<p>Does anyone know how Profile schools use home equity? Do they protect a certain amount or consider the entire amount a parent asset to be assessed at 5.4%?</p>
<p>I tried to get my S school to answer this question but they keep speaking in general terms and will not give me specifics on how they came up with their EFC - which is significantly higher than the FAFSA EFC - which they say is due to them now using home equity as an asset which they didn't due in earlier years due to younger kids....</p>
<p>Each Profile school has its own formula for using the CSS info. Some schools don’t use home equity at all. Some will exclude a determined amount, but use the rest. For instance, if you have $300k in home equity, the school may exclude X amount (sometimes based on income), and then use the rest.</p>
<p>Also, if you already are having OTHER assets excluded/protected (say $50k in stocks), then maybe the school isn’t excluding any equity? It may not make sense to a school to offer protections for both equity AND other assets. </p>
<p>If your child’s school won’t tell you what their formula for equity is (and some schools won’t), then there’s nothing you can really do.</p>
<p>If you take the difference between FAFSA EFC and their number, how does that relate to your home equity? </p>
<p>For instance, if FAFSA EFC is $20k and their number is $30k, then how does that $10k difference relate to your equity? </p>
<p>BTW…have you tried the school’s NPC and see what that gives you?</p>
<p>I wish we had a chart. My kids’ schools have never been forthcoming about it but, looking at the numbers, the current school is <em>not</em> using it at all. In general, they use it but ours must be excluded based on income. </p>
<p>Have all your younger kids started college? I’ve never heard of a school that excluded it based on the presence of younger kids. That’s interesting because the questions ask nothing about house size.</p>
<p>One thing that happened to me was that they used a formula to value my house at significantly more than it is really worth (though they would not tell me how much they valued it at, but they did say it was more than the purchase price, and our house is currently worth less than we paid for it). But I was able to send in some documentation including our mortgage statement and property taxes (that’s what they asked for) and I also included a comparative market analysis from a real estate agent. They increased our grant aid by a few thousand dollars based on that change, putting it back in line with what I had expected it to be.</p>
<p>each year I send the statement from the county assessors office showing the current home valuation and statement from mortagage co showing how much is owed,u uas we live in area where values fell and despite owning home for 23 yrs its worth less thn we paid so we cant borrow against it even if we wanted to</p>
<p>If the school’s NPC is accurate, you can reverse engineer their formula. Just enter the same data two times but the second time increase the home equity by $100k. Do this a few times to accumulate enough data points to be able to graph it - there may be multiple break points in the formula (say 0% of equity up to $50k, 2% of equity from $50-100k, 4% of equity above $100k).</p>
<p>I have no idea how to appeal the home value however. If the county assessor says that the house has lost value since the original purchase, it would seem unethical for the school to use a higher number. The county has a vested interest (increased tax base) in assessing value as high as possible. Since the school’s numbers are all used for giving away their own money, the situation becomes awkward - I assume you cannot sue them for bad FA practices.</p>
<p>In many areas, tax assessments aren’t accurate indicators of what a house might sell for. They don’t need to be accurate relative to selling prices, just relative to other houses in the same county. (I believe that they basically add up all the assessed values, and then divide the total tax budget needed by that to determine the tax rate per dollar (or per thousand dollars) of assessed house value. So they don’t really gain anything by all the houses being assessed higher.)</p>
<p>the 568 group that the post refers to is a group of mostly top colleges that share the same philosophy about the need for consistent FA decisions between institutions:</p>
<p>“Section 568 of the Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA) of 1994 sets forth the conditions under which financial aid officers from different colleges and universities may establish common approaches for awarding non-federal, or institutional, student aid. The provision does not permit discussion or comparison of institutional aid awards for individual students.”</p>
<p>"In late 1998, an ad hoc group of college and university presidents met to discuss their shared belief in the primacy of need-based financial aid and their common concern about restoring public confidence in a financial aid system that aspires to be both understandable and fair. At that time, they committed to the development of a common methodology based on recommendations that had already been developed by participating institutions for further consideration "</p>
<p>here is a list of the colleges who are members of the 568 group</p>
<p>568 Presidents’ Group Member Institutions
Amherst College
Boston College
Claremont McKenna College
College of the Holy Cross
Columbia University
Cornell University
Dartmouth College
Davidson College
Duke University
Georgetown University
Grinnell College
Haverford College
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Middlebury College
Northwestern University
Pomona College
St. John’s College
Swarthmore College
University of Chicago
University of Notre Dame
University of Pennsylvania
Vanderbilt University
Wellesley College
Wesleyan University
Williams College</p>