<p>When a college states that they provide 100% financial need based aid, how is that broken down? Is it 100% grant money or is it part grant, part loan, part work study, or does it depend on the size of the endowment? As an example, let's say our EFC is $20,000 and the coa is $40,000.</p>
<p>In virtually all instances, it's a combination of grants, loans and work study and summer jobs. A very few colleges don't require students with very low family incomes (i.e. around $40,000 annually) to take out loans, but the colleges still require some kind of self help (jobs).</p>
<p>Not all colleges that say they meet 100% of financial need actually meet 100% of financial need. In fact one college (Emory) did not even meet 30% of my need.</p>
<p>Colleges who say they meet 100% of your financial need determine themselves exactly what that "need" is. Many have different formulas that does not follow the FAFSA and the result is an EFC that is greater than what was anticipated. My EFC is about 5K but the university is asking me to pay around 12K.</p>
<p>Does anyone have any advice for convincing financial aid officers to lower my parent contribution?</p>
<p>axlifter, I realize what the need is. in my case, my EFC according to FAFSA was not even 4k but EFC calculated by Emory is over 40K. Does that make sense at all?</p>
<p>Based on what cantwaittogotocollege says then I wish colleges would spell out what they mean when they say 100% of FN met...or, is this process so complicated that they cannot make it any clearer? Forgive me for asking stupid questions - I'm just so new at this.</p>
<p>If you do a search for Sybbie, you may find one of her breakdowns of a typical financial aid package. That is about as good as I have ever seen, and if she ever writes a book, I'll be first in line to buy it. </p>
<p>Need can be defined in different ways. A college that uses just the FAFSA may just use the EFC so generated. Schools that want other forms like their own app or Profile, have more wiggle room, and some actually will use whatever number or rationale that they feel like using depending on how much they want the student.</p>
<p>Meeting 100% of need is defined as providing a full financial aid package to meet need. We may disagree on what constitutes financial aid, but the definition used is grants, scholarships, student need-based (usually subsidized) loans, and student employment.</p>
<p>Each college will have a different packaging methodology, so as to how they meet need, in what conditions they offer higher grant and lower work (if they do this), etc, can only be determined by asking the college.</p>
<p>At MIT, we keep it pretty simply (I hope):</p>
<p>We take the need and subtract from it a $5500 self help offer (this amount represents the amount in combination of student employment and student loan). The remainder is scholarship.</p>
<p>When a college states they meet full need, they do mean the need they define, so you may also want to determine how they do their need analysis (much more on my blog about that).</p>
<p>Another caveat for full need schools: keep in mind, if your full need is met, there is no way to add money to the package without reducing somewhere else (primary example -- outside scholarships). Since we meet full need at MIT, if you receive an outside scholarship, we have to take it from somewhere, so we first remove it from Self-Help and only after that is completely replaced will we reduce grant. In no case (unless the scholarship is greater than your need) would we reduce your family contribution. Again, it is best to contact each college to see how they handle this, since some have less generous policies.</p>
<p>Hope this was helpful...</p>