Special circumstances refers to anything in the applicant’s financial situation that is not reflected on the FAFSA or CSS Profile. The Profile has an actual space for applicants to detail special circumstances. For FAFSA schools, applicants may have to appeal their aid award and go through the Professional Judgment (PJ) process. If this might apply to you, you should understand…
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CSS PROFILE
This is a big topic so for today I’m going to focus on general rules. Keep in mind the FAFSA rules are different from the CSS Profile rules; below is FAFSA only. The custodial parent for the FAFSA can be different than the custodial parent in the divorce decree and/or different from who claims the student as a dependent on…
Step 1 in figuring out how to pay for college is estimating your EFC. You can use the FAFSA4caster, or the more detailed EFC Formula Guide (note that’s for 2018-2019; the 2019-2020 version should be released this month). But EFC is just a starting point: schools aren’t required to meet your need, and they certainly aren’t required to meet it…
On our recent college odyssey, we heard about a lot of need-blind admissions policies, and no loan/100% of need met financial aid policies. These are mostly good things but perhaps not as good as they sound on the surface, so it’s worth unpacking them.
With the change to prior-prior tax year reporting on the FAFSA and CSS PROFILE, it seems that keeping track of what data dates pertain to what is becoming increasingly complicated. This table summarizes the relevant years or dates for each school year. School Year 2018-2019 2019-2020 2020-2021 2021-2022 2022-2023 2023-2024 2024-2025 FAFSA/ PROFILE Income Year 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020…