You can always complete the FAFSA in future years. No school can prevent you from completing it and qualifying for federal aid or loans. The school can decide not to give its own aid in future years if you didn’t receive it in the first year, but I think that’s rare too. Most of the schools that say you can’t get aid in future years if you don’t apply in the first year are the ‘meets full needs’ schools that don’t want students to claim they don’t need anything to get admitted and then suddenly need full aid, and those are mostly CSS schools.
Some schools require FAFSA for merit aid not because they are looking at your need but because they are using the form to determine if you are a citizen. Some awards are limited to citizens by state law or by the donor of the award. Some may have merit awards tied to need, but that’s not the only reason to require the FAFSA. I think GA requires the FAFSA for the Zell Miller/Hope awards, but those are merit only awards and need plays no part.
In the past two years, a few schools did give out CARES money to any student who completed a FAFSA. Since that was federal money, it could only go to citizens/qualified non-citizens so the schools used FAFSA filing as the qualifying factor. Probably were other kids at the school who should have gotten a check, but if they didn’t complete the FAFSA they didn’t get the CARES money.
Yes, you must be accurate, but there is not going to be an audit to see if you have the exact amount.
I have seen a reference to a “verification process” for the FAFSA if selected. Is that sort of like an audit or something? Anyone know any more about that?
@Sweetgum the verification process is done to verify that the info you put on the forms is accurate. Usually you are selected because something on your forms doesn’t align quite right. The schools tell you specifically what they want you to send for documentation. I don’t think it’s very often a line by line everything you enter verification (which is what I would call an audit).
The key is…you need to be honest in what you put on the forms. This is required. Schools don’t want to award aid to folks who don’t qualify. And if you knowingly enter incorrect financials to gain financial aid, that is considered fraud…you don’t want to get mixed up in that!
But if you are honest, and get selected for verification, you just send in the requested materials. People do make honest mistakes and colleges understand that.
I have personal knowledge of a school distributing CARES money to students who did not complete FAFSA, as long as eligibility was verified through a different process (like using a U.S. passport).
The CSS question that will be difficult for us is house value. We are in NorCal and home prices have skyrocketed. A year ago we refinanced to pull out money for a new roof and had an appraisal. Now, I see comparable homes in our neighborhood listed with astronomical prices and Zillow, etc show our house at a value that would indicate it’s gone up 50 percent since the appraisal. That seems crazy. What’s the best way to determine?
This year will indeed be CRAZY with regards to home value appreciation and home equity. Housing prices have risen hugely during Covid. I wonder if colleges that use home equity in their calculations will take that into consideration.
The schools could do that, of course, but it was a lot easier to just send the money to all that already had proven their eligibility by the FAFSA. A school cannot accept a copy of the passport as proof but must see the original passport (or birth certificate) and this happens all the time with students who can’t get the FSA ID verification with FAFSA. If the students had already returned home, like in the spring of 2020, that would have been more difficult or at least delayed the refund.
Maybe easier at a school with 2000 students to get the notice out to students to show up with a passport than at Ohio State or Central Florida.
Yes, the school did that, and then they sent an all-student email saying that students who were eligible for the CARES money but had not filed FAFSA could still get the money by doing either x, y or z. I’m not sure that in this case actually laying eyes on the original passport (or whatever authenticating document) was required. Some of the kids really needed the money. The school was not going to make it unnecessarily difficult.
From reading other threads and listening to financial aid sessions at several colleges, most do not use the value of your primary residence even if asked for in the CSS. 2nd homes, business property, investment properties, and other real estate may be considered depending on their formulas.
There is a thread that mentions a college still using primary residence and amount owed in their formula and expects loans to be taken out as part of meeting need, but I do not have first hand experience with that. That was not the case with any of our aid packages.
The only outlier in the questions in the CSS was UMiami. They had some different questions including make, model, and year of cars we drive. That was kind of fascinating to me.
