The logical place to report a student-owned 529 account is under student investments, as instructed by the most recent FAFSA currently available (2023-2024), unless the student must report parental information, in which case a student-owned 529 is reported as a parental investment.
There is no similar exception in the Profile instructions, at least there wasn’t the last time I saw a Profile form, which was several years ago. (Unfortunately, Profile is not made readily available online like FAFSA.) If you know that the Profile has been updated to include such an instruction, you can do us all a favor by educating us. Otherwise, again, the logical place on Profile to report a student-owned 529 account is in the student asset section as a student investment, unless the Profile instructions now explicitly direct that a student-owned 529 should or can be reported as a parental asset. A student-owned 529 account is not parental property in the legal sense, and while in many cases it may be controlled by a parent until the student owner/beneficiary reaches the legal age of majority and assumes control, it does not have to be controlled by a parent up until that time. When I last saw Profile, the relevant question in the parent asset section was “what is the total current market value of your parents’ investments? Do not include your parents’ home, business, farm, real estate, or retirement plans.” A 529 account owned by the student is not a parental investment.
My examples of Profile schools that don’t (or didn’t) treat student-owned 529 accounts as parental assets is as dated as my actual exposure to a Profile form, so individual school financial aid policies may have changed in the interim. What I did back then was call financial aid offices and ask. The information won’t be found on a college’s financial aid web page. I was given some favorable and some not-so-favorable answers. I also made it clear in the Profile Explanations/Special Circumstances section that $XX of the amount reported on line XX as a student investment was held in a student-owned 529 account, so that every school was aware and had a chance to exercise professional judgment, if they were so inclined.
Bottom Line: just because FAFSA treats a student-owned 529 account as a parental asset (assuming parental information must be reported) for the allocation of federal aid, don’t assume that Profile schools in distributing institutional need-based aid will operate the same way.