<p>Do they really? Is that need calculated From the EFC?</p>
<p>The colleges that meet full need do NOT use the FAFSA EFC. These schools all use the FAFSA and an additional form, either the CSS PROFILE or a school financial aid form. These second forms delve deeper into your family finances than the FAFSA only.</p>
<p>Really, the FAFSA is used to determine your eligibility for federally funded need based aid only at these “meets full need schools”. This would include the Pell Grant, SEOG (if the school has it), work study, and loans (Perkins or Stafford). Sometimes the EFC per FAFSA is also used for state aid determination (TAP in NY or Calgrant in CA, for example).</p>
<p>The schools that meet full need are sometimes, however, much more generous to higher income earners than FAFSA only schools. Some of these schools award need based aid for families with AGIs in the $150,000 range. Not all do this, however.</p>
<p>The thing to remember, these schools that meet full need AND are very generous are also quite competitive for admissions.</p>
<p>The SCHOOL will determine what your financial need is for that school…using THAT school’s formula for doing so. Income is the primary driver but so are assets to some degree.</p>
<p>Three of my four kids attended/will attend schools that meet “100% of demonstrated need.” (Colgate, Smith & Lehigh, if you are interested).</p>
<p>None of them met need to our Federal EFC. I have no complaints - they were all very generous. But they each calculated our need according to their own formulas.</p>
<p>Out of the 7 colleges/universities my d was admitted into, 2 were meets-need schools- Smith and Tufts. While they both (in fact, all of her schools) calculated our EFC in their own way, the financial packages she received from Smith and Tufts did, indeed, meet our EFC as indicated by FAFSA. </p>
<p>I know that Smith actually re-calculated our FAFSA which made it lower than the SAR we received from FAFSA (we found out about this after her award was made). But in the end, their package still reflected the original EFC number. Smith told me they use the “institutional” method to determine aid (which involves a lot of hocus-pocus as far as I can figure out).</p>
<p>There have been a number of threads where posters have shown how widely different the definition of need can be from school to school. Each school has wide license in defining need when it comes to its own funds.</p>