That is what is required before the school can give out any federal loans or Pell grants or SEOG, so I don’t know why it would be different for federal money under CARES. There are several threads on here, mostly from kids who became citizens but were born somewhere else and their SSA records don’t show them as citizens, and the way to fix it is to show your documentation to the FA office. @kelsmom can confirm.
Because one of my kids is adopted from overseas, we know several students who ran into this when applying for federal aid (and driver’s licenses, and federal jobs). My daughter was fortunate that it didn’t happen to her as I correctly changed her status with SSA from ‘not a citizen but allowed to work’ to ‘citizen’ years before she went to college, but sometimes SSA is not as careful about these things as it should be. It doesn’t happen as much anymore as kids adopted from many countries (not all) are citizens when they enter the country, so they are citizens when they get their SSN. But it happens, and the rule is that the college has to see the passport or other authorizing document like a certificate of citizenship, but not a copy or fax, before authorizing any federal aid. I would never, ever, send those documents to a FA office to be lost in the mail room but others can make their own choice about letting those document out out their possession.
Yes, the school is required to see the citizenship documentation in person. If it wasn’t possible to bring it in before aid was disbursed, we would disburse once the student sent us a copy … but they had to bring us the original for us to see as soon as they arrived on campus. If they didn’t do that, we would have backed off all aid (creating a balance) until they brought it to us. Fortunately, while I had many instances where proof of citizenship was required, I never had a student fail to bring the original documents for me to view.
We are full pay. Did not fill it out with D#1 - she got plenty of merit. With D#2 (2021 hs grad), I learned for the first time on here that some schools may REQUIRE the FAFSA in order to receive merit aid. One of the schools in D#2’s top 3 had this requirement, so I filled it out. I did the best I could with recent tax return information (and they have all your info, so they can check it - plus you agree to link it to your IRS filings at some point), so there were probably some mistakes but no one contacted me either way - to answer the OP’s initial question.
Again, via research on here, the consensus was that it didn’t hurt to submit it to all the schools she applied to - so I did. A couple of the schools contacted me regarding the additional requirement of the CSS. I was not going to take the time needed to fill out the CSS (plus, I was uncomfortable with the level of info it asks for). Of the two schools that asked for it, one was an in-state reach (so, affordable for us and limited merit only given for the very top of the class) and the other was a private that was very low on her list. I contacted both schools and confirmed that it was fine not to do the CSS as long as I understood that she’d be out of merit contention. She did end up getting a merit award from the school that required the FAFSA only as well as good merit from the non-FAFSA schools.
I would research whether the schools your student is applying to have the FAFSA/CSS requirement for merit awards. If they don’t, and you are comfortable with your financial position, I wouldn’t bother filling them out - but that’s just me.
Agree with this - don’t think you need to do it just for work study. At D21’s university jobs in the dining hall are not work study and they are starting at $15/hr with free meal vouchers.
Agree, they may also use it to compare to reported income to see if something does not add up. You can not be making $4500 monthly mortgage payments if you are reporting you only make $48,000 a year and have no savings or other source of income.
It looks like many highly selective colleges meeting 100% need are moving to formulas based on a percent of annual income. It would be easier if more were transparent with their process.
My view, which has been confirmed over the years by several FA folks, is that you should have a reasonable basis for the value you state. If your annual property taxes state a market value, that’ll often be the most favorable for a homeowner. That’s every bit as reasonable as something like Zillow. The only truly accurate way to determine a home’s value is to sell it on the day you file the FA forms. No one expects you to do that. An appraisal might be the second best way, but no one expects families filing for FA to incur that expense every year. Use a reasonable method that you can defend with a straight face and you’ll be fine. (That doesn’t mean that if a school determines you might be eligible for aid, that they won’t second-guess your valuation; but that does not mean you lied about anything).
I believe that applies to determining business value and some of the various other investments that folks have (those that aren’t valued daily and aren’t easily valued—shares in private companies, etc.). Just do your best and have a reasonable basis that you can articulate. There are different methodologies and no one thinks there’s an exact value for some of these things (at least, not one that can be determined without a market). So estimates will always vary. But not by ridiculous amounts.