In the case where assets are high enough such that it can be estimated from the formula that the student won’t receive any aid (SAI > college cost), but income is well below $60K, would there be any reason to file FAFSA, assuming the targeted colleges do not require it for merit aid (US resident)?
I keep reading that “filing the FAFSA is easy and fast”, and keep getting emails from colleges offering FAFSA filing grants (!), but in our case it isn’t at all easy or fast, given the types of assets involved, so I’d rather not go through it unless it would have a downside/missed opportunity. Thank you!
When my student was at Texas A&M, FAFSA was required, to be eligible for MANY scholarships & awards. The scholarship application (yearly) is a general form; student isn’t applying for specific scholarships. If student is given a scholarship, but FAFSA isn’t on file…committee moves on and gives someone else the $.
My student didn’t qualify for any aid, but was awarded multiple merit scholarships & non merit awards. If she hadn’t submitted FAFSA, she would not have gotten the majority of her scholarships.
She’s now in grad school and submitted FAFSA again today-literally took <20 minutes.
When we sat down to do the FAFSA we realized that with our unusual assets it was definitely not going to be easy or fast. Since we were not going to qualify for financial aid and the schools being applied to did not require it for merit awards, we did not fill it out. We did look up whether the schools required it, since some do.
TAMU is one of the very few schools that require FAFSA for merit awards - the majority don’t. So check with the schools your kid is applying to.
But having said that, have you run the NPCs on school websites? The generous private schools use CSS and they may handle your finances differently. I have no personal experience with either form so I will defer to others who do, but my understanding is that the results can differ.
You can always file a FAFSA during the academic year if you would like your student to be able to take out the federally funded direct loan. If you have the resources to pay for college in full, what a wonderful gift to your children!
For these loans, the FAFSA does not need to be filed prior to the student starting college. The FAFSA can be filed during the academic year if these loans are wanted or needed.
I have known many people that ran everything and didn’t think they would do fafsa but did it anyway and received help. My theory is to apply and see what happens. Many were self employed, and had different situations. Some schools also raise their lower limits.
@DadOfJerseyGirl maybe it’s a Texas thing?
My student is now attending another state university in Texas currently, and her law school scholarship requires FAFSA to be on file.
All of her scholarships are merit based only, she does not qualify for any aid/assistance.
There are donors who prefer recipients to have financial need or to be from less privileged backgrounds. When schools have a lot of these restricted funds, they may require that students file a FAFSA. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the scholarships will only go to students with need or from less privileged backgrounds, but it does allow the school to honor restrictions for donors who included them, when possible. Schools prefer not to be strictly bound by donor requirements, and they do try to keep funds as unrestricted as possible, but no school is going to say no to donations. If a school knows that they’ll have plenty of students who qualify for scholarships who will file FAFSA, they won’t need to make everyone do it in order to be considered for aid - they know they will have enough students demonstrating need to comply with any donor restrictions on scholarships.
Thanks so much for the replies. A bit late in checking back after a crazy day that included a visit to the emergency vet. Fortunately puppy is fine now.
This is exactly our situation. It will take several hours in the course of days to pull all this info together. It is not easy or fast for us by any means. Trust me, otherwise we’d just do it- it would be faster than posting on this thread.
The college S25 is going to attend is a private LAC that does not require CSS and it does not require FAFSA for non-need-based merit scholarships. They reccomend using the official SAI calculator on the FAFSA website.
However, the estimated SAI calculator on the FAFSA website is inaccurate because it assumes that anyone with less than $60k in income is eligible and it ignores assets for those who file certain Form 1040 schedules. The more accurate calculator I found is this one, and it uses the appropriate SAI formula. And it is pretty clear we won’t qualify for aid.
Thank you for all the replies and insights. I’ll have another chat with my husband and think about it some more.
It sounds like you have complicated finances. Please please don’t think that third party net price calculators are going to be accurate for you either. They might not be.
Are you willing and able to fully fund college? If so, what a wonderful gift to your child! If that is the case, and you really feel the FAFSA is too complicated to complete, then don’t do it.
I will say, some folks have been surprised that they actually received some need based aid when they didn’t expect to. But really the choice is up to you…it sounds like this is not a requirement for your student!
