On the CSS Profile there is a line that asks for the student’s interest from investments. The real value was $2. By mistake, I put $2,925. There should have been so many red flags alerting the financial aid office that the value was wrong:
You could not use the 1040EZ if the value is greater than $1,500.
He does not show assets that could possibly generate so much interest.
The FAFSA was automatically transferred and should not have shown the mistake.
I have emailed the financial aid office and sent them his tax return showing the correct value.
This is such a huge difference, I’m not sure what I’m going to do if it is not corrected. Needless to say, I was counting on that $20K value.
Does anyone have any experience if schools correct financial aid offers when such a mistake is made?
Can you go into FA and ask them to revise it? If you have proof that the investment is $2 instead of that large amount I don’t see why they can’t just readjust it.
If the college promises to meet full need, they should be willing to make corrections and adjust your financial aid if there has been an error in data entry. I’m guessing that $2925 was the total value of the student’s bank or brokerage account, rather than interest … so I’d think that could be an easy mistake to make. I’d suggest that you call the financial aid office and ask to review the award with a financial aid rep, to determine whether that is the source of the error. You might be asked for documentation – for example, copies of account statements— but that should easy for you to get.
However it could also be that the error was caught or corrected for, and that the change in aid is due to another reason… so the only way to find out is to talk to the people in the financial aid office. An increase of $3000 in income would not result in a change of $20K on the financial aid award, and I doubt that most colleges would override FAFSA data by making projections based on interest ---- so there definitely could be other reasons – such as changes in parental income or enrollment status of college-age siblings.
I spoke to someone earlier in the week and they said they would take a look. He left me a phone message that it was due to the interest. I imagine it affected the financial aid so much because they thought there is some investment behind it that is large and will generate so much interest. The mistake was I entered line 1 from 1040EZ (income) when it asked me to enter line 2 (interest).
Try to schedule a phone appointment where you can go over the award together – I always found that to be the most efficient way of dealing with things.
I can see the possibility of a college projecting out asset value based on interest, but it’s a dumb thing to do because very often college students may be receiving interests from long-term bonds they have cashed in. It’s common enough that families use savings bonds or zero coupon bonds as savings vehicles for kids-- and of course once the bond is cashed in, the underlying asset is gone.
So I got an email today that said that the representative would talk with the financial aid administrators and I will speak to him next week about my next steps. Not exactly sure what that means, but it does sound hopeful.
So it sounds like the school has a procedure to correct information on the CSS Profile. I have a feeling this is going to take a while (a few weeks at least). Not sure what to do if the semester bill is due and this isn’t cleared up. I also wonder if the award will be the same as if I hadn’t made the mistake. Still get can’t get my arms around the fact that interest of $2925 made such a large difference in the aid. This is a meets full need college.
I’d ask the billing department what to do if the bill is due and there is no credit from the FA dept. We had that issue for my daughter this summer and I went ahead and paid the bill on a credit card. Thought she’d receive the $$ by the time the bill was due but no, so I paid the credit card. Also, we’d paid 2/3 of the bill at summer registration but then she added a class so another 1/3 was due. I paid that when it was due too.
Of course, it wasn’t $20k, only $3k. I couldn’t have paid a $20k bill.
It does seem strange that your child having $3k in unearned income would cause a $20k change in financial aid. Maybe there was also another calculating error. I don’t think they’d look through the tax return and try to figure out what kind of investment she would have needed to generate that $3k. I think they’d just take it at face value, that she had $3k in unearned income. It could have been given to her, cashed in an IRA. Lots of reason.
Did you previously qualify for either auto $0 EFC or the simplified needs test? If so…was your second qualifier using the 1040 A or 1040EZ form? If so…that might be part of the issue.
Have YOU checked each line of your Profile to see if there is possibly another error on it…an entry that is higher than it should be?
It would be about $10K incorrect for the Fall semester. It would be difficult to pay but I cold figure it out.
I Spoke to them today and asked the question about how $3K interest could cause such a change in financial aid. His response was he looked at all the numbers comparing them to the previous year and that was the only one that stuck out. He said it was rare to see such a high amount of interest for a student. It would have to be a pretty large asset to generate $3K of interest.
No, we did not qualify for the$0 EFC the previous year.
Today I double checked every line and believe everything else is corect. I even compared it to the previous year’s Profile. The first question in this year’s child income section is about interest. The first question the previous year is AGI. I remember at the time I had double checked my answers from this year to last year. No wonder I didn’t see that one.
It took a month, but they re-did the aid and it is now as I expected. The process was slow, but everyone was nice.
They only correction made was the one line I identified above where interest was overstated by $2,925 (I entered the total income instead of interest).