My name is Jeff Selingo. I am the author of a forthcoming book on college admissions and working on an article for the New York Times. I have received permission from College Confidential to post here. I am interested in interviewing parents of college-going students about financial-aid gapping. That’s the practice of when colleges give you substantially less in financial aid than your EFC shows you should receive. If your son or daughter is enrolled at a college right now and has been substantially gapped in their financial-aid package compared to your federal EFC, please email me at jeff@selingo.com. I’m looking for people willing to talk on the record and share their financial-aid letters.
You might clarify what you are really looking for. What do you think a “federal EFC” is?
Also responded to your identical thread in the Financial Aid forum.
Please be aware that FAFSA’s EFC does not provide students with an estimate of what any particular college might cost. Colleges both consider additional information (for example, often the CSS Profile) and each college has its own own formula for calculating need. Focusing on the FAFSA EFC number by itself is a common but often critical mistake.
Instead, students and their parents should complete the Net Price Calculator (“NPC”) located on each college’s financial aid website. The NPC will provide a financial aid estimate, including a breakdown of the types of aid included.
Qualifier: historically, some colleges’ NPCs have been less useful for more complex family financials due to a failure to include all the needed information. Complex situations may include owning a business, divorce, farm, and rental properties. It’s unclear how common it still is, in 2020, for NPCs to be inaccurate for these reasons, as many college NPCs may have caught up with these issues. A few colleges have a reputation for poor-quality calculators, such as NYU, though often families have no particular reason to know; it’s not as though colleges’ NPCs are subject to posted student reviews, as far as I am aware.
So, @choiceauthor , you may wish to clarify your question. Decide whether you asking:
(a) simply whether students’ actual offered packages differ from their FAFSA EFC i,* or
(b) whether students did not receive enough aid, or were not predicted to receive enough aid per the NPC, to attend because their income or assets did not allow for that under the college’s calculations (the commonly used term is “donut hole”), or
© the college’s Net Price Calculator was inaccurate (perhaps for one of the above-mentioned situations such as divorce or owning a business).
The OP seems like he should know better than to frame this so simplistically.
https://jeffselingo.com/, or is this just an ad?
Moderator’s Note:
The OP has been vetted and approved to have posts in both forums.
The federal EFC generated by the FAFSA is used to determine Pell Grant eligibilty. It’s not the amount families should expect to have to pay for any particular school. An estimate of that number can be generated by each school’s Net Price Calculator, but those aren’t accurate for divorced parents or business owners. And the information entered has to be accurate or the output won’t be.
OP - Is your question about aid for freshman year, or is it about freshman aid being better than aid in future years?
The NPC is also unreliable. I’m looking for families who had substantial amounts of “unmet need,” enrolled anyway, and how they filled the gap.
Agree with the above posters. More clarification is needed.
As noted above, FAFSA is used to determine Pell eligibility and gain access to Federal Direct Student loans. The FAFSA EFC (assuming you mean that by your term ‘federal EFC’), should be considered the minimum a student will be expected to pay.
For FAFSA only schools, there are not many (if any?) that meet full need…so, many students are gapped. Some FAFSA only schools might meet full need for select students that they really want to attend.
For CSS Profile schools (mostly privates, some of which meet full need but most don’t), the greater financial detail almost always leads to a higher EFC than one’s FAFSA EFC. Profile schools also require FAFSA, for the reasons stated above.
It is critical that students run each school’s net price calculator to get an estimate of what that school will cost. Of course, some NPCs are less than accurate, outdated and/or don’t include merit aid.
Post to the folks on the NYU forum. That is ground zero for gapping.
The list of colleges that gap is long, because most schools don’t meet full need. NYU is but one example. Look at the thread from the recent BU student accepted ED under BU’s new ‘affordable BU’ initiative. And many others, we see it every year.
Also look at FAFSA only schools like many state flagships and you will see they gap as well. Hello UIUC.
It’s still not clear whether you are referring to actual aid packages that were less than the NPC estimate (an important issue by itself), or whether the actual aid package simply was not enough but was nonetheless in line with the NPC and the student decided to apply anyway, knowing the college was not likely to be affordable, or as is unfortunately very common, the student and family were unaware that NPCs existed and relied on the misnomer of the FAFSA EFC.
Gap filling would typically involve parent loans or merit scholarships. Parent loans should be a cause for at least some hesitation and evaluation of whether attending may be a potentially unwise financial choice. Merit is an uncertain proposition for many colleges, with the exception of some large publics that publish automatic merit charts or have merit calculators, but may be worth the try for those students who have high academic stats compared to the students enrolled at the college (these are published, if you aren’t aware).
Consider whether there might be a trend of greater numbers of students looking to their in-state public options and/or looking to those schools with significant auto merit, rather than go the parent loan route. (Easy example for auto merit is Bama but there are several others.)
Also consider that you may have difficulty defining “gapping” objectively. Colleges expect families to pull from both current earnings and saved assets, not one or the other. How do you decide whether a student was actually gapped, if the package looks like the NPC estimate, and the package does not include any loans greater than federal student loans? Or are you letting the students/families determine that they could not afford what the college calculated they could afford? (See the can of worms?) Or are you merely looking for evidence of colleges that include parent loans to fill some amount of the calculated need in their “financial aid” packages? That would probably be the most straightforward evidence of gapping.
For simple family finances, the NPC should be an accurate estimate of the what the actual package will look like, for many colleges, though again the exceptions to that are an issue.
Moderator’s Note
The OP has been approved to have two threads going on the same topic to get more input.
So are you looking for folks who had aid awards that were less than what the NPC indicated but let their kids enroll anyway?
NYU has already been referred to above, it’s NPC calculator is very simplistic and often wildly off. This can probably be researched objectively by looking at the questions it asks vs those asked on other college NPC websites.
Also, “gapping” might be differently defined depending on whether the college concerned claims to meet full need, or whether (hello NYU again!) it explicitly tells you it doesn’t.
“Meet need” claims depend on the definition of “need”. For example, both Yale and USC claim to “meet need”, but they define “need” differently, which can give very different net prices for the same financial information.
What is the point of the piece? Outrage or education?
Perhaps the piece would be most helpful if it made these points:
- FAFSA EFC determines federal aid like Pell grants.
- Colleges may, and often do, calculate EFC for their own aid differently from the FAFSA EFC (and other colleges). They may also use additional information beyond the FAFSA information. They may also have different policies regarding divorced parents, whether the student is considered independent for college financial aid, etc. compared to federal aid policy (and other colleges).
- Obviously, "need" depends on the college's EFC calculation. A college's definition of "need" may not be the same as what the student and family think that they need.
- Most colleges do not claim to "meet need", or may do so for only a subset of students.
- Using the net price calculator for each college before applying is the best way to estimate costs. But one has to be careful if the parents are divorced and the college wants both of their finances (ex-spouses often do not want to share finances with each other), or there is significant non-W-2 revenue or income.
Add to reply #18:
- Colleges also typically expect a student self help contribution of federal direct loan, part time and/or summer work earnings (college may offer work study), or both. The amount of such student self help contribution varies between different colleges.
- Net price includes expected parent contribution, expected student self help contribution, and unmet need. It is equal to list price minus grants and scholarships (not loans or work study).
- Merit scholarships may affect financial aid differently at different colleges. Some may replace unmet need and student self help contribution first before replacing grants. But others may replace college grants first. Usually, expected parent contribution is replaced last.
Are you considering subsidized loans as part of aid or part of the gap? To me, loans should not be part of the picture of how a school meets need, but often loans are indeed part of a financial aid package.
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