CSS Profile for Divorced Parents

[ucbalumnus]

@Polipotamus

That cannot happen. Why? Because the documentation (eg. an IRA Form 1040) uploaded by parents and students is static; from the Student Portal, they can only read or view it as a PDF or jpeg. Meanwhile, the data from the 1040 (for example) is extracted from the PDF, etc., placed into a data file, and then sent to each of the financial aid offices at the applicant’s schools.

Reverse engineering can be done without access to the other parent’s financial documentation.

For example, if one parent know his/her own finances and the student’s financial aid package, it should not be difficult to make a reasonable guess at the other parent’s finances by putting in the one parent’s known finances and guesses of the other parent’s finances in the college’s net price calculator until the one parent finds a guess that produces a net price calculator result similar to the student’s financial aid package.

Of course, net price calculators may not be that precise, and there may be various combinations of income and assets that yield the same financial aid package, but reverse engineering at least ranges of the other parent’s finances is doable even when the other parent’s financial documentation are kept private.