@BrooklynRye by OSS do you mean Out of State school (OOS)?
@“Erin’s Dad” - Yes I mean out of state school…lol. @twoinanddone - Not sure what you are saying. Of course recruits can receive financial aid. Favoring them in terms of need based aid could be a violation of NCAA rules, but they are certainly as eligible as anyone else for need based aid. Perhaps I am misunderstanding…? For instance, the Ivies do not give Athletic Scholarships. If someone, recruit included, is a need-based aid candidate at Harvard or Yale, how do they get money from the school other than via financial aid?
A student at D1 or D2 school who has an athletic scholaship cannot accept need based aid from the institution. The athlete can accept it from federal or state grants, but not from the school. For a D3 school, you said your son receives aid because he was a recruited athlete. Athletes only receive the same aid as other student at a D3 school, not extra because of being an athlete. If he were at a school that didn’t meet 100% of need, he could get no more than another student just because he’s an athlete. Same, not more.
So then a student at an Ivy, a D1, who does not have an athletic scholarship (the Ivies don’t award them), CAN accept need based aid from the school. I never said my son was at a D3 school. He is actually at a D1. My point about him being a recruit above was just to differentiate him from a straightforward academic applicant.
The Ivy schools are special in that they award only financial aid and not athletic. They have an agreement with the NCAA to do this, but they agree to treat athletes like all other financial aid applicants. It is possible that a team could have more than the maximum number of players that would be allowed on another D1 team and ALL of them to be on 100% scholarship, but that’s a possibility the Ivy League and NCAA accepts (and is unlikely to happen). An Ivy can’t give a full scholarship to a woman tennis player unless that tennis player has demonstrated financial need, even though that player would have received a full scholarship from Florida or Duke or any other D1 school. Other full need D1 schools, like UVa and Stanford, have to follow the NCAA rules and can’t give need based aid and athletic aid to the same student without it counting against the athletic team maximum number of scholarships (so they don’t do that). The D3 and Ivy schools have agreed that when it comes to financial need, athletes will be treated like other applicants.
Whether an athlete at a non-Ivy D1 school, say Stanford, CAN accept a need based scholarship in lieu of an athletic one is complicated. There are rules about recruiting and walk ons and total number of scholarships. Otherwise a rich school like Stanford could just give out the max number of lacrosse or baseball scholarships and say everyone else on the team is on a financial need scholarship. That’s not fair to other schools that have limits on the number of athletic scholarships. Stanford can give 85 football scholarships just like all other D1 big schools, and have 35 walk ons. Financial aid to those walk ons is regulated because otherwise Stanford could just give 85 athletic scholarships and 30 financial need ones, and have every player fully covered, so basically giving 105 full athletic scholarships.
The schools who do get around it are the service academies. They have three and four times the ‘recruited’ players than other D1 teams. However, they can’t recruit the 330 pound linemen for their football teams either. Life is not always fair or even.
More specifically, and more correctly, the FAFSA EFC is calculated according to a formula established by law, and is a creation of the Federal government. The government’s purpose in doing so is to have a method to award federal financial aid. Whether or not a school wants to use this same formula to award institutional aid is completely up to the school. My experience has been that more selective schools, especially those that claim to meet 100% of demonstrated need, that have tens of millions of dollars of institutional aid to dispense each year, choose to use their own formulas that require a much more detailed look at family finances. And many of these schools use the term “EFC” even though the formula and number are different than what you get with FAFSA. Also, for those schools described above, what the family actually ends up paying is usually a lot closer to the school’s EFC number compared to what the family would pay at a school that bases everything off of the FAFSA EFC.
I don’t believe this to be true at the vast majority of meets-full-need schools. These schools generally have detailed and accurate NPCs that will show an institutional EFC that is pretty close to reality, as long as valid information was entered and the family financial situation is not unusual or overly complicated. However, at schools that gap or that include Parent Plus loans in their “aid” package, all bets are off.
