I have been using Collegedata.com to look at college data for senior S1. On this site under a the specific college I am looking up it has a tab for “money matters” which says when applying for financial aid - Methodology for Awarding Institutional Aid which is either IM or FM or both… When I run the #'s in the EFC my IM & FM are lower then what my FAFSA says. Does anyone know why or what the schools actually use?
Is their calculator up to date? Last year the parent asset protection allowance was about $10,000 higher than this year.
I’ve found the EFC calculator from collegeboard pretty accurate. I used the federal methodology (FM) and the EFC was the same as on our FAFSA.
Al lot of the colleges we are looking at say they take they use IM. My IM is lower than my FAFSA & FM… So I hope this is true. It would work in out favor…
Yes, when we ran some net price calculators there were some schools that had a lower family contribution than our FAFSA EFC.
Hopefully you will get some financial aid packages soon and find out how much aid the colleges will give.
FM should align with your FAFSA.
FM should be the same as FAFSA…but that doesn’t mean that need will be met.
Which schools are you seeing lower numbers? Are they asking for assets? I recently learned that some NPCs aren’t asking for assets or some other things that affect EFC.
Are you using the NPCs on each schools’ website?
Do you have any business deductions?
Not necessary seen lower. Just wondering because Collegedata.com said these schools used IM - Boston College, Bucknell. Cornell, J. Hopkins & UVA…Lehigh and NYU said they use both… I have verified BC and Bucknell do use IM on there financial aid website. I need to look at other schools. This sure takes a lot of time… I need to run NPC’s I did them awhile ago. I did them from their website but believe they all kicked me back to Collegeboard… IM definitely works in my favor.
@mommdc Same here FM is close to FAFSA but IM Is lower and we applied to about 6 schools that use IM… FIngers Crossed
@mommdc how do you know if their calc is up to date? I am not sure I understand what you mean by the $10,000 parent asset protection
I was wondering if the calculator uses updated EFC formula. For example when I used the EFC calculator at finaid it listed a year before the current year.
I have used the collegeboard EFC estimator and it came up with same parent EFC as on our FAFSA, the student EFC was a bit higher for some reason.
You will need to wait for finaid packages from the individual schools to see for sure how they respond to your EFC and need, as they determine it with your information.
The parent asset protection allowance is a set amount that changes by age (goes up) and excludes a set number
of assets before they affect EFC calculation. It changed from last year the amount of APA. For example ours was $30,000 last year and $20,000 this year. The $10k in difference I mentioned.
I have been running the NPC from collegeboard pretty obsessively for the last few weeks. The offers we have seen so far pretty much align with what the NPC predicts. The only thing I can’t figure out is the CollegeBoard NPC site keeps throwing in a Pell Grant which I know we do not qualify for. I’ve just been assuming that is wrong and adding in the amount to our EFC.