Schools have their own formulas for calculating their institutional need based awards. It’s their money…and they can do as they please. Also, some schools count things that others don’t…like home equity in the primary residence…income from non-custodial parents, for example.
Ah, I did notice that differing levels of information on the primary residence were requested, to follow through on @thumper1 's example. Some asked for the home value alone, some additionally asked for the mortgage principal, others even wanted to know what year the home was purchased and what its value was at the time. Others only cared about real estate owned other than the primary residence. So I see your point.
The NP calculator platform that Bama, tOSU, and some others are on, allows you to input an EFC figure -or- the detailed financials. That implies you have an EFC figure in your back pocket that isn’t specific to a given school. I used the calculator on College Board / Big Future. Is that the best figure to use by default in this situation?
Also - I started a separate thread about this in the last day or two.
About 200 schools http://www.cegment.com/our-clients/ have their NP calculators on the Cegment platform. Yet I haven’t found a way to save the input data (not output results) for use on the next school’s NPC, the way they do for the College Board NPC member schools. Everything has to be typed in from scratch every time and it’s a real pain if you’re doing more than a few.
Sorry you asked, yet? ;
IDOC uploader is a major pain. There is a max upload size so if you have lots of paper to upload, then you need to upload multiple files. It took me hours of scanning, saving to pdf, and uploading our financial info. It freaks me out that they have all of our personal financial info. Same for CSS profile. What a pain. It’s very detailed and if you own a business like my DH and I do, it gets very very detailed.
I agree with @thumper1 about the deadlines. Feb 1 is too early, especially for business owners.
Another thing that irks me: (at least at both my D’s schools) If you want to use an installment plan to pay tuition (usually over the course of the school year) it cost me $50 bucks to set this up at one school and $70 at the other.
Biggest PITA of all…you can NOT update the Profile online. Stupid.
Of course we all know if that was an option, the College Board would have a fee attached to it.
Any pain points or annoyances AFTER the financial aid application process?
@thumper1 PREACH!!! Amen to your post above.
@schoolfinance11 Waiting for final numbers. In our case, Financial aid has been “pending” since the beginning of the year. So until the fall invoice is sent next week, we really don’t know what the “real” number will be. We have generally a good idea, but still…
Also, regarding sub and unsub loans: if you don’t want to take them, then the student needs to remember to write to the FA office (using their school email address) to decline them. A parent cannot decline the loans. My oldest D just declined them this past week.
The merit award was already earned, so wouldn’t you prefer to think of it as having no need at all?
^ Yeah, I think @WasatchWriter may have it backwards. The merit award wipes out the need.
Maybe so. But that wasn’t the point of this thread or my post.
The EFC that the FAFSA generates is not the amount you will pay!
@Irishmomof2 can you elaborate?
Sometimes people get “gapped.” You need to run the NPC for the specific school to know what they expect you to pay.
Got it @Irishmomof2 and @TempeMom , I understand.
So then how can Bama and tOSU give me the option to input an EFC figure into their NPC rather than detailed financial information? If the EFC is supposed to be specified by them, isn’t that kind of a circular argument?
I guess the safest route is to always input the detailed financial information, to minimize estimation and errors.
Also confusing on NPC’s is issues related to owning your own business and divorced parents/step parent income.
I m not dealing with any of the problems you folks mentioned-since I am a foreign student who can’tget FA, but my neighbors in my dorm faced similar problems. One of them had to call FA office because his FA somehow reduced, and he had to talk to his mom to solve it. It took 3 days.
A school that only uses your FAFSA efc could ask you to input that if you have it
Thanks @saintfan .
We haven’t done our FAFSA so I was wondering what is the best proxy. Is it the Big Future EFC calculator?
I realize any EFC or NPC result can change by 20-30% or more just in response to circumstances that are outside our control, including that asset protection change for 2016-17. We’re not going to be choosing one school over another just because its NPC output in July was $5K lower.
As mentioned above…that colleges don’t stack the merit with the need based aid…at all, even though the FA dept said they would…that colleges say they will work with you and not to worry about finances, but for many, working with you just means ‘offering’ parent loans. That schools consider loans to be aid to get you to the EFC they have determined. We thought the loans would be something we could choose to use to help us pay the EFC.
Reducing the 100+ questions on the FAFSA and CSS/Profile to a more manageable number.