<p>For those who have already received a financial aid offer from Penn:</p>
<p>How much is your family expected to pay, compared to your FAFSA EFC?</p>
<p>My ds hasn't received his financial aid package yet, but I want to get an idea of what to expect. At the school where my dd is a junior, she has been asked to pay slightly less than her FAFSA EFC each year. However, at another school where ds was accepted this year, he would be expected to pay almost double the FAFSA EFC. Both of these schools, like Penn, are need-blind schools that use the PROFILE and promise to meet full need, but clearly they interpret "need" very differently.</p>
<p>I know this will vary a lot according to individual family circumstances, but I'm curious to hear what others are experiencing.</p>
<p>Penn was the only school where my EFC was higher than my FAFSA EFC. My FAFSA was around 2,600 and my Penn EFC was 4,850 plus a 2,350 student contribution for a total of 7,200. 2 other ivies plus Duke gave me a 0 EFC and I would only have to pay the student contribution which was 2350 at the 2 ivies and 2100 at duke. I called the financial aid office and talked to them about my higher offers and so I ended up faxing them my other offers from the other schools. Hopefully they lower my EFC was they see the offers from other schools</p>
<p>Lightzout, I’ve heard of people faxing/calling/email finaid and getting their EFC lowered. Please let me know how this works for you. If it goes well I might give it a shot too</p>
<p>I called Penn SFS this morning. They said it will be Tuesday or Wednesday before they have a financial aid offer ready for my son. This makes it really tough to plan whether to attend Penn Preview Days. We don’t want to spend the time and money on the trip unless the financial aid will make it feasible for him to attend.</p>
<p>If most people are being asked to pay a lot more than their FAFSA EFC, that’s not a good sign.</p>
<p>Don’t confuse correlation with causation. Penn uses the profile to determine their EFC and there is no reason to expect it to match the FAFSA EFC. If the student’s parents are divorced (and remarried) or have substantial assets then the family should expect a profile EFC to be higher. LG we not know any of the specifics of your situation but the Penn response is fairly predictable from the profile … and has virtually nothing to do with any other family’s result unless they happen to have a similar family/asset situation as yours.</p>
<p>I know that the Profile EFC will not necessarily match the FAFSA. In fact, I know from experience that it can go both ways.</p>
<p>My dd’s school uses the Profile, but she has never been asked to pay her full FAFSA EFC. In her school’s opinion, our family needs even more aid than the FAFSA indicates, and the school has provided it.</p>
<p>Using the same Profile data, a different school asked my ds to pay almost double the FAFSA EFC. We can’t afford that, so he won’t be going there.</p>
<p>Both of these schools are Top 20 privates that are need-blind and promise to meet 100% of need. But I certainly couldn’t use the results from one school to predict the outcome at the other. So until we receive an initial offer from Penn, we have no idea where it will fall.</p>