They literally took me 10 minutes a piece. I felt bad charging that much.
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The assumption that parents who never went to college who have friends who arenāt plugged into the college admissions game and whose kid is attending a high school where the overburdened guidance counselor has to juggle several hundreds of graduating students and their less-informed, time-crunched familiesāthe assumption that those parents are idiots for believing someone who tells them that thereās a website where they can apply for financial aid for $80 (which is a website that simply fills out the FAFSA for them, which they donāt know any more than they know that the first F stands for free)ā
Yeah, folks, making those sorts of judgmental assumptions is kind of the way privilege works.
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They arenāt idiots. But hopefully someone is directing them to the correct url for the FAFSA. Our HS had a sheet of important info and this was included.
Will this affect CSS too?
I am concerned about the below
Big Change in the Treatment of Multiple Students Enrolled in College at the Same Time
Although the FAFSA will still collect information about the number of family members enrolled in college on at least a half-time basis at the same time as the applicant, the FAFSA will no longer divide the parent assessment by the number of family members in college.
Similarly, the family contribution for independent students will no longer be divided by the number of family members in college.
This change will significantly reduce the amount of financial aid for middle- and high-income families who have multiple family members enrolled in college at the same time. It will not affect low-income applicants who already have a zero student aid index.
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I havenāt heard anything about CB making changes to CSS Profile. Colleges that use the data from Profile have unique formulas for calculating what they expect a family to pay.
The FAFSA changes will impact qualification for Federal financial aid and loans. The new FAFSA will be used by FAFSA-only colleges to determine what a family is expected to pay. The majority of FAFSA-only colleges do not meet full need, and with the changes it seems gaps could be higher, but itās all not clear yet and obviously will depend on each familyās specific circumstances. We all have some homework to do on these changes.
A college using FAFSA only may use the FAFSA calculation, or may use its own calculation from the FAFSA information. A college using CSS Profile will be using some calculation other than just the FAFSA calculation.
While a FAFSA only school can recalculate the EFC to award institutional aid if desired, they canāt recalculate EFC for federal aid. I am concerned about the impact on students who lose Pell eligibility due to the changes. These are not necessarily middle income students.
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I have had one kid go to a FAFSA only school and one go to a CSS Profile school. I found the FAFSA to be pretty straight forward. As a parent wo likes to understand how this all works, I find change to be difficult. If this is a change for the better, then great. I guess time will tell if it is truly less confusing or just differently confusing going forward.
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I was in the same position until the CSS school one child goes to switched to FAFSA-only.
If I drank, Iādāve opened up a bottle of champagne when that announcement was made.
But to the point of the overall thread, all of the numbers that result from the FAFSA and CSS areāwith the exception of Pell eligibility, as mentioned by @kelsmomāmore of a convenient fiction than anything else. Financial need is calculated by each college individually, and they may well take in the same numbers to get entirely different results.
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That is why the best available estimate for a specific college come from its Net Price Calculator. Of course, the caveat is that some colleges have poor-quality Net Price Calculators, so the best available estimates for those colleges are poor-quality estimates.
There are also colleges whose Net Price Calculators do not properly take into account situations like divorced parents, small business / rental / self-employment income, etc., or they give inadequate instructions to users on how to handle these situations, so they may give poor-quality estimates for these situations.
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Very interesting changes to shove in with stimulus package.
Some of the changes are the culmination of years of discussion: SAI, fewer questions. The push for years has been to move the FAFSA to a tool that measures eligibility for federal aid. The Department of Education had already determined that many questions on the FAFSA donāt make a difference for federal aid ā¦ so the streamlined questions are a reflection of what EDās data shows actually makes a difference for Pell and SEOG. As is normal when rules are made to try to help the most people in the most efficient manner, itās not perfect. But the idea has been that if schools want additional information to distribute their own aid, they can feel free to collect that on their own (I envision a Profile-like form that perhaps schools will pay a vendor to process).
Some of the other changes ā¦ wow. I do not get the reasoning for the change to adjusting EFC due to number of dependents in college. I can think of so many students I have known over the years that would have lost Pell eligibility because of that change. The change to using the parent who earns more is not one I had ever heard discussed in financial aid circles, but it makes sense.
Removing the 150% Pell rule is a win. The manpower required to track this is not insignificant, and it doesnāt help students. I donāt see it helping taxpayers, either. So good riddance to that rule.
It looks like the bill gives financial aid administrators the ability to change income to 0 if there is evidence of receiving unemployment. There was a similar rule in the Obama administration during the last recession. It made it much easier for aid administrators to help students qualify for a Pell grant during a national crisis. Personally, I saw good & bad with that, but there are always good/bad things when stopgap programs are implemented. The thought is that it gives help in a relatively efficient manner.
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In theory, the argument would be that families who have kids 1-3 years apart versus 4+ years apart should be spending similar amounts on college for all of the kids either way, rather than getting a āfinancial aid bonusā for having the kids fewer than 4 years apart.
However, the counterargument is that some families are unable to handle multiple kidsā college costs all at the same time, even though they may have been able to do that one at a time.
The following chart of college spending may help visualize the difference, assuming each kidās college costs $20k per year (before FA), and each kid takes 8 continuous semesters to graduate:
Year Kids years apart
1 4
0 $0 $0
1 $20k $20k
2 $40k $20k
3 $40k $20k
4 $40k $20k
5 $20k $20k
6 $0 $20k
7 $0 $20k
8 $0 $20k
9 $0 $0
Total $160k $160kThe argument for the change is that both families eventually end up spending the same amount for college, so any need-based FA should be equal. The counterargument is that many families who could fit $20k (for example) in their yearly budgets cannot fit $40k (for example) in their yearly budgets.
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Why are they comparing for 9 years?
second, it seems punishing families having kids < 4 years apart. tbh, how many of us really were able to controll that outcome successfully? On paper it seems same amount after 9 years, however first 4 years, family with more kids in college is now slammed with more expenses than family with spread out expenses.
Well, arguably parents who had kids further apart will end up paying more in college expenses, because income is likely to increase over time.
But yeah, cashflow bottlenecks are a very real thing, and can cause trouble under the new system.
Or because college costs are likely to increase over time (and faster than income for most parents of high school and college age kids).
On a related note, kids going to college just as a typical* recession hits may find the double financial hit of parental income loss, while states defund their universities to balance budgets, resulting in higher state university tuition and worse state university financial aid. Historical tuition levels indicate that state university tuition tends to be stable most of the time, but spikes during typical recessions.
*The COVID-19 related recession was atypical in that wealthy people who owned capital did quite well (see the stock market), so that state income tax receipts were often better than expected.
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weāll have a total of 5 years when weāve had double in college (undergrad) at the same time between 4 kids. That half-number EFC allowed one kid to take out subsidized loans which we are thankful for. That option will be gone for the next double year. 
question: where are you all seeing this original info, and why did this start up again today?
It started again today because someone posted about it elsewhere and this thread was tagged as the place where the discussion started.
Iām all for a simpler FAFSA form. Perhaps this will make it more accessible for some families. And the renaming of the EFC is long overdue.
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Mea culpa!
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Itās actually good that this thread got revived! I think it originally got lost in December between the holidays and forum update. Itās info that is helpful and important.
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