Can anyone brief me on how CSS profile work?
So my understanding is that submitting CSS profile to schools is like applying for financial aid?
I am confused someone plase help me.
For the schools that require it, the Profile is used to apply for need-based institutional aid (that is, money that the school, not the government, gives you based on financial need).
you’ll fill out both the fafsa for all schools and the css profile for certain schools (typically these are privates that offer more institutional aid than the average school). each school will tell you what they require.
fafsa is free and easier to fill out. you can send it send to multiple schools at once. doing corrections and sending updates is easy.
profile is quite detailed and takes a good bit longer to fill out (if you do it first, filling out fafsa is a snap). you pay for this one though, for each school. i recommend you do it one school at a time according to due dates - this enables you to wait to pay until you need to submit, plus it reduces the likelihood you’ll have to file corrections (which have been a huge pain with profile in the past).
fafsa has to be done every year you apply
profile MIGHT need to be done each year, each school is different. if required you’d have to pay each year.
If you mean doing a separate Profile completion for different schools, I don’t think that you can do this. Profile is done online, and once you do it and hit submit, you’re done. You can go back later and have it sent to additional schools, but you can’t do different versions in the same academic year for different schools.
Actually, I believe you can change some things when submitting to subsequent schools with the profile. Income and taxes from 2015 clearly will be the same. But sometimes assets change…and unless something has changed, this field can be entered anew each time you submit a Profile to a different school.
But honestly…since you want your assets to be lowest for,that first school…what’s the point in NOT submitting to all of them, unless you are not sure if you will actually be applying?
last year we were able to make changes if they were necessary for additional submissions. don’t know if it’s the same this year.
the point thumper made is one reason not to do them all at once - you may not have even applied to one school yet when submitting profile for an ED or EA school; and if you decide later not to apply that would be a waste of money.
we ran into issues where we simply had mistakes (errors on our part, especially the first year doing it) that needed to be corrected (manually printing and writing in changes and sending to each school!). if you do them one at a time you’re less likely to send out multiple submissions with errors, and you’ll expend much less effort in filing corrections. last time around there was no automated mechanism for submitting corrections, so it is important to reduce your errors when possible.
Wait so I have a question. I know you only have to fill out the FAFSA once, and then you can send it to different schools. But do you only have to fill out the CSS once also? Or do you have to fill it all out again for different schools?
One time and then pay to have it sent to different schools.
Ok thanks!
Some schools will send you a supplement to complete after they get your CSS with additional financial questions.
Exactly - making changes on the CSS is a bit of a pain as you have to send corrections to each college you applied to that requires it. My D did not apply EA or ED, just RD, so we submitted only 1 CSS and sent it to all of the schools that needed it. But then the corrections/updates had to be sent individually to those schools. And filling out the CSS first does make the FAFSA seem like a snap - the CSS is longer and much more thorough in terms of getting a financial picture of your family’s ability to pay, but it includes an explanation of every single number they are looking for so that you get used to the financial aid jargon.