Random FAFSA correction made by college not yet attending?

D117 is a senior applying to colleges and we don’t even have all of her results back but I just got an email that some college made a correction to her FAFSA. We used the DRT and the change is not processed yet so how can I find out what school did it and why?

I remember reading here about this happening to others but in most cases it turned out to be an error on the college’s part or even one silly correction like a rounding error of 399 not rounded to 400 on income. Our taxes are straight forward, no rounding errors and we used the same information for our S who is already in college and they didn’t make any changes.

I’m really nervous about a college making a change now because we have already received some great financial aid packages and I would guess if she gets into any other schools, they will also be putting packages together. I don’t think a college should be able to do this without at least emailing D about a change and WHY it was made!

@kelsmom Do you have any ideas of what we should do?

Thanks in advance!

It may not be a numbers change. Colleges can make other changes too. DD’s added the amount of student loans already taken, which appears on the bottom of the SAR. I know your daughter is not yet in school, but it could be a change to type of housing or an address or something that has nothing to do with the financial figures.

Thanks for your reply, @twoinanddone I was able to log in and it says change was made today but I didn’t see any thing different at all. It would have been nice to see the EFC go down, haha.

If I understand how this works, whatever the change the random college made now goes to all her other colleges, right? That’s annoying as I thought we had everything completed months ago and hope the colleges don’t throw out her apps because they now have extra work to figure out what was changed at this late date! Just kidding but I still think that they should be required to say WHAT college made the change and what it was, at least to us. If I didn’t have CC, I would get excited thinking a college is looking closely at her application but at least, we know for a fact that financial aid and admissions are entirely two different things.

If we ever figure it out, I’ll come back and update. Thanks again.

I did find this older post from Kelsmom about this issue: "… Did you submit, then change schools, then submit again? If so, and a school from the first set of schools made a change, then you will see those schools again as the active transaction in your account (but the second set of schools will still see only their info, not the newest info). If there is no change in any of the information … compare it to the FIRST FAFSA you submitted … then whatever was done was something that made no difference to anything (and therefore doesn’t matter). "

I logged back into her FAFSA again and found that it now has her first list of schools listed as Kelsmom says above so we can narrow down what college made the change. The first batch of schools was really small, too, as they were her early apps.

I don’t know if that really is helpful in anyway but at first, when I realized it was the first batch of schools, I was worried that the current acceptances that have already sent her finaid packages from a later FAFSA batch would maybe make a change, too. According to above, they won’t even see the change because they were not in that first batch so yay, that’s somewhat comforting.