CSS Supplemental Questions - 529 plan

When filling out the CSS Profile we got a supplemental question from 2 colleges:

If any of your assets are from Section 529 college savings or pre-paid tution plans, what is its value?

The heading above this question is: Supplemental Questions - Student Finances. I (parent) own this account however it is my son’s name. I am confused if I should list the value of the 529 here since it is under Student Finances not Parent Finances. The individual colleges have not responded to my request for clarification. Any advice?

I think the best thing to do here is to wait for the colleges to respond to your requests for clarification. It’s important to note whether specific 529 accounts are A) owned by the student, B) owned by a parent with the student as the currently designated beneficiary, or C) owned by a parent with someone other than the student as the currently designated beneficiary.

While FAFSA in any of these three situations would treat the 529 balance as a parent asset (as long as parental information is required when FAFSA is completed), Profile schools have their own policies on how 529 plans are treated (student owned vs. parent owned) for allocating institutional need-based aid.

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In our case it is (B) owned by parent with student as beneficiary. One school got back to me today and told me to list $0 after confirming that I already had it listed as one of my (parent) assets in an earlier section.

Hi there. Can you tell me if this was a Columbia? I put my son’s 529 amount in this spot and I believe that was a mistake, which is why we didn’t get enough aid from Columbia.

This was not Columbia. Both schools are small LACs. I reached out to both colleges who asked for this data and each gave me a different answer! I would suggest reaching out to the institution individually - I called the financial aid offices and did hear back from both - each detailed how to answer the question (a bit frustrating that it was not universal - but understand that they are looking for specifics)

Thank you. We met with Columbia FINAID yesterday, and she basically confirmed I had made an error. She corrected it and my aid went up by a lot! So relieved.

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