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Maybe if there IS a financial aid “package” it includes Work Study. If there is just a “here’s what you need to pay” statement, it doesn’t include anything buy the unsub and parent PLUS loans.</p>
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I know I should understand all this by now, but it seems everytime I think I do get it, I see another example that just doesn’t seem to fit with what I thought to be true.</p>
<p>Why would there be a gap (100% difference!) in her cost of attendance from her fafsa efc at a fafsa only school? I can see that happening at a school that uses CSS-Profile, but shouldn’t the fafsa EFC be pretty accurate for a fafsa only school?</p>
<p>I have done some of the financial aid calculators, but mostly for the meets 100% of need schools. Except at schools where merit is guaranteed for certain things, I guess there is really no way to know how merit aid might benefit you until you apply and (hopefully) get a financial aid packet?</p>
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<p>Because MOST colleges do not even pretend to meet full need! </p>
<p>And certainly the FAFSA only colleges do not make that promise. The whole point of the CSS Profile is to enable colleges who claim to meet “full need” to gather more money about family resources, so as to avoid giving out more aid dollars than they have to. </p>
<p>FAFSA EFC established federal aid eligibility. That’s it. My daughter got a partial Pell Grant her freshman year, a work study grant, and the full allotment of subsidized Stafford loans.</p>
<p>shoboemom-- I can give an example of high-end merit aid at a full-need school. I applied to Rice this past year and was awarded 25k/yr in merit aid. My family’s FAFSA EFC is just under 10k; Rice calculated it at 14k (I’m assuming because of home equity). My FA package from Rice was preferentially packaged (as opposed to that of my friends’) in that I was not packaged work-study (they just gave me that need-based money instead). </p>
<p>They took the COA (52k) subtracted the merit aid (25k) and then gave another 13k in institutional need-based money to meet my family’s calculated need. But again, this was a full-need school, so my need was going to be ‘met’ regardless of whether it came from the merit pot or the need pot.</p>
<p>Case Western, for example, uses both the FAFSA and Profile and meets about 88% of need. I was given a 30.5k merit scholarship, and then an additional 1.5k in grant, need-based aid. My package then included work-study, and then the rest was ‘met’ with loans (Stafford, Perkins, and Parent PLUS). It’s entirely possible that without the merit money, some of that would have been replaced with FA money, but a lot of that would probably roll into loans instead.</p>