For those who understand EFC calculations. It should be pretty obvious that a parent with 24K income and student with 6K effective income should result in close to 0 EFC.
The only way for EFC to be > 2500 is for student income to be much higher.
This seems to be a mystery, my daughter will work with fafsa and the finaid office.
I promise to come back and unravel it for all who are helping.
I basically suspect the following:
1 - coop income in line 44f not getting subtracted before being fed to EFC calculations.
maybe they dont expect total income < allowances when regular income is above a certain threshold, and it is erroring out. I know my daughter said something looked wierd in 44f, like it showed the 10k on the SAR, but seemed ambiguous while on the website. Also as soon as she submitted the fafsa, it did not give her an efc, it gave the following message:
"Estimated Expected Family Contribution (EFC)=
We cannot calculate an Expected Family Contribution (EFC) until your application is processed."
But then a few days later the SAR came back with the high EFC.
I used the spreadsheet that was posted here
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/2027522-fafsa-spreadsheet-for-dependent-students.html#latest
It shows EFC of almost zero, with the correct input data.
If I zero out coop earnings, i get exactly what the FAFSA SAR shows.