The question is…was there something in one of the box 12 fields on your W2 forms.
My daughter also was notified of a FAFSA correction. I too went line by line looking for it. In our case, it was a much smaller correction (she’s on a gap year where she is earning some college credit and they updated her grade level to “Attended college before/1st year”). What I don’t understand is why can’t FAFSA tell you what changed. I missed seeing the change the first time I went line by line. Only found it the second time. Seems crazy to put the burden on the student to find the differences.
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We can’t really go line by line. Because we used the IRS tool a lot of the lines just say info retrieved in that manner. We are meeting with a financial aid officer and I am hoping they can provide a FAFSA doc that doesn’t have the info masked.
Ahead of that meeting you can print out the fafsa worksheet and input your 2020 tax info.
https://studentaid.gov/sites/default/files/2022-23-fafsa-worksheet.pdf
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When you meet with the financial aid officer, they will be able to explain the change/s. Any updates made to a FAFSA are required to be noted in the student’s file.
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I know this thread is old - but did you ever find out if the college that made the change was one she was eventually accepted to? (not the 3 she was already accepted to)…the same thing happened to us today…and both schools my son was accepted to already said they didnt make the change…
I am assuming it resulted in a change to EFC. Is she still waiting to hear from schools where you submitted tax information (e.g., CSS Profile schools)? If so, a school may have been working on your file in preparation for decision day (they have to review all files so aid packages are ready to go once admissions decides which schools to admit - it often goes down to the wire). If they found any information that didn’t match the information submitted, they have to update the FAFSA to match.
If there was no change to EFC, the change may have been as simple as changing the expected housing response or even something like whether this is the student’s first time in college (students sometimes say no because they took community college courses while enrolled in high school - they technically are still first time in college, and that response has to be correct for the school’s automated aid packaging).
Thank you for responding! I compared them line by line. We made changes in January and today a school updated the FAFSA. There are no changes on any of the lines except for the list of schools, believe it or not. 2 are removed from our last updated SAR (January) and replaced with two from the first SAR in October. I am beyond perplexed. The EFC is exactly the same.
Yes - we are still waiting on 8 of the 10 schools on her FAFSA (they are CSS schools) Checked the IDOC service and nothing is missing.
In your case - but did you ever find out if the college that made the change was one she was eventually accepted to?
Did you do a FAFSA, then remove two schools & replace them with two new schools? If so, the update was made by one of the two you removed from the original FAFSA. They don’t have access to the FAFSA transaction where you removed them, so they updated the one they were on. So you could narrow it down to one of the two schools you removed.
There is no correlation between updates to a FAFSA & getting an acceptance. Schools that don’t have rolling admissions have to be prepared “in case” students are accepted, so they review every applicant’s information in advance of decision day.
That makes total sense. Thank you! Im going to go back and see which those two are. You have helped so much thanks again!
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It was Tufts, and she was admitted but did not attend.
I’ve been puzzling over a similar situation. It is strange to me that a school can make a change (which in our case bumped up the EFC) with no straightforward way to see which school it was or what they changed. From what you are saying, it sounds to me like the school that made the change would have to be one of the schools on the most recent updated SAR? If that is the case, that helps me narrow it down.
It isn’t necessarily a school on the most recent SAR - I was able to narrow it down to that transaction for the person who asked about it based on the information they provided. Keep in mind that schools are required to resolve what is called “conflicting information.” If there is information in your financial aid file that contradicts information reported on your FAFSA, schools are required to change the FAFSA information. Typically, although not always, this will be tax related. Did you submit your tax return to any of the schools?
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Okay, I was thinking that if schools don’t have access to a FAFSA transaction after they’ve been removed, they would have to put themselves back on the FAFSA to make changes.
We used the automated transfer from the IRS for the FAFSA. Some of our schools use CSS, and I think I narrowed down the discrepancy to a retirement savings payment which shows up there but not the FAFSA. I believe I saw you mention that in another post as a common correction?
