The federal, FAFSA based EFC is misunderstood by many to mean that the EFC number represents all that the family will be expected to contribute to college expenses. For all but a very small number of schools, this is a absolutely not the case. A minority of schools (not “each school”) will either calculate an institutional EFC using something other than FAFSA (predominately CSS/Profile) to award institutional need-based aid, or these schools may award aid based on a subset of FAFSA data.