<p>or more likely, contract this function out). </p>
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<p>Contracting things out takes money. Just so y’all know, every penny spent is a penny not available to award to students.</p>
<p>I would expect schools to back test their calculators for accuracy to check that previous years’ input produced the actual awards. A few hundred, at least, test cases should be enough to get reasonably close.</p>
<p>Just brief clarity on the “legal guardianship” issue (I seem to have a LOT of those students this year). Yes, when they have been in legal guardianship, they qualify as Independent students. So that makes that part of the FAFSA process easy.</p>
<p>Some of them have not been selected for verification. So they will in all likelihood not have any more paperwork to chase–this year.</p>
<p>A few of them HAVE been selected for verification. This can also be rather easy (that is, presuming schools have actually already put their required, customized Verification forms on their websites–which many are still missing!). </p>
<p>BUT the problem is that several schools, private and state public schools, have asked for the actual document that states that they were or are in legal guardianship. Makes sense, since it would be rather easy to claim that as truth when it was not. And there’s the rub, my dears–as I posted earlier, the families I deal with are often not the most organized, that legal guardianship document is LONG gone, the courts have not computerized their older records, the kid has no memory when they were taken from mom/dad and handed over to grandma/auntie, and so forth. If the schools are sticklers, they insist on that legal guardianship paper, and will not do FA package for the potential student without it…sad. I have seen it happen. (And a kid like that often PARTICULARLY needs to go off into the different world of college).</p>
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<p>I hope in these cases that the college wd get it closer with time and experience. I also hope the feds would have some sort of oversight to watch this. The net price concept is like fair labeling, and there needs to be truth in labeling. If a product says no trans fat, I trust that there is no trans fat - maybe not the best example , but u get my drift. :)</p>
<p>Am I going to miss the posts of an entire generation, one by one landing on my “ignore” list as I stumble over the “wd” and “u” fad as if this were a texting venue? :(</p>
<p>My point is, it’s not possible to be “close” in many cases. At a large school, where the big scholarships will be balanced out by the nothing-but-Pell folks who waited until all the money was gone to apply. At a smaller school, though - one that practices enrollment management - it won’t be possible to give a “typical” estimate that is anything more than the bare-bones stuff (Pell, loans). If the feds punish schools for not being close (don’t see that happening, but IF), the schools will reevaluate their aid policies. If they end up going to all need-based only because scholarships skew things too much (unless they are “guaranteed,” in which case the result will be less money for more people - which defeats the purpose quite often), fewer middle-income-and-higher will see anything but loans. That’s just my two cents.</p>
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<p>In such cases is it possible to give a valid range? Here is the minimum you would get (probably 5500 in Stafford loans if not Pell eligible unless a school guarantees aid in certain other circumstances). Here is the maximum you could get (presumably COA minus FAFSA EFC or minus the school’s custom EFC, but could be less if a school knows they never give out more than $X to a certain student) and here’s a “typical” award for a student with your financial situation, YMMV.</p>
<p>Where this is most important, I think, is for schools that guarantee to meet “full demonstrated need” but give the student no idea what they may compute the student’s need to be. Presumably <em>that</em> at least could be computed with some accuracy? And in that case seeing how a typical aid package would break out in terms of grants/loans/etc. would be helpful. But even just knowing the number, the schools computed “EFC” for the family, would be a huge improvement over what we have today!</p>
<p>There’s a recent white paper available that explains the issues of using the free federal net price calculator template, building an NPC, or buying one from the third party provider. Several companies, such as Student Aid Services, the market leader, are building custom NPCs and others such as The College Board are selling self-serve templates.</p>
<p>The federal template calculators brevity is an advantage, but the inaccuracy that comes with that brevity is its biggest drawback. To determine dependency status, approximate
EFC and cost of attendance (COA) in the federal template calculator, students answer 10 questions or fewer. Brevity to this extreme leads to a high percentage of inaccurate aid
and net price estimates. The federal template calculator provides a relatively inaccurate net price estimation for most prospective students, most of the time. </p>
<p>A test of the federal template calculators EFC methodology on 145,000 actual dependent and independent students financial profiles found that 7 out of 10 students fell outside of the correct Federal Methodology (FM) EFC range, with an average discrepancy of $6,187.ii Even when the federal template calculator assigns a student to the correct EFC range, it can produce an inaccurate grant aid estimate because it uses need-based criteria to determine merit aid. (white paper at <a href=“http://www.studentaidservices.com%5B/url%5D”>www.studentaidservices.com</a>)</p>
