@BrooklynRye eventually we will be where you are now, 3 in college (but not yet!) and without the recruited anything. Although I allowed K1 to apply to OOS Publics, that was a mistake and fortunately K1 ended up choosing a top meets full needs school instead that was generous with aid. While K2 and K3 are not as strong academically as K1, they are close enough that I HOPE to get them both into meets full needs colleges. K2 has already been told that OOS publics are off the table (they only ones that might give K2 merit are too far away).
I am assuming your D1 is at an OOS public? and D2 is at an art school that does not promise to meet full need?
If they had both gone to the same school as S1 or a peer, would they have gotten similar packages or do you think he got a special deal? If your EFC is 15k per kid? Then giving you 52k leaves you with an EFC of 17k which is in line with the calculations or am I missing something?
@SeekingPam - Hi! Yes, D1 is at an OOS public and D2 will be at an art school that does not promise to meet full need. Neither D would stand a chance of admittance at S1’s school and, in any case, if anything at all, would not get anywhere near the deal S1 received, i.e., yes, he received a special deal. For S1’s school with a COA at around $72k, our projected need is $57k, so on its face the grant is directly in line with the calculations. However, no school does that other than when it is recruiting or where the applicant is relatively impoverished. Normally one would have to come up with the $10k in subsidized and unsubsidized loans plus financial aid, then chip in the EFC, and then pray to the gods that the college offers even a small percentage of the remainder in the form of a grant rather than additional loans.
@seekingpam - You know, you just taught me something I didn’t know. Thank you! Throughout this whole long process I was unaware that some colleges as a matter of policy do not use loans to meet financial aid. Wow! What a concept! Yes, S1’s school is one of these. Loans are not used to meet financial need. Thank you, Pam!
@BelknapPoint - Be precise when talking about “EFC.” The Expected Family Contribution is a term of art used by the Federal government and is solely generated by the completed FAFSA form. This is your one and only EFC. How the colleges adjust this number and meet your unique formulaic-perceived need does not change your EFC. It is merely a reflection on what basis and in what form a given college is prepared to offer “aid.” Remember also that the FAFSA goes into far less detail and breadth of one’s finances than does the CSS Profile. Your perceived ability to pay for the latter will almost always be greater than your FAFSA-generated EFC.
@BrooklynRye
Not true. Colleges can and do compute their own EFC, independent of the FAFSA EFC, either through information provided on Profile or through a school’s unique FA paperwork. So, it is quite possible for a student to have two EFCs: one calculated by FAFSA, and one calculated independently by the school through some other means. And yes, they are called the exact same thing: Expected Family Contribution (EFC).
I have two kids in college. They both have drastically different EFCs. One school is FAFSA only, while the other school meets need and also uses the profile. They also recalculated her EFC at my request based on a one time occurrence. The simple answer to the original question is that it may depend on the school.
I don’t want to split hairs or to make this anymore complicated for those inquiring about how the financial aid process and elements such as the EFC work. I think we are all on the same page in any case. However, THE EFC is calculated according to a formula established by law. It is a creation of the Federal government. Whether schools refer to their internal financial aid evaluation and calculations as an “EFC” or by any other name, it is NOT the same thing. In fact, not one of the schools to which any of my children applied, including Ivies, top public schools and dedicated art schools, referred to their evaluation as the “Expected Family Contribution.” The most common phrases used to describe the school’s evaluation are the “Institutional Number” or the “Internal Number.” However, as a practical matter, many schools do perform their own internal evaluation of need based on the CSS Profile which goes into much more depth than the FAFSA. Primarily, schools are looking for equity, e.g., a second home or a self-owned business, for a greater valuation.
@BrooklynRye - Not sure why this is important to you. It’s like getting worked up when a person calls a tissue a Kleenex or a bandage a Band-Aid. But FWIW my D’s school came close to call it an EFC, they split what they felt we could pay into two numbers they called “Family Contribution” and “Student Contribution”.
@ClaremontMom - The reason it is important to me, as well as the reason I feel it can be significant to people asking about the process, is because I think people seeking financial aid need to understand the different layers of the process so as to make the most informed decision. Early on in the process, when we first received our EFC from the FAFSA, we bought right in to the calculation that resulted in optimum need-based aid. We did not understand that each individual school would do its own, internal calculation based on additional criteria. We did not understand that, even that internal calculation would not guarantee us optimum aid under the college’s internal formula. In the end our aid packages were a long way from the FAFSA and substantially short of the internal number generated by each college. Whether someone calls a tissue a Kleenex or a snot rag, you are still receiving something with which to wipe your nose. Whether someone calls a bandage a Band-Aid or a boo-boo sticky, you are still receiving something to protect a wound. When someone refers to the formula by which need-based aid is calculated internally by each college as an "EFC,’ they are, in most cases not receiving anywhere near the amount they may be expecting. This was a rude awakening to us and I just sought to perhaps help others avoid the same pitfall.
