<p>Now that most FA packages have rolled in, how accurate were the NPC's for the colleges your kids applied to? Just curious how this relatively new tool is working. I would say for us, they were very accurate. One school was off by $1000 but I think the award letter is wrong because the scholarship given with his acceptance was $1000 more than it showed on the letter. I think this school is out of the running so we haven't pursued getting this corrected.</p>
<p>Our student is a soph
and the Fin calculator was very wrong–</p>
<p>We used the hard #s from our CCS Profile and taxes etc…aid should have been higher by 30% for the first year. Second year it was off by almost the same amount.</p>
<p>We are pretty disappointed with the lack of transparency in the institutional methods.</p>
<p>fog, do you mean wrong as in the NPC calculated that you’d receive a certain amount of aid and the college actually offered you a much smaller amount? That was not our experience. We found that most NPCs assumed we could (or should) pay more than we thought was reasonable. But the amount the NPCs came up with and the aid packages actually offered have so far been within a couple thousand dollars of each other, at least with the schools S is really interested in. (I may have wiped the memory banks on the others.) So not as accurate as SteveMA finds them to be, but pretty accurate nonetheless.</p>
<p>Our EFC on the letters were higher than the Fin Calc. for OOS schools. However in the end it didn’t matter 1. because of merit aid in the letters and 2. because he ended up in state.</p>
<p>Right.
we used mutiple fin aid cal --so that if there was a problem, we might catch it…</p>
<p>K1s frosh yr the Us fin aid cal wasn’t up and running.</p>
<p>Afterwards when they posted it–the fin aid k1 got was 30% less than the calc said was to be expected (and this was with the #s the fin aid got from us, CSS, etc)</p>
<p>Same 2nd yr…about 20% less.</p>
<p>This U offers grants, work-study, requires student earnings and EFC.
Also does not stack scholarships over EFC so had K1 brought big outside scholarships to the table, it doesn’t reduce “family” EFC…</p>
<p>I think aid is mysterious at best…</p>
<p>our cpa and fin planner feel the same way…we are in the red</p>
<p>fogfog–are you talking about the FAFSA EFC fin aid calculator or the Net Price Calculator on the college websites? I’m talking specifically the NPC on the college websites, assuming people ran those with real tax numbers I guess, not just estimates. When you say it was that much less, was that just for the part of the package that included grants/scholarships or the entire package, including loans?</p>
<p>I’m with you on the mystery as to why schools take an outside scholarship that the student earned as reducing THEIR portion and not your portion though.</p>
<p>@SteveMA - Would you feel comfortable posting the names of the schools that were accurate?</p>
<p>What’s up with schools providing an NPC and then basically asking you to ignore the result because they treat each FA request individually? Check out Wash U at St. Louis as an example.</p>
<p>By accurate I mean what FA they would offer…which for us was pretty much nothing. At a couple of their more expensive schools they were offered small scholarships, but mostly they got loans, which we expected. When we factored in the automatic merit aid and the loans (and small scholarships for the couple schools that offered that) they were pretty spot on. None of the final packages were more than what they said they would be (except for that one school above). I’m not really into publicizing too much info, sorry.</p>
<p>For me it depended on the school. Villanova, Boston University, an NYU were a lot better than their NPC calculated (though I’ve heard that BU and NYU give more aid to people they like more so maybe that’s the case), I was slightly better at UPenn and Georgetown, about the same at Loyola Maryland, and much worse than calculated at Northeastern and American U. NPC calculators need to be taken with a grain of salt as sometimes certain applicants get more money than others despite having the same need.</p>
<p>Our financial picture is very simple so they were pretty accurate</p>
<p>Chicago–> actual cost was a couple thousand cheaper, maybe a bit more even
Northwestern → actual cost was a few thousand more
Fordham–> he got merit so it was much much cheaper that the NPC
Tufts–> don’t know yet</p>
<p>I will also say that the spread between grant, loan, etc was pretty close too.</p>
<p>SteveMA</p>
<p>the NPC was the U’s…not fafsa nor css…</p>
<p>The U will use any outside schollys to reduce the student’s requirement for work-study, and “summer job” savings…NOT the EFC.<br>
They INSIST the parents get hit with an EFC I guess…funny how “estimate family contribution” doesn’t include the student in the “family” …</p>
<p>Also I frankly see the “no loans” part as marketing. </p>
<p>Sure they don’t offer loans–they offer grants, work study (student chases down job that fits into schedule) and the rest is "student savings and EFC.
