OP did call: The entire answer I got was “We don’t know why it was so wrong, there’s nothing we can do about it, the awards are what they are.” Oh, and “No, there isn’t a supervisor or anyone who can answer any of your questions available. Have a nice day.”
Time to contact the assistant director, IMHO. Even if “the awards are what they are,” the school should be willing to explain the difference between the NPC and the actual awards.
A dear friend has a daughter who went to USF. It was supposed to be her admissions safety, but she was waitlisted. She was interested in studying Japanese.
The fact of the matter is that any high priced private school is not a financial safety. The big ticket merit awards can fluctuate from year to year and financial aid decisions can often have to come down to providing the numbers. Like chopping up a large $25K award to 5 $5K ones to get more students into the fold. The numbers have gotten so danged big these days that it really takes a lot of of big awards to greatly cover the cost of these upper range priced private colleges. I was sure the ceiling would be reached at the $45-50K range and it’s now soared beyond $70k. What would have been a great award back in the day when my oldest was applying to college doesn’t even come up to half or even a third of full costs at some of these schools.
A financial safety has surefire awards, and those schools that were on my college senior’s list, have rescinded the automatic formulas now, or a low enough sticker price that it is affordable even without any aid.
I just recently came back on the board after about a 3-4 year hiatus and am surprised at how the financial aid and merit picture has changed.
Do call USF and find out what the story is. I’m interested in knowing why their NPC is so way off too. We can all guess, but only the Fin Aid office can explain this, or the Admissions officer if the merit award portion is what did not pan out.
USF is a Florida public university. A relatively low priced Florida public university.
it’s also University of San Francisco which is a high priced private school. That offers a lot of Japanese programs. I think that’s what the OP has in mind.
USF in CA is very expensive. Right up with a lot of the top priced schools. Though USF in FL is very reasonable for Florida residents, coming in under the $25K line , full price, it’s over $34k for OOSers
Quick update: The less than helpful person I spoke with did give me the name and email address for an assistant director in the financial aid department, and I looked up his phone number from that info. I did call today and left him a message, and I send a brief email explaining the situation. I have not yet heard back. As disappointed as I am in the FA office from a customer service perspective, I suspect the woman I spoke with simply had no idea how to answer my questions. I’m hoping for better from the assistant director, whenever I hear back from him.
@cptofthehouse I can’t believe how tough the admissions race has been this year. DD was rejected from three schools where she was well above the averages indicated in their freshman profiles, and several of the schools she applied to are focusing heavily on harder to prepare for metrics like yield and applicant interest. I take some comfort in the fact that it isn’t just her; even the salutatorian of her class is struggling, deferred from her top choice and so far rejected or waitlisted from three others. Other than USF and Loyola, my daughter only applied to schools that meet full need and only managed to get one acceptance out of those 6 schools. And of course, luck being what it is, it is at a school she’s not particularly excited about, one that she added to the list before her time in Japan and that doesn’t have a strong program in that area. And other than Wellesley, none of them should have been a major stretch for her, so she’s feeling really crappy about all the hard work that she put into the last four years now that it is coming down to a school she doesn’t really want to be at vs. a school we really can’t afford. And I feel so bad for her because for all the hours of research we put into this process, I really thought we were both better prepared to get her into a school she would really love.
@STEM2017 We’re talking about U of San Francisco, not South Florida.
Apologies
As a general rule, I had noticed over the years that many of the Catholic schools had far more stringent requirements and limited seats for girls. I saw excellent female students shut out of schools like BC, Fordham, Fairfield, Providence who when males with much weaker academic profiles were being accepted with merit money. I’m not talking the huge scholarships or the more selective schools, but even the guys with <3.0 goals and 1200 SATs were gett $5k or less sweetness as well as acceptances at a number of Catholic colleges.
Several of the girls in my area looked at Catholic schools out of the east coast geographics after getting disappointing results EA. Many of them were accepted after the initial deferment but it was a wake up call for them. If you aren’t in the “A” list, getting merit money not likely to happen. Even the more ebulliently optimistic families got that message.
I’ve noticed with a lot of these schools, not just Catholic ones, that it’s very important when pursing a geographic advantage to emphasize directed interest in the school and come up with a real connection to the area and college. These schools often know their target market well, and are wary of those outside of it who may just be throwing a few outlier schools into their list, without seriously seeing themselves there.