My son is attending one of the pricey but meets full need without loans schools. We have a daughter who will be a senior next year. In our financial aid meeting they told us to expect that if she attends a school with a similar financial profile that my son’s grant aid will be expanded and rather than paying 100% of our EFC we would then start paying 60% of our EFC for each child. They say it’s not exactly half because they do expect that you know you will have 2 kids in college and have been saving something. If she ends up at an inexpensive school or gets a full ride they probably will not increase his grant aid. We were lucky that he got some merit aid in addition to the grant aid so we know we have his needs met with what we have saved which gives us a bit more flexibility if my daughter gets a less generous financial aid offer. Our EFC and NPC amounts were almost identical like within a few hundred dollars as was my son’s grant aid but our financial situation is very basic income and investments. Luckily they don’t consider home equity too.
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It should really be called MFC - Minimum Family Contribution.
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Ha! In some cases it can be the Monthly Family Contribution
Good one @mom2collegekids ! For some of these schools, it might as well be Monthly Family Contribution.
That’s how far off we are from being able to afford them 
@mom2collegekids & @WalknOnEggShells - Would love to see accurate statistics on the relative percentages of FAFSA-generated loans (e.g., subsidized and unsubsidized loans, Perkins, and federal work study) versus scholarship/merit grants made by the individual colleges. Schools always promote the concept that they meet all need and that a very high percentage of their students receive aid. I think we heard this expressed in one form or another at EVERY info session which we attended. I am willing to bet the house that the large majority of these students are only receiving federal loans and work study. The phrase “financial aid” as used by colleges makes me think of Fezzik saying to Vizzini in “Princess Bride” - “I don’t think that word means what you think it means…”
When I visited Carnegie Melon, the specifically said that they don’t take into consideration the tuition at the other school when two kids are in college at the same time. He went on to say that one kid could be at a community college and it is treated the same as if that kid was at an expensive private school. I know it’s just one school.
^^that is also how FAFSA treats it. Doesn’t matter what the tuition is or how much you are paying of it, two in college is two in college.
@twoinanddone - Curious as to why the fin aid forms ask not only how much the other colleges cost, but whether or not you are receiving any scholarships or aid for those…?
The FAFSA didn’t ask, or at least I don’t remember it asking, what the tuition was or what the grants/scholarships received was. I did have to verify to each school that there was another kid at another school, but that was all. I wouldn’t have even known the grants and scholarships in Feb when filling out the FAFSA as many weren’t awarded until June of that first year, and even now I never know the tuition and fees amount until the bill comes out in July.
If it asked, I don’t remember figuring it out (and it would have involved figuring it out as it is not just one number minus another number). One of my kids has almost her full costs covered, but the EFC for my other daughter doesn’t seem to consider that at all. The EFC for two in school is just half of what it would have been for one.
FAFSA doesn’t ask but CSS Profile does See my previous post #17.
@ClaremontMom - Should have been more specific. Yes, FAFSA does not ask about other schools, CSS does. So, back to my question in #52 – Why does CSS ask for this information if schools don’t count money at other schools against money you may get from them? As a practical matter you may genuinely not know. For instance, when doing CSS for D2 & S1, with D1 already in school, had no confirmed scholarships/aid. However, if either D2 or S1 were the child already in school and we were filling out CSS for the remainder, we would already know that D2 received substantial scholarship money or that S1 received substantial aid and would have to put it on the CSS…
CSS asks because some schools DO consider it. Which ones? You’ll have to ask.
Agree, it will be difficult to know when completing the CSS in the fall which school an applying senior will end up at and what the financial aid will be.
As previously explained, some Profile schools do look at the amount of aid (and therefore the net cost) that siblings receive from either their college of attendance or outside scholarships.
@BrooklynRye, thanks for post #38. I forgot to respond. it’s surprising that the LACs were so stingy. I guess it depends on which ones, but I thought a lot of them are pretty good with financial aid.
It’s unbelievable that it’s this complicated and this variable at different schools. Does anyone know if this is something you can get a straight and accurate answer about if you do call a school? For example, if we’re looking at 10 schools, and I call the Admissions office at all 10 schools, do you think I’ll get an answer I can bank on from each school, or will they say it depends on the situation?
In other words, is this the kind of thing that schools have a black and white policy on, or is it “holistic” 