.
Unanticipated unteimbursed medical expenses. Breadwinner loss of income. Catastrophic loss that is not insured (e.g. House burns down, or floods, and no insurance).
Otherwise, your family contribution will be what the college calculates it to be.
The thing is…Profile schools have varying formulas. There have even been reports here of students who got more aid than they thought they were going to receive @emilybee weren’t you one of those families?
So…you never know.
^Yup. We got $10k/yr more in FA then our EFC suggested we would at need only school. Iirc, we put down the amount we were paying for private high school for what we could afford and that’s what we paid for his college tuition. His award was $40k/year. Son’s contribution did go up every year (as did COA) but we paid his contributiion, so in the end it cost us in total $80k - which is exactly what a SUNY costs for 4 years.
And our income at the time was between $120-$130k a year and he is only child so no other kids in college at the same time.
We just completed the CSS PROFILE for the third time. We have always answered the question honestly, recognizing that our D’s college commits to meeting “100 percent of demonstrated need”, but based on their EFC formula, even with their grant aid and Federal student loans, we have used, and probably will still need to use, private loans to make up the difference between what we can actually afford to pay each year and our EFC.
Has anyone ever received any financial aid from school even when the estimated Net Calculator showed that you will not be getting any financial aid from the school (HYPSM)? Our income varies year to year (self-employed) but have assets that increase EFC greatly.
The estimated Net Calculators from our experience are a rough guess. I highly recommend Troy Onink’s columns on the Forbes magazine website on how assets and income are counted for financial aid based on the various formulas colleges use. http://www.forbes.com/sites/troyonink/2017/01/08/2017-guide-to-college-financial-aid-the-fafsa-and-css-profile/#5568248b4ccb
my advice to any and everyone out there on this is if you can, avoid all schools using the PROFILE. My student is now going into 3rd year and her school keeps throwing me into verification, only because they put me into verification the first year. PROFILE is so overreaching it’s disgusting.
For what it is worth, we were told by the College counselor that worked with our son that schools would deny admission based on a low number, but that a high number would not change any financial aid offered. In our case, we will not qualify for need based aid other than perhaps loans. I can say, our S has been offered so far what I would view as expected merit aid (higher than he could have gotten, but lower than we would of course like)