The family then researches loans etc as necessary to handle the full need. What our CPA/tax returns say is our full need, and what the U says are very different.</p>
<p>In our case, there is no equity in the house. We are self employed. Any contributions to our SEP (very little) are “added back”, as are some deductions (health insurance expenses etc)</p>
<p>Self employed parents get it rough because of things that are handled on the employers side…</p>
<p>We did the NPC for Penn, and it was not accurate at all. Our actual grant amount is much lower than what was calculated. Our cost is 25% higher than what we calculated. I’m not sure if we can do this. It’s heartbreaking.</p>
<p>Ours were off by quite abit (@ $6 - $10,000) for the privates where we had hoped for some aid/discounting since our AGI is not close to six figures. BUT we have rental property and while I included the value of them, similar to what you would put as an asset on the FAFSA this shows that some/many colleges probably add BACK things that are expensed, depreciated or deducted on taxes for people who have assets in places other than IRAs and 401Ks. Now fortunately, I didn’t “believe” the numbers that were coming in on the cost calculators because this is my third in college and I can generally “gut guess” what colleges will charge. It is my personal belief that many private colleges do their “best” to get kids close to their state costs especially kids from states with strong (expensive) publics (like Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, etc.) since almost every financial offer from an OSS public or a private came within a thousand dollars of our state flagship full costs which is what we would be. Coincidence…I think not since this is the third time I’ve witnessed this type of “packaging.”</p>
<p>^ That is insightful! Mom of 3…
I hadn’t considered that.<br>
I worry about or K2s funding as its at schools that also include loans.
hoping with 2 at the same time that we get a break somewhere.</p>
<p>When you are looking at the funding for your state flagship–is that the in state rate or oos?</p>
<p>What I don’t understand is that we were told that our retirement funds didn’t allow for them to make any adjustments when we filed for re-evaluation. I thought that retirement accounts (401K) were not supposed to have ANY bearing on this.</p>
<p>And… motherofthreeboys - our real package is still 4000 higher than the state flagship school. 8000 more than the NPC.</p>
<p>
But couldn’t your student STILL work during the school year and summer effectively reducing your EFC?</p>
<p>Alabama: No significant difference between NPC & actual award.
Baylor: No significant difference between NPC & actual award.
SMU: Need-based grant awarded was 33% higher than NPC indicated.</p>
<p>fogfog - instate rate, but for our two flagships the cost is around $28,000 + or - depending on which school for freshman (tuition, room & board, books, transp)…the OSS costs are much, much higher. One of our flagships uses Profile but guarantees to meet need for in-state students - although it’s Profile need and the other is FAFSA only but does not guarantee to meet need for in-state students. There is no “state” merit money only federal and whatever the unis decide to give. Actually after watching 3 kids go through this the “best buy” are in the instate and border LACS who fight like crazy (and give nice packages equal to in-state flagships) over the kids that would pick MSU or UofM. </p>
<p>I think the calculators work better for people with very simple financial situations - salary + 401Ks/IRAs. But that is true for publics and privates. Even the HYP genre schools use income AND assets.</p>
<p>@tracyann - Reitrement funds do not have any impact on FA packages up to a point. The college wants to be sure that you have not used your IRA as a dodge to accumulate an unreasonable amount of cash. If your family income is $50k annually, but you have $3million in an IRA, they will not give you any FA. </p>
<p>They don’t want you to borrow huge sums during the student’s freshman year of high school, put the money in a retirement account, then effectively make “back door” contributions to the retirement account by paying back the loans over the next six years.</p>
<p>Our experience was that the NPCs were within about 5-10% which I thought was good. For my twins, all private schools that they applied to offered more money than expected while all public schools offered less money than we expected based on NPC. Coincidence?</p>
<p>One irritant that I picked up on was that the calculators used costs from the previous academic year until late March. This resulted in a difference of a few thousand dollars by itself.</p>
<p>I am also curious about what auditing the NPCs are subject to. Since they are legally mandated to offer an NPC, does anyone check to make sure that the NPC algorithm actually tries to line up with the actual algortihm used by the FA Office? The lack of transparency, even among taxpayer supported publics, is appalling.</p>