<p>A lot of colleges will use a CSS Profile as well as their own financial aid forms and will pay very careful attention to your income tax returns. They will also have different rules as to how they count business assets, business losses, and home equity to arrive at the EFC calculation. </p>
<p>What is the most accurate CSS Profile/Institutional Financial Aid EFC Calculator that you have seen that takes into account more than just the adjusted gross income and wages, but goes into business income and rental income and so forth?</p>
<p>Any inputs or links is important. </p>
<p>My question is asking for much more than just a college board Institutional Method EFC calculator. What i'm hoping is a school like Carnegie Melon or USC or John Hopkins or so will have a very accurate and detailed EFC calculator or someone in the field has found a very sophisticated EFC Calculator. </p>
<p>Thanks guys!</p>
<p>It doesn’t exist. There are too many parameters for a generic calculator to include, particularly for those whose parents own/have a ‘business’. Every college calculates institutional ‘need’ differently (Profile), even for those with just W-2 income and some home equity. Some colleges cap home equity as a multiple of salary, for example, while others do not.</p>
<p>Each school can interpret the information on CSS Profile as they choose. So you need to try the estimators at each different Profile school you are interested in. I will say that Cornell’s estimator came pretty close to their actual offer. But Cornell’s estimate is irrelevant if you’re going somewhere else. Same with anyone else’s. (Some schools will match aid offers from certain other schools for a student accepted to both – that is the only case where another school’s calculator may be relevant.)</p>
<p>If the school has a calculator/estimator of its own that would be the best option. However, even if you can pinpoint your EFC there is no telling what the composition of your fin aid package will be. (grant, loan, work study) If the school is one of the few that meet 100% of need with no loans you can come very close to estimating what it will cost you, but it’s always different than you think.</p>
<p>If someone could just invent such a thing, they would be rich beyond their dreams…</p>
<p>It’s not a matter of inventing, it’s a matter of having access to privately held formulas.</p>
<p>^again, because each school is allowed it’s own formula, there is no universal tool.</p>
<p>The way you phrased the queston - just understand there is a difference between the way the IRS uses detail to calculate taxes versus the way each Profile college can use the same (plus assets) to determine your abilty to pay costs.</p>
<p>I thought I saw that each school is supposed to have a calculator up on their FA pages- is it by this fall? Next fall?</p>
<p>All colleges must have a NPC by October this year. Many of them that have them up now (30+ and growing) are linking to, and using, the College Board’s customized net price calculator:</p>
<p>[College</a> Board’s Net Price Calculator - Calculate the Cost to attend a University or College](<a href=“Net Price Calculator (NPC) - Education Professionals”>http://netpricecalculator.collegeboard.org/)</p>
<p>As more and more colleges use this service, it will actually get closer and closer to a single, accurate EFC estimator for participating schools. This is because you can register, enter your financial data once, and compare your expected net price at all participating schools. The colleges alter the EFC formula to match the way they evaluate all of the inputs - including home equity, business gain/loss, etc.</p>
<p>Isn’t “Institutional Method,” by definition, specific to a particular institution (college/university)?</p>
<p>It would be nice if they could each create an estimator that people could use to get a ballpark figure, particularly one where you could plug in various scenarios anonymously, similar to the FinAid.org calculators.</p>
<p>I don’t relish giving my personal, identifiable financial information out willy-nilly, and I also, from time to time, am interested in calculating a hypothetical (What if I quit my job? What if I had spent everything that’s in the college fund on other expenses? What if I faked my own death 
?).</p>
<p>Yes. Many schools now have something close, an estimator, on their web pages. What collegeboard is doing is offering to serve as a central point with links to with subscriber colleges’ individual calculators or using that same requested detail. (Collegeboard offers this at a price to the schools.)</p>
<p>Keep in mind, though, that final finaid still won’t be strictly a machine calculation.</p>
<p>I’ve heard a lot of skepticism over how accurate the NPCs will (be required to?) be. It would be amazing if families could get an accurate picture of financial aid, but many schools have competitive merit and/or merit within need aid, or aid available on a first-come-first-served basis, etc. that will always be difficult to estimate. A good calculator could give you a range of scenarios, but that seems unlikely.</p>
<p>^ and, we’ve seen threads where parents complain that they ran the school’s calculator and got far less aid than they expected. The safe position is to learn up on finaid and make no assumptions. What also concerns me is that CB occasionally has minor errors that students and families take as gospel (and so, don’t dig further into the school’s own info.)</p>
<p>DeskPotato,</p>
<p>It is possible to use the school specific calculators on the College Board site anonymously as a “guest,” just make sure you aren’t logged into your CB account. It won’t save your info for the future and won’t send anything to the college.</p>
<p>I like your idea of running so many scenarios. :)</p>