I’m thinking of starting a NPC thread. The NPC came into existence well after I was active on the boards. They really cleared up a lot of uncertainties in the cost analyses ad comparisons among schools. But I’m curious now how accurate they’ve turned out to be
Here are three of MANY threads that are on this site about net price calculators.
Just do a search for net price calculators. There are a lot of threads that already talk about this.
The net price calculators have varying levels of accuracy. They should be viewed as an estimate only. In addition, some NPCs have a lot of questions, while others are very brief.
When it comes to merit awards mentioned on NPCs, unless these are guaranteed awards for certain stats, they really should be viewed with caution. Because…some kids will get them and others won’t.
For the 13 colleges my daughter applied to, our NPCs were very accurate, probably within $1000 of what was awarded.
@taverngirl yes…some NPCs are more accurate.
The perplexing thing to me about the OPs post is that their net cost was 10 times what their FAFSA EFC was. The Profile does delve more deeply into finances than the FAFSA, but this is a huge difference.
With a net cost of $25,000 or so, this student did get a good amount of aid from SFU. Just not enough to make attending possible.
Overall, the Catholic colleges do terrible for families with low EFCs. 
The question is why this NPC wasn’t accurate.
I’m guessing the office of financial aid doesn’t want to say “we don’t have enough money for all students so this an admit/deny” (academic Admission, financial denial).
USF’s published data shows that they have terrible aid for low income students.
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=San+Francisco&s=all&pg=2&id=122612#netprc shows an actual net price averaging $20,000 for students from families with income below $30k.
I agree that the Catholic colleges, especially those in California, are in general not affordable for families with low EFCs. My D17 originally wanted to go to college in California (doesn’t every non-California teen!). I ran the NPC’s for USF, USD, and Loyola Marymount. All came in at over $30,000 (some close to $40,000) for our $0 FAFSA EFC family.
The poor financial aid at many Catholic colleges has been the subject of some articles:
https://hechingerreport.org/catholic-colleges-tell-poor-students-go-somewhere-else/
https://www.propublica.org/article/as-pope-pushes-to-help-the-poor-catholic-universities-leave-them-behind
This is the 2nd thread Ive seen today where people with simple financial situations have gotten very very very wrong results on schools’ Net Price Calculators.
If after speaking to FA managers (not just whoever answers the phones) I was still getting inadequate explanations about why the results were so wrong, I would start tweeting about it, posting screenshots of the Net Price Calculator inputted info and the Net Price Calculator results, tagging the school, detailing conversations, and generally embarrassing the schools for being dismissive about their grossly inadequate Net Price Calculators
It may not result in a satisfactory result for me, but it might move the school to improve their Net Price Calculator.
I have, on occasion, tweeted about particularly poor business practices, etc, and usually I get a positive resolution. Again, not saying that you’ll likely get more money, but the school will probably feel that they must correct their Net Price Calculator.
Post screenshots of NPC entries? I would not publicly do that. This includes financial information that many folks just don’t want as a matter of public record.
Even the results of the NPC might not be something folks want publicly read on Twitter. Let’s face it…some people would not want the whole world to know the are Pell eligible.
BUT…I would be sending all of this to the college. This student seems to be “off” in the merit aid department. Merit aid is not guaranteed at this college. So really…I’m not sure there is a case…but they should try. Usually merit aid is awarded by admissions…based on the strength of the application. This family needs to find out USF process for having their financial aid award reconsidered…and do that.
^But they could post the NPC result… and the FA result (not the detail)
They could do either one…whatever they’re comfortable with. They could post the Net Price Calculator result and DM the details.
The point is that when people have SIMPLE finances (paid by an employer), few or no assets, then the Net Price Calculator should not be off by such ridiculous amounts. One of the advantages of going to a prior prior system with FAFSA being released on Oct 1, is that these estimates for simple situations should be close to accurate.
In the other case I learned about yesterday, the instate public Net Price Calculator showed that thee student would get about $14k of “free money” (mix of grants and merit). None of that was loans or WS. Yet, when the family got the FA package, there was zero free money. How could they be off by that much when finances are simple?