I had this happen a couple years ago. When I queried the college concerned, it turned out that I had reported the same income twice. It wound up giving us a lower EFC and more financial aid, so I was grateful for the college’s intervention.
@Fishnlines29 According to Brown, whenever they access the FAFSA system, they see the most up-to-date information. They claim that once you authorised them to receive your SAR, they get all subsequent updates regardless of whether they continue to be listed on the FAFSA. They seemed pretty emphatic on that point.
If a school is NOT listed on a submitted FAFSA, then the school cannot see an updated submission from that fafsa.
This is probably repetitive and not helpful, but we got an e-mail notice that our FAFSA was changed by a college. I think this was after I (the parent) made a change to the IRS automated population of our tax return. One of the data items from our tax return was placed in the incorrect FAFSA field (it was an amount less than $500 - I think it was interest income or something and ended up being in a totally unrelated field) and I changed it to the correct field manually. I think it gave me some kind of warning message about colleges being able to see that a change was made - I guess they don’t want you to mess with the downloaded data. But I figured it was best to keep the change, since the FAFSA would have been inaccurate if I had not have corrected it. Obviously one of the colleges decided to make the change back to how it was originally downloaded. I didn’t worry about it - it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference to our EFC.
^^^
I think it’s good for people to hear these scenarios so that they can have more data points that may have some bearing on a situation that they are involved in.
Here’s one that I have direct knowledge of:
The student had submitted FAFSA for consideration for junior year financial aid. FAFSA asks that any student income that comes from work-study employment be reported, so that it can be deducted from student taxable income since it comes from a need-based program. Properly reporting work-study wages on the FAFSA will reduce the FAFSA EFC. In this case, the school “corrected” the FAFSA by changing the properly reported work-study wage amount to $0! This was especially curious given that the work-study wages were paid by the very same school, and a student W-2 issued by the school showing the correct wage amount that was reported on FAFSA was included in the financial aid package that the student submitted to the school. Shortly after a “what the heck are you doing?” email was sent to the financial aid office, a reply email was received that basically said “oops, sorry,” and a correction to the “correction” was made that restored the FAFSA to its original, proper format (the FAFSA EFC was also returned to its prior, correct amount).
@thumper1 That directly contradicts what both the Department of Education and the university’s themselves say. They claim that once you authorise a college to receive your FAFSA, they can access your information for the rest of the admissions cycle. That includes all corrections.
That includes all corrections sent to THEM.
@kelsmom can you access any fafsa information for FAFSA forms that are NOT submitted to your school?
@thumper1 When you log into FAA Access you can see that a student has submitted a FAFSA or correction but if your school is not listed on it the only way to access the information is with the DRN number which you generally would have to get from the family.
@bschooltotech Precisely my point. In this case, the student did originally list them. So the university will have the DRN number.
@thumper1 Not certain why you would not want a university FA office to know of a change to your FAFSA. Not disclosing changes in financial circumstances can result in the denial of all aid.
In some cases changes are made to the fafsa by one school. It’s not because of a change in financial circumstances. It is because the financial aid officer at THAT SCHOOL determined a change needed to be made. It might be an error. It might be something that school has adjusted…that other schools won’t.
Certainly…if there is an error on the fafsa, it is the full responsibility of the student to disclose that to ALL schools…because getting financial aid with inaccurate information that is known…is fraud.
We had this issue several years ago. Incredibly frustrating as it was S1’s application year. The change that school made was wrong, and it was sent to all the other schools. I changed it back; they changed it back. It was truly a circle from hell. I still am shocked a school can go in an unilaterally change your information and FAFSA sends it to all the schools, without any verification or notice to you until after the fact.
A kind person at FAFSA finally told me which of the 10 schools was making the edit and told me if S wasn’t going to attend that school, to delete them from the list, make the correction back to the original AGAIN, and send it to the other 9 schools.
Salt in the wound…it was my alma mater. Grrrr.
I can top this with a case of a school changing FAFSA two weeks after rejecting a student (which is supposedly being sent to all the schools that accepted the student) with incorrect information that would negatively affect EFC
I am a finaid director. Schools can and do make changes, and they are sent out to all other schools on the FAFSA (don’t blame us … that’s how the update system works … and believe me, we’d prefer not have changes made by other schools) - yes, there is a way for only the updating school to get the change, but it’s not the normal process for most schools. If a school is removed from a FAFSA, they will not get any changes made on any subsequent FAFSAs on which they are not listed … but if a change is made on a FAFSA on which they are listed, they will get it. There are times a school may update an earlier transaction, so it’s possible a school that was later deleted could get an update in that case.
Aid officers are not generally part of the admissions staff … if there was a change made after a student was rejected, it was because the aid office was working their student lists that were made prior to the rejection. This will only happen in schools that package aid before an admissions decision is made (many, if not most, schools package aid only after the student has been admitted).
Please understand that schools are not out to get anyone. They have rules to follow. Yes, mistakes are sometimes made, which is why I encourage anyone who has a question to ask it.