<p>I am wondering if the the financial aid calculator on collegeboard.com is true to what CMC has determined your EFC to be, using their own method?</p>
<p>We are trying to gain a ball park understanding of what CMC would determine our EFC to be, but not sure of their specific policies. If, in your experience, the collegeboard financial aid calculator is pretty close, that would give us a good idea.</p>
<p>Any experienced voices out there?
Thanks!</p>
<p>The IM method will vary greatly depending on your personal circumstances. Mine are unique to me so it is very difficult to compare. The collegeboard does not ask some questions that are relevant to my situation that are required on the actual Profile form. In my case my Profile “EFC” is actually lower than my FAFSA EFC due to high school tuition for younger sibling. So I ran the college board IM method as if the younger sibling was in college to get an idea - the result was lower than my actual family contribution calculated by CMC. Probably @ 25% lower. I have “typical” assets/savings etc. I will say CMC is very generous but it is nearly impossible to guess how your individual circumstances may affect the IM “EFC”. If you get in and have questions about your FA package make sure you speak with the FA director to get accurate information!</p>
<p>thank you for your response!</p>
<p>This probably doesn’t nail things down very much but our experience is similar to NEM’s. Your EFC is likely to be somewhere between the FAFSA and IM calculation and that can be a broad window. CMC will take unusual circumstances into consideration but their judgement about this is difficult to predict.</p>
<p>Thanks for your experiences! Our child would love to apply to CMC under ED, and thinks (naively perhaps) that since it is need blind and meets full need, that ED would be ok - even though we will have quite alot of “need”.
My explanation to our student is that since CMC gets to decide how much our contribution will be, we need to apply RD.
HOWEVER - if CMC routinely gave EFC numbers close to collegeboard calculators, then we could do it. That number is about the max we could pay.
I believe that anyone for whom a few thousand dollars per year will make a difference, has no busines in the ED round.
What do you think?</p>
<p>I can’t tell you about the advantages of applying ED or the similarities or differences between FA packages. My thinking was the same as yours. S applied RD.</p>