These questions are actually for a friend of mine whom I’m trying to help in college research, so I don’t have all the specific financial information concerning her situation available, mostly just general information. Anyways my question concerns schools that take the CSS Profile for financial aid and take/require a profile from the noncustodial biological parent. I’ve been trying to do research on how this affects financial aid at these schools and early on I found this article from Time Money: http://time.com/money/4218077/want-more-financial-aid-get-a-divorce/
“Colleges that require a CSS Profile from both the custodial and noncustodial parent will generally strip out the stepparents and use only the biological parents’ income and assets in the formula. But colleges that require a CSS Profile just from the custodial parent will typically include that parent’s new spouse in their calculations.”
And from the College Board, there’s a list of schools that indicates which use the CSS profile and require it from both custodial and noncustodial parents.
https://profileonline.collegeboard.org/prf/PXRemotePartInstitutionServlet/PXRemotePartInstitutionServlet.srv?excmpid=MTG336-ST-1-a2o
The situation with my friend is that her biological parents are divorced with her custodial parents being her biological mother and her stepdad. Her family income comes mostly from her stepdad as her mother doesn’t have a formal job. Her noncustodial parent, her biological father, is unmarried and has a fairly low income. So my understanding from the article I read was that schools that took the CSS Noncustodial profile would only count her biological parents, which would make her eligible for a lot of helpful aid.
However, upon further research, it seems as if this isn’t true. I’ve read some more articles that claim colleges differ in whether or not they count stepparents’ income, but I have yet to be able to find any schools that I can confirm only use the biological parents’ income. So my question is does anyone know of any colleges, likely using the CSS Profile I would assume, that actually do strip out Stepparents’ income and only count biological parents when determining financial aid eligibility? What would really be helpful is if there is a list available of schools that do this, but if anyone knows of any at all, that would be great. Sorry that was so long, but thank you so much in advance!!