Correct on income.
So I actually called the FAFSA HOTLINE… after walking through a horrible robotic voice interface with obvious glitches, I finally got to a Account Representative. Would have saved myself a bunch of headache by just saying “Account Representative” in the first place. I ended up with a very helpful lady on the phone.
She looked through my account(s) and verified that my daughters are properly connected to me. She told me that she sees this a lot actually, it is not an automatic thing that just because you have a second child that your EFC is supposed to go down. My first daughter only has one school in her FAFSA. My second has 20 schools. She said that the schools you apply to also has an effect on your EFC.
This I don’t understand as it should not matter what schools you are applying for… what you can afford is what you can afford, the EFC is what you can afford, the schools should not matter. Besides if your list of 10 or 20 schools will have cheaper and very expensive on that list. Was she blowing smoke up my tailpipe or was that just bad information??
The school you apply to has no effect on your FAFSA EFC. It could have an effect on what you’re expected to pay using a net price calculator
This is not really right unless the students have enough assets of their own. However, in the old days, the max EFC was $99k, so during those times, a wealthy family could find that they have a $99k EFC with one in college, and a $99k EFC with 2 in college.