Definition of "meets full need"

Are there any guidelines for a school that purports to “meet full demonstrated need?” I know student loans can be included in a package for a meets full need school, but what about Parent Loans? Couldn’t any school claim meet full need if parent loans are included? Let’s say school is $65,000. They give the student a $25,000 university grant, $5500 student loan and the rest parent PLUS loans–could they claim to meet full need?
I’m wondering especially in relation to USC. I read another post on CC that said the family’s contribution was double their EFC on the FAFSA. I know schools don’t have to go by the FAFSA EFC, but double?

Yes, double or triple or whatever the max EFC can be. FAFSA Does not count primary home equity, a non custodial parent’s finances or certain business holdings or transactions. Those can add up to a lot. FAFSA has some crazy loopholes where a kid can be eligible for PELL yet have a billionaire parent.

Though colleges can make claims of meeting full aid, and I have seen some reputable colleges be very vague in guaranteeing financial aid, the common data has certain standards as to what constitutes aid. Only subsidized student loans count. Parent loans do not.

Full needs schools typically determine your need based on their own system and include additional information that may not be part of the fafsa application. This means their idea of what you need may be really different from the FAFSA EFC or what you personally feel you need.

I can only speak for our own experience but having a straight forward financial situation, the full need schools our two were accepted into did not include parent loans. Some other private schools that DONT meet need did. Neither applied to USC though.

Formula can be very different as cpt pointed out, because of the way Profile schools consider income, equity, business, etc but anything other than federal loans should not count. I’ve seen the sub and unsub part of the Direct included (so the whole $5500), and one of D’s schools included a “Health Sciences loan” in the package - an additional loan because she’d applied to pharmacy at that school. She wasn’t sure about that major and they were vague about what would happen if she switched. She didn’t attend that school after all, so moot point.

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1675058-meet-full-need-schools-can-vary-significantly-in-their-net-prices.html is an older thread about how differently colleges may define “need”.

Parent Plus loans are not student need based financial aid…they are loans to the parents.

@Emsmom1 USC uses the Profile. For ANY college using the Profile, the data on that form is what is used to determine institutional need based aid using the college formula.

The FAFSA EFC really is meaningless in the context of a school that uses the Profile. The Profile delves into more depth in terms of finances.

In addition, there are things for the Profile that are never on the FAFSA…primary home equity, and non-custodial parent financials, for example. Businesses with less than a certain number of employers are not included.

Some students for FAFSA purposes qualify for the simplified needs test whereby their assets (and that includes very substantial assets if they have them) are NOT counted. There is NO simplified needs test for the Profile…and everything counts.

It’s very easy for me to think of several scenarios where the family contribution at a Profile school could be double the FAFSA EFC…divorced parents? Significant equity in primary residence? Qualifies for simplified needs on FAFSA… but assets are counted for Profile school? Business deductions?

I would amend this to say that “everything” is reported on the Profile… whether it “counts” or not depends on the proprietary formula that the particular school uses.

Are you saying that any unsubsidized part of a student’s federal direct loan does not count as aid that can be used to help meet 100% of the student’s need?

The way it was explained to me was that the Direct loans are not financial aid any more than PLUS. It’s the subsidized loans that are. Because just about anyone can get the Unsubsidized loans regardless of need. . Colleges also offer up their own loans at times and some states offer loans. I don’t know if those loans are considered financial aid by Common data.
I know federal work study is considered financial aid but not work study available to all students even though they can be the very same job. It’s the source of the funds and how they are treated.

There are things that may not be reported on PROFILE and odd things just asked about if you apply to certain schools. Some schools do hit up retirement funds, some carry forward student assets from the freshman year reporting. Schools do all sorts of things with their financial aid formulas.

I think, too, that some schools might actually meet full demonstrated need without “advertising” that this is the case. That was our experience. Student did a lot of pre-research and hoped/expected aid at ~90% of need after we filed the css profile. After admission and a very easy FA appeal, they met 100% of our demonstrated need.

Although it’s a very limited sample, my takeaway is that if a school’s CDS shows they meet a great deal of need, and it’s a good fit for reasons other than financial, it’s well worth the application fee to find out what they’ll offer. This process is full of surprises… and they aren’t all bad.

The total Direct Loan is considered student financial aid.

That a school meets full need does not mean it guarantees it or will give it to all students, even most students. You can be the rare bird who got a full need met package, especially if it’s based on FAFSA EFC. There are even some who get more than need met with merit money. There are merit within need scholarships and need within merit.

Very few schools guarantee to meet full need as defined by FAFSA EFC. I hear that UChicago does but have not verified. A small school in PA, Albright also does. Or did.

Chicago has its own supplemental form (CSS Profile may be used instead at the applicant’s option).
https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/cost-aid/applying-aid

Also, even if a college uses only FAFSA to gather financial information, it could still calculate its EFC differently from the FAFSA EFC, or it could allocate FA using some other methodology.

Subsidized loans are direct loans.

Who explained it to you this way?

@ucbalumnus the University of Chicago form is VERY short. It asks for no non-custodial parent information, no primary home equity…doesn’t really delve into finances extensively at all.

@cptofthehouse the Direct Loans can be subsidized or unsubsidized but they are still considered student loans, and student financial aid.

Who told you that only the subsidized loans were considered student financial aid? That’s just not true.

From the OP’s example, the school is meeting the need as it defines it, like with a good portion of the COA still the responsibility of the parents/family. For that portion, the parents can take a PLUS loan. The school isn’t covering that under ‘meeting need’ because it doesn’t consider that the family needs that amount, but does give the PLUS option because it’s available.

@cptofthehouse

I can first-hand report that even when it said it did meet full need and only required FAFSA (2015), it didn’t match FAFSA. Net cost after loans/work study was about $3k more.

From our experience, most of the colleges that promise to meet “100 percent of demonstrated need” utilize the CSS Profile, which asks for much more detailed family financial information than the FAFSA does. In fact, one of the colleges that our D applied to in their CSS Profile supplement even asked what year, make, and model cars we drive!

Another factor is that most colleges do not take into consideration the cost of living where you live when calculating your EFC. Our D recently graduated from a “meets 100 percent of demonstrated need” highly selective university. We live in a very high cost of living area, but our EFC for each year for her undergraduate education at the private university was still about 25 percent of the adjusted gross income on our married filing jointly tax return each year. FWIW, I found that that the cost calculators on the various college websites that our D applied to weren’t that accurate for our family’s financial situation, so we received less need-based aid than we expected.

Our D utilized all of her Federal student loans she was entitled to each year, but we declined use of Parent PLUS loans. For the additional funding needed beyond what we had saved up in our parent owned 529 plan, we utilized private student loans which I cosigned for our D because I didn’t want to liquidate our other investments to pay for her college expenses.

Fortunately, because of my high credit score, we received very competitive interest rates on our private student loans far lower than the Parent PLUS loan rates, with no origination fees, and I made both interest and principal payments on both her Federal and private loans throughout the 4 years of her undergraduate study.

Now that she has received her undergraduate degree and excelled in her studies (she graduated magna cum laude), we’re allowing our D to keep her Federal student loans as her responsibility, but I’m refinancing and consolidating her private student loans which I cosigned into my name only as a private parent loan. I’ll have about 1.5 times our most recent annual EFC to pay off in the consolidated private parent loan, which is manageable for us, especially since I received a very competitive fixed rate and no origination fee on this loan, either.

Every family’s situation is different and this strategy might not work for everyone, but it has worked well for us.