I just wish there were a little more transparency about who was changing things and what they changed. It would probably save a lot of customer support phone calls to FAFSA. Thank you for all your help in explaining this!
A school that was removed doesn’t put itself back - it makes the correction on the last transaction that they were included on. If they added a retirement contribution, it means it was a school that has your W-2. The contribution is on your W-2, so they have to update your FAFSA. That information doesn’t transfer from IRS (although I think it will in the future). A school that doesn’t have your W-2 has no way of knowing that you didn’t include that on your FAFSA. Now that you know you didn’t report that amount, you should update your FAFSA to include it, since you should have done that from the start.
Blockquote A school that was removed doesn’t put itself back - it makes the correction on the last transaction that they were included on.
Just to make sure I’m understanding this - if the correction is on the most recent SAR and no other, then the school who did it should be on that SAR?
Blockquote If they added a retirement contribution, it means it was a school that has your W-2. The contribution is on your W-2, so they have to update your FAFSA. That information doesn’t transfer from IRS (although I think it will in the future).
We put that information on the CSS but not the FAFSA. I probably was thinking of it as some of the extra CSS information and didn’t realize since I worked on the forms at different times. It was definitely my mistake. In retrospect, we probably shouldn’t have done the automated transfer from the IRS. I don’t think I would have missed it if I were doing it manually. I hope not. It’s good that may be part of the automated process in the future. At least it has only a very small effect on the EFC, so I don’t think it will be too problematic to sort out.
Blockquote A school that doesn’t have your W-2 has no way of knowing that you didn’t include that on your FAFSA. Now that you know you didn’t report that amount, you should update your FAFSA to include it, since you should have done that from the start.
One more question - this was corrected on the FAFSA by whichever unknown school made the last correction. It now appears on the SAR. So my FAFSA should be updated now? Or is there something else I need to do? Do I need to add back any schools that were removed and aren’t on the most recent SAR and re-send to them?
Thank you again for your time. I really appreciate you explaining this.
If you can verify that the correction was done on the most recent SAR, then the school would be one listed on that SAR. One of the reasons I suggest removing all schools from the original transaction and only adding new schools in the new transaction is so that it’s easier to keep everything straight in case corrections are needed (or made by a school). To further complicate things, some schools will make a correction & it will go to all schools on that transaction, while other schools will apply the changes only to their school (that requires updating directly in the processor system, rather than on the FAFSA). It seems like a lot of CSS schools apply only to their school, but I don’t know if all do.
If you log into the most recent SAR on the FAFSA website, do you see the new EFC? If so, are you able to see the schools listed on that SAR? It’s been awhile since I was on your side of the FAFSA (I was on the school side), so I’m not sure what you see.
Yes, I am able to see the new EFC on the most recent SAR, as well as the schools listed on that SAR.
On the FAFSA website, there is an option to download all the SARs from any time the FAFSA has been corrected with a correction or by adding or removing a school, so that at least makes comparing them easier, since they list the schools on the SAR itself.
That’s a good tip to remove all the old schools when you add new ones. It would simplify things.
If all the schools are listed on the transaction with the new EFC, I believe that all of those schools will have the updated transaction. However, some schools won’t download a transaction into their system if they can tell that another school, rather than the student, has made the change (they can’t tell which school did it, but they can tell that a school did it). At the large public university where I once worked, we downloaded them, but we manually screened them to see what changed. Some schools might not look, but their computer systems might automatically adjust the aid package (it might not affect the actual aid you get, even if they do - it could just be Parent Plus loan that changes). In other words, it’s hard to know. I see two choices: update all FAFSA transactions initiated by you (probably the original & one that replaced schools). Update with the amount contributed to 401k/403b. You can remove duplicate schools from the second transaction, and you can even remove any schools you are sure your kid won’t attend. Or send each school a communication indicating that you forgot to include the contribution to retirement. Include the W-2. Do NOT send this via email (it’s not secure) … upload it to the student portal if you have that option or fax it.
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Thank you! That’s very helpful to have a better understanding of what they are doing with the information on the other end.