Net price calculator accuracy survey

A sub-discussion around reply #99-100 of http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/2051901-lets-pool-our-experiences-to-add-some-financial-transparency-to-this-college-process.html had the idea for this thread, a survey of net price calculator net prices versus actual financial aid offer net prices, to help future students and parents with pre-application financial aid estimates and how trustworthy each college’s net price calculator is.

Please include the following information about the student and parents:

  • Whether student is dependent or independent as defined for FAFSA purposes.
  • Whether student is a frosh or transfer student.
  • Whether parents are married, divorced/separated (and whether either is remarried if divorced), or other status.
  • Whether any income or assets are unusual (beyond mostly W-2 income and relatively small amounts of investment income), such as small business, self employment, rental real estate, etc..

For each college, indicate:

  • Name of college.
  • If a state school, whether in-state, out-of-state, or out-of-state with regional discount.
  • Net price from net price calculator. (net price = list price minus grants and scholarships)
  • Net price from actual financial aid offer.
  • If either net price included the effect of merit scholarships, indicate how much.
  • If parents are divorced/separated and the college wants both parents' finances, how the net price calculator was run to account for that. Also, if a non-custodial parent waiver was applied for and if it was granted.
  • If the college has any variation from typical in terms of whether the student is dependent/independent or frosh/transfer, indicate that.

@ucbalumnus

That’s asking folks to put a lot of personal information on a public forum…and I’m not sure of your point.

The one thing that is important…did the family correctly complete the NPC…are they sure.

I agree with @thumper1

The main reason the NPC can be so off for people is IF they have unusual circumstances, which many do… they own businesses or rentals, are divorced, etc. NPCs are only effective in pretty straightforward W2 kinds of salary situations and typical family situations… a lot of people do not understand that and have false expectations.

Garbage in, garbage out – When playing with the NPC are you using the same data that you will use to fill out the CSS Profile or other Financial Aid applications?

I used the NPC, very simple W-2 parent, no real estate or small businesses.

The calculators I used showed we would receive…nothing! And they were right.

The benefit to using the calculator at Florida Tech was that it showed which level of merit she’d receive, and it showed as the middle level. When the actual letter came, it showed the lowest level. It turns out that the admissions office never updated ACT scores so gave her the merit award based on the first test. If I hadn’t used the NPC, I wouldn’t have know that she was expected to get more and probably would have accepted that initial award as correct. I also learned not to leave things to the school, as it pretty much sucked at anything administrative.

The Wyoming calculator asked more farming and ranching questions than other calculators. Didn’t apply to me, but I’m guessing that some people would find it more accurate. It also showed we’d get no money from need, which was true. It did show the merit award which is strictly based on gpa/ACT.

I had been thinking of starting almost the exact same thread yesterday when I saw this. While NPCs are not perfect for everyone, assuming that people are using the same data in the CSS as they do in the NPC, it’s an important question to know whether the financial aid offers are in the same ballpark.

I’ve got a D19 (and so obviously can’t contribute any data), but as we see the increasing level of applications and declining admissions rates for a variety of reasons, I’m forced to start thinking about whether ED is something we should consider. I’d rather not have my daughter use it for a variety of reasons (not least of which is that she isn’t particularly committed to any college at the moment), but if we do decide to explore it, I want to know if I can count on the NPC because we will need aid. Not necessarily the whole cost, as our NPCs are in the five-digit territory, but definitely not full-pay at the LACs we’re generally looking at.

We do have a straightforward employment/family situation, and luckily for us the NPCs produce results that we can afford. I understand that the NPCs might not be perfect; if the financial aid offer is, say, $300 higher than the NPC result, that’s something we can handle and not something I’d reject an ED offer for. But if people are reporting more consistently NPCs are, say, 10% below their financial aid offer, that might mean D19 would have to take out some loans, and that’s a situation, all else being equal, I’d like to avoid.

Anyway, that’s a long-winded explanation of why I think this could be useful.

Unless your daughter gets accepted into a meets needs without loans school, it’s likely schools giving you need based aid are going to consider the loans will make up part of the package.

I agree that the questions asked parents to post a lot of personal information

@twoinanddone I understand that packages may or often do include loans. But in our case, the NPCs generally come in roughly a $10k range – at the bottom of the range, we can definitely pay for the college even without our daughter taking out the subsidized loan, and at the middle of the range, we can just make college work without our daughter taking the loan, and at the top, she’d definitely have to take out the loan. So for us, an NPC being 10% wrong, depending on where a college’s NPC sits on the scale, can have a variable impact on our decision, while a 1% error is not significant.

I, too, agree that I’m not sure how detailed people will be in their financial data – as you can tell, even I in these posts encouraging this information am being cagey. I think percentage terms – e.g., the NPC was X% off – are sufficiently helpful, along with some context from the poster – the only college that was way off was _____. I understand, though, if people choose that even this much info is too much info.

Yes, if people do not want to show the actual numbers, they can write that the actual FA from the college was “$____ better” or “$____ worse” than the college’s NPC estimate.

But it seems that there is not much interest in the survey, so we’ll just have to stick with using generalizations about NPCs and FA offers that may not necessarily apply to all colleges.

@ucbalumnus

The issue is…for some folks at a specific college…the NPC will be very close, while for others it will not be. We would need to know the %age likelihood that a NPC would or wouldn’t be accurate for all completing it for a specific school.

Not sure that is a realistic thing to find out.

I agree that many people will not want to share a lot of personal information but for those of us with complicated situations (divorced, re-married, self-employed), it can be helpful to hear about other’s financial aid results and possibly target schools where the potential for aid is maximized because we can’t get accurate estimates from NPCs. For example, the best aid packages D17 received were from Vassar and Richmond. Next were Lafayette and Davidson. The worst were Kenyon and Denison (there were others too but there was a pretty big range in net cost from best to worst). I think that information could be helpful to some other families even though they should take into consideration that they could have very different results. I wish I could read similar types of results from others as I plan for my S19.

@elena13 I was thinking why bother to post as I am both self employed and divorced and thus had no clue what to expect from any NPC. Kids cast wide nets.

As I’ve posted before on other threads on the topic of NPC accuracy, Happykid’s home-state public U NPC was accurate almost to the dollar. FAFSA only. Only W2 income. No property. No significant savings or stock holdings.

Your mileage, even at that particular university, could vary wildly from ours. The amount of data needed to cover all of the institutions of interest here at CC, and all of the possible family financial situations, is larger than can be handled meaningfully without a ginormous database.

One thing not to forget, which I don’t know whether NPCs ask for it, is including pretax retirement contributions in untaxed income.

For example, the AGI and income from working income of a family is $80,000, but they contributed $4,000 to a 401k.

On the FAFSA that $4,000 will be added to total income under untaxed income.

It is not listed on the tax return, so doesn’t get brought over in the FAFSA IRS data retrieval process.

I have come across several NPCs that ask for FAFSA EFC, so having an estimate of your FAFSA EFC is helpful.

I have found the Collegeboard EFC calculator (federal methodology) fairly accurate, and you can Google for “FAFSA EFC formula” for the aid year you need, and go through it by hand as well.

I think this gets updated in August or so every year.