<p>Here’s are links to several NPCs posted by public and private colleges:</p>
<p>Albright College <a href=“https://albright.studentaidcalculator.com/survey.aspx[/url]”>ClearCost;
<p>University of Arkansas <a href=“ClearCost”>ClearCost;
<p>Arcadia University <a href=“https://arcadia.studentaidcalculator.com/survey.aspx[/url]”>Unknown Address;
<p>NASFAA’s magazine Student Aid Transcript’s November issue is all about NPCs and the organization has a thorough NPC resource page.</p>
<p>Also, the Department of Education’s Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance is conducting a public hearing about on net price calculators and nontraditional students March 17 from 9am-5pm at the Four Points Sheraton in Washington, DC.</p>
<p>Thank you for posting that! Very interesting…and, as kelsmom predicted, the NPC’s are not as helpful as folks think they’re going to be!</p>
<p>Radio, public schools may ask for documentation when child is first registered. Have you asked the kid to speak to his/her GC to see if they can pull file to help with this.</p>
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<p>Why, then, wouldn’t the feds make the template longer in order to increase accuracy? After all, information, accurate information, is what is driving the NPC. If you’re not hitting accurate info, then you haven’t hit your target and you got to keep working it. I’d be quite willing to fill out a longer tool in order to get a price in a timely manner. In April , all at once, whenall the hard HS classes start coming to a close, and where there will be not that much time to add up the pluses and minuses before decision day on 5/1, we’ll finally find out how much the colleges will be.</p>
<p>As it is now, we are in a purgatory period now, january through April, where we cannot do detail visits and spend important time and energy getting info for a better decision til we get a price - AND an admission decision. One should only vet what you can afford. </p>
<p>So I assume the 145,000 students in the study were properly randomly selected including a mix of standard and non-standard cases? There was a mention of non traditional cases in hte post. I would hope the NPC could get at least the ‘typical case’ down pretty close.</p>
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<p>This does not seem like a reasonable thing to do. Why would the feds mix need based and merit based grant aid? Aren;t there definite rules governing the uses of each?</p>
<p>Collegeboard now has net price calculators for specific colleges. This is different from their other calculator. I’m sure the list will grow, but for now it is quite limited. </p>
<p>Claremont McKenna College
Dartmouth College
Jamestown College
Pomona College
Rice University
Union College
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Wake Forest University</p>
<p>[The</a> College Board’s Net Price Calculator](<a href=“College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools”>Net Price Calculator (NPC) - Education Professionals)</p>
<p>The one problem I see is that the costs for 2011-2012 are unknown until mid January at the earliest, which is well after most applications have already been submitted. Cost increases can vary by quite a bit. For 2011-2012 Princeton’s COA went up 1% while Yale’s COA was up 5.8%. There’s really no way around this problem though. It might be helpful if collegeboard indicated which year the costs are based upon.</p>
<p>Right - this is the calculator I mentioned a few pages back and when I used it to compare the calculator to what we are actually receiving from son’s university - it was quite accurate! I really think this is a step in the right direction.</p>
<p>In addition to agreeing with all these comments, I also hate faxing the tax forms and w-2’s to people in so many colleges that now have all our SSN#'s. Isn’t all that info on the FAFSA in the first place?</p>
<p>I always black out the SSN’s and banking info on the tax returns. I know I sure don’t need them when I verify … can’t imagine why a school would.</p>
<p>However … schools are very, very careful with applicant information. They don’t want your information being compromised any more than you do.</p>
<p>IDOC specifically requires SSNs to be added to the top of each document (even when they already appear on the document) so blacking them out isn’t an option for IDOC schools.</p>
<p>IDOC is paid to be very, very careful with protecting this information.</p>
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<p>Yes, but I assume they send it out without blacking out the SSNs to all of the schools on each student’s list. I know that they too will attempt to be very, very careful with our information, but I do feel a bit “vulnerable” having it so “out there”.</p>
<p>I’m not sure how IDOC processes information, but I assume it’s scanned into the computer and accessed that way. I could be wrong, but that makes the most sense to me.</p>
<p>We scan all documents into the computer where I work, and we shred the documents after scanning. Access to the documents via computer is limited to only those who legitimately have the need to view them.</p>
<p>If you’re smart enough to go to college, you should have the minimal brainpower it takes to comprehend the costs and financial aid options available. And for the Latino and lower-class students that the article mentions, they have no excuses considering they are the two groups that traditionally receive the most aid. There are mountains of information regarding loans, grants and scholarship, it just takes a simple google search and some phone calls. Just deciding not to apply for financial aid is a personal mistake, not the fault of the system.</p>