Sorry…not enough information. These schools that guarantee to meet 100% of need for all do,so using their own formulas.
Are you self employed or a business owner?
Did you include your pretax retirement account contributions when you were doing the NPC? Some folks forget that amount and it can add substantially to the income schools use,
How much was the difference between the award and the NPC? $5000, or $50,000? Many of these schools expect a student contribution too...which is NOT unreasonable.
You claim you are trying to help others. You really are NOT since you haven't put the school that you feel short changed YOU. How much help is it to know that some college, somewhere didn't meet the need as the family expected...with NO additional information? NONE.
Re: this
Not exactly. When you have more than one sibling in college, your overall family contribution for EACH kid will be less. Neither will have a zero EFC. Say your EFC with one was $30,000, then with two, your FAFSA EFC will be about $15,000 EACH when both are enrolled concurrently.
For Profile schools (and the schools that meet full need for all use the Profile except Princeton and Chicago), each kid would have a family contribution of 60%…so in my example…it would be $18,000 per kid…or so assuming they both went to schools that meet full need for all.
To be honest, it has been noted here more than one time that the net costs for schools,that meet full need can vary by $10,000 or MORE. This is because of the variation in their formulas, and how they calculate need based aid.
Bottom line…if the finances don’t work out…you choose another school.
I hear that you are venting your fristration…but it is what it is.
And for the record, the NPCs give an estimate of your net cost. The actual award is what really matters.
OP, you appear to have a fundamental misunderstanding about how need-based financial aid is calculated among the many schools that offer such aid.
First: pretty much every school has their own method for determining how much institutional need-based aid any particular student will be offered. Therefore, it shouldn’t be a surprise to you or anyone else that different schools will have different offers for the same applicant.
Second: “your financials” is absolutely relevant to this process. Schools that may appear to be very similar may have drastically different need-based financial aid formulas that generate need-based offers that are thousands of dollars apart. For example, school A may completely ignore primary home equity in their formula, while school B may consider all of the primary home equity. If the applicant’s parents have hundreds of thousands of dollars in home equity, this alone will lead to a much different offer between school A and school B. “Your financials” are the key to the whole process.
Third: in several of your posts, you have asked others to identify schools and provide details about experiences that might be similar to yours, and yet you have named no schools and provided no details. You need to go first. And don’t leave out the financials.
@ClarinetDad16 Please read the requirements for University of Alabama merit aid and related threads here on CC. I also stated most not all and I never stated it was automatic.
In which case, I fail to see the point of this thread, and so am closing. If another user wants to come along and start a thread looking for schools that meet 100% demonstrated need and wants to share data, feel free. Otherwise, this thread is just one big circular discussion.