<p>Could this happen due to high amounts of debt or something?</p>
<p>PROFILE is meant to identify additional assets that can be used to pay school expenses.
Colleges are not interested in personal debt.</p>
<p>I can’t think of any scenario where Profile would come out less than FAFSA. Debt is not considered on either the FAFSA or the Profile forms.</p>
<p>CSS Profile doesn’t provide an EFC.</p>
<p>Schools take the info from CSS Profile and use their formulas to yield a “family contribution.”</p>
<p>For schools like HYPS, they give super aid, so their expected family contribution could be lower than a FAFSA EFC.</p>
<p>that said, having a lot of debt won’t matter unless the debt is from medical bills that weren’t covered by insurance. Other debt (cars, homes, credit cards, etc) are considered personal choices and not considered.</p>
<p>If you’re concerned that your “family contribution” will be unaffordable because your parents are making large payments for debts, then be sure to have some safety schools that are affordable thru scholarships or family funds.</p>
<p>The CSS Profile does not generate an “EFC” in the same way the FAFSA does. However each school using the Profile generates some number (may be called an EFC) using their own methodology. I actually did get a lower “EFC” from a number of schools that use the Profile due to tuition expenses for private school for a younger sibling. This is NOT typical. These were all meet need, heavily endowed, types of colleges/universities (but not HYP). A lot of consumer or home debt would not likely lessen the expected EFC from the Profile. BTW - the financial aid office did call it the EFC - the number they generated from the Profile.</p>
<p>Last year our Profile numbers (both IM and FM) were lower than the FAFSA EFC.</p>
<p>I did not break down why, but we do have five children and above average income/assets.</p>
<p>Yes, it did for us. I think it was because the Profile is more generous to military income situations than the FAFSA.</p>
<p>Private grade school tuition and/or high medical expenses are usually the two big factors that can drive a lower EFC via the Institutional Method (IM) of calculating EFC that CSS Schools use. Another area that can drive you to a lower EFC determined by the Institutional Method (vs FAFSA) is the way asset protection allowance is determined. This could leave you with a lower EFC via the IM method, particularly for families with several children and parents that are relatively young.</p>
<p>Here’s an example:</p>
<p>Let’s consider a typical family of 5 with family income of 150,000 and assets of 120,000. The parents are 45 and 46 years of age. This family has 3 kids, ages 15, 18 and 20. The 20 year old is in college and the 18 year old is applying to college.</p>
<p>Using the FAFSA forumula guide and tables to determine parent contribution from assets (based on older parent age), you would see that $42,300 in assets is “protected”, leaving $77,700 in assets that would be assessed at the parental rate of 5.6%, and leave you with an expected contribution from assets of $4351.20.</p>
<p>Most colleges that use the CSS profile use the Institutional Method (IM) of evaluating EFC that evaluates assets differently - it calculates 3 different components of asset protection and adds them up to determine the amount of assets assessed. These three are the Emergency Reserve Allowance, the Cumulative Education Savings Allowance, and the Low Income Asset Allowance. </p>
<p>Using the IM tables from the 2010 Charney Book (Paying for College Without Going Broke), you see that the Emergence Reserve allowance for this family would be $31,620.<br>
The formula for the Education Savings allowance is:
(number of college students X ASG X 18 X .625) + (ASG X total ages of pre-college children, excluding the student applicant), where,
ASG = Annual Savings Goal = .0152 X annual income = $2280 for this family with income of $150,000.
So, you get a total ESA of (2<em>2280</em>18<em>(.625)) + (2280</em>15) = $78,660</p>
<p>This family will not get any low income asset protection, so their total asset protection is the sum of the Emergency Reserve allowance ($31,620) and the Education Savings Allowance ($78,660) = $110,280. Their assessable assets under IM would thus be $9720 and EFC from assets under IM, would thus be 5.6% of that, or $544.32.</p>
<p>So, for this family, assessable assets under IM ($9720) would be considerably less than under FM ($77,700), resulting in an EFC that is nearly $4000 less.</p>
<p>As others have indicated, you wont ever really know what the exact formulas are that CSS Schools use to calculate EFC, and many of them may vary widely. But, the published IM method in Charney can at least give you a ballpark idea and ability to get some better detail than you’ll ever get on the EFC calculators found on websites.</p>