When you use the finaid calculator it might not match the correct aid year. For FAFSA the parent asset protection amount is much lower this year than previous years. If the finaid calculator is based on a year before 2016-17 it might not be accurate.
I have found the collegeboard EFC calculator fairly accurate, but I only used the one for federal methodology and it did not figure my D’s contribution correctly when she had taxable scholarship income. But the parent contribution it calculated matched the one I got from running the EFC formula by hand.
Thanks very much for all the great responses everyone. I was distracted by real life for a couple of days, and wasn’t able to chime in, but I’ve learned a lot. I appreciate it.
This stuff is really confusing. On the question of how many different numbers can correctly be called your EFC, I would say that any number other than 0 is too high. It’s a ridiculous name that I’m sure leads many people to overestimate the amount of aid they’ll be getting.
“Meets full need” is no less confusing. It’s crazy that you have to get past these two ridiculously confusing ideas to get to what everyone really wants to know.
I found a list the other day of schools that meet full need without loans, but I can’t find it now. I think it was on the US News site somewhere.
That list was pretty short - like 15 colleges, and all of them were super selective. For me, “meets full need” is not the least bit interesting, because it can include huge loans, but the short list of schools that meet full need without loans is too exclusive. Does anyone know if I can build a list of schools that meet, say 90% or more of need without loans, using the SuperMatch feature on this site or a tool at another site?
It sounds like my need is going to be around 20K for each kid, so a school that meets 100% of need without loans would give me 20K, and a school that meets 90% of need without loans would give me 18K. Of course, 20K would be better, but I’d still be interested in schools that meet 90% of need without loans.
A related question, for the techies in the group - does anyone know if any of the college web sites, like college data, have any web services that you can use to build lists like the one I’m trying to build? I’m guessing no, because they probably want you to use the web site and see the ads.
This is good to know. The unfortunate thing is that the only private school on our list that doesn’t use the CSS is one of the ones at which we might have a good shot at merit aid. All the others use the CSS.
That’s good news. So if you manage to get past all the smoke and mirrors in the terminology that they use, and go straight to the NPC’s, you can get an honest answer.
You couldn’t know your need until you run the NPC for that school. If your EFC for that school is $20, they won’t meet that, they’ll expect you to pay at least that. If your EFC is $20k but the school COA is $60k, then your need is $40k. If the school’s COA is $70k, your need will go up to $50k.
@BrooklynRye, thanks for posting all of that detail in post #19. That’s a great example.
This line you wrote scares me. I understand that the EFC is not a good predictor of the aid you’ll receive,
but do you remember if the Net Prices given by the NPC’s were close to what you were eventually offered as a Net Price?
Our EFC on the NPC was very accurate, but we do not have anything such as divorce, remarriage, owning a business, etc. The NPC may not be as accurate with those things.
We found the NPC’s fairly accurate (some more than others) but we too have a straightforward situation.
Also you will find schools which meet need with minimal loans (only the subsidized student loan) and, of course, you could decline the loan. But again those that I know of are selective schools as well (my guess is they all are).
And as twoinanddone pointed out your “need” is going to be different at each school (even if your expected contribution is the same) based on its cost.
Sorry @WalknOnEggShells , I wish I had a more definitive answer. S1 received 100% need but he is an athletic recruit. D1 received a low percentage of demonstrated need, largely we assume because she is at an OSS. D2 60-70% of demonstrated need but again with a caveat that she will be at a dedicated art school. Starting with the FAFSA EFC as a baseline, the institutional numbers generated by each school varied tremendously. Not surprisingly the OSS had the greatest disparity with the federal EFC. But elite private schools, other than Ivies, were equally stingy. Small Liberal Arts schools were the worst! But whatever the federal, institutional or npc number, the school always has the prerogative to allocate more or less to your particular need.
Athletic recruits don’t receive need based aid. They can’t. If it is a D3 school, the school can recruit and then give need based aid under the same conditions it would give the money to other students, otherwise it is an athletic scholarship and against the rules.