| Financial aid people don't want to get into making value judgments about families spend money. Some might consider church donations to be "better" than, say, donations to a political candidate or animal shelter. Or than payments on a Lexus. Others might lump all of those items into the same category - income spent on non-essential things. So, colleges can't really look too hard at the categories of expense.
The inability of financial aid types to make any value judgments at all creates problems, too. In one sense, families that live under their means and salt away money for college are penalized at aid time compared to families that spend a lot and save little. (At the same time, most of the gnashing of teeth I've been hearing lately hasn't been from penalized savers, but rather from middle class families who found their income-based EFC was unaffordable without substantial college-fund savings.) |