NCP confidentiality

Paying for College
1

(Disclaimer: I have already fully disclosed my own and my wife’s income on the CSS NCP Profile.)

I understand that FAFSA, CSS Profile, and CSS NCP Profile information are supposed to be kept confidential; divorced parents are not supposed to be able to get information of each other’s finances, and that they are required to assure and ensure such confidentiality because the parents would not be willing to share any information at all otherwise.

However, every school will send out a financial aid analysis showing the cost of attendance, the school’s applied merit (scholarship) and non-merit (grants) -based aid, leaving a bottom line family contribution. Do both parents get to see this analysis?

Does it further break down the contribution according to how much money they expect each parent to contribute? Given how litigious my ex is, I was very reluctant to provide any information if they even might have disclosed that much to her (how much they calculate I ‘should’ contribute). (Hell, I was reluctant to buy my house a few years ago because the sale would be a matter of public record, and the ex has lived only in rentals for well over a decade now.)

Not providing the information is an invitation for the ex to sue, alleging one is concealing income to the child’s detriment.

They are well aware they cannot compel either parent to pay anything, so it is clearly in the schools’ best interest to avoid anything that would trigger the parents spending the money that the school covets on legal fees.

How do they provide any bottom line estimates, without setting off the litigation machine?
How do they allocate the family contribution without revealing each parent’s finances to the other?

2

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Do both parents get to see this analysis?
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Certainly a NCP could demand to see the results before paying. After all, the CP could lie and say, “the family contribution is $50k, so your half is $25k”, when really the total amount is $30k but the CP doesn’t want to pay much.

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How do they allocate the family contribution without revealing each parent’s finances to the other?
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Some schools do not separate it out, so they just give a big number and the two households then “fight it out”…which is crazy. There should be a breakdown…CP contribution, NCP contribution. But, then that would also “suggest” to the other household the affluence of the other household.

What else can a school do?

YOUR child is asking it for money. the school is no relation to your child and owes your child nothing.

3

The question was supposed to be along the lines of, “How can/do the schools analyze both parents’ incomes and arrive at an expected contribution, and release that result, without setting off new conflict that would keep the child from attending that school?”

What a school could do is follow the example of the public schools and simply use the household/FAFSA information. Whoever is actually a parent in the household and raising the child gets the bill.

Or maybe divide it up according to the number of nights the child stayed with each parent in the previous year.

Treat people like parents instead of ATMs - it’s worth trying.

Long term, schools (at least, public schools) could actually get fully funded and provide tuition-free education to all residents, because the graduates and research the schools produce is a public good that we all benefit from.

The question is how do those schools that DO NOT do what they could, avoid causing further problems?

4

It isn’t the business of colleges to “avoid causing further problems”. If it happens, it happens. Surely all parties involved already know whether money is an issue. The real problem is that too many CPs and kids aren’t savvy enough to make certain that there is at least one place that will be affordable without any help from the NCP on their list.

Even if the college distributes the cost based on the number of seconds in a year that a student spends with each parent, and the financials of each of those parents, there still is no guarantee whatsoever that even parents who are ready, willing, and able to participate in paying for their kid’s education will find any given aid package to be an affordable one.

5

FCCDad, because PROFILE schools do things differently from each other, it’s difficult to come up with the way any given school handles this. The bottom line is that your daughter and your ex will be able to figure out what your expected contribution is going to be. It’s a matter of simple math. The Cost of Attendance is public information and the tuition, fees, room, board and other direct billed items will be listed. Your ex will get what she is expected to pay, and the financial aid award will be listed. Whether that aid will be broken down between the two households on a pro rata basis is an individual thing; that is often done, so that though your net contribution can be calculated out, one cannot break down what you are required to pay out of pocket and how that amount was reduced by financial aid Your expected contribution will not be shared with your ex as the school is prohibited from sharing your parent, income, financial info with her.

At a number of schools the NCP is not hit as hard as the custodial parent in terms of contribution.

Be aware that your daughter may contact the fin aid office to request a breakdown of the calculated contribution for the custodial and non-custodial parent,and unless you specifically state that the info is NOT to be provided to her, it will be given as she is considered responsible for getting the money to the school from both parents.

I suggest you call the fin aid offices of each school involved and ask exactly how they present the awards and how much or how little info is on them.

Are you responsible by decree or state law for payment of your daughter’s college costs? In some states, child support ends on the child’s 18th birthday or upon high school graduation unless it is stated in the divorce decree as otherwise.

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Most colleges give a family comtribution…even for families where the parents are divorced. It is up to the families to work out where the money will actually come from. Most colleges do not get involved in that.

7

Thumper, some colleges do break down the contribution by each parent when there is a NCP involved as well as the student contribution. I’ve seen this. EIther parent or both or neither can decline to pay his/her share for any reason. How that can figure into a law suit, I don’t know. I’ve known many NCPs refuse to fill out the PROFILE forms because they do not want to pay anything and will not be paying anything and feel that the chances of getting sued for the amounts are greater than simply refusing to give out financial info and telling the kid that $X will be contributed per year and that’s that. In some cases, it’s pretty clear that the NCP would get hit for the entire bill. Sometimes not so clear, depending on the school’s NCP formula.

8

Cpte. Read my post again. I said MOST, not ALL. So yes…that would mean some colleges do break down the contributions.

But even those that do honestly do NOT care how the family makes those payments.

If a parent refused to pay, this would be a civil suit between the parties, and would have nothing to do with the college. Just like it would be a civil court ruling if a custodial parent sought additional money for college costs. Again…nothing to do with the college.

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I agree that the school doesn’t care who pays what. I don’t know what % of PROFILE schools will break down the contributions, but they are not supposed to release one parent’s info to the other, and I thought that the expected contribution from each parent was not shown either. BUt the info IS avallable to the student if s/he so requests it unless the parent forbids the school from releasing the info to the student. Whether it is MOST or SOME, that do breakdowns and what is in such breakdowns, I have no idea.

Looking at some college fin aid pages about NPC confidentiality, they out and out say the school is not permitted to release the info for each parent to the other. How much info is considered proprietary to each parent, I don’t know, as I’ve stated. But if one parent refuses to pay, the amount left unpaid would have to be given to the student so that the gap can be filled somehow.

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If one parent refuses to pay, that is not the college’s issue. The family would need to figure out where the additional money was going to come from. The school would not be responsible for funding the shortfall. The family would.

But this is the case with all families, not just families where the parents are divorced. The school gives a family contribution. Either the family determines it is affordable, and pays. Or they determine it is not affordable and find a different college option.

College will not release the non-custodial profile to the custodial parent. They will not release the custodial parent profile to the non-custodial parent. I suppose parents can extrapolate the other parent’s income by looking at the contribution the college sets for that parent. But really…my guess is most custodial parents have a ball park notion anyway.

11

We didn’t see any breakdown by NPC vs custodial parent from my kids’ schools (all private). It was indeed up to us to figure it out. I don’t know what the NPC numbers look like for my ex (I actually have a very good idea for his income, but no idea for his wife). I did have a conversation with my ex saying, “Look, here is what the net price calculator showed with just my info, and here is the FA package kid was offered.” I did not ask specifically ask him to pay the difference, but explained that the difference was likely due to his/his wife’s income and assets. He has (for D2, didn’t for D1 for various reasons) paid a pretty considerable amount of the difference. I am satisfied with this arrangement for D2.

12

I can tell you I didn’t receive a bill or breakdown from either of my kids’ school. They received them on their portals. My daughters also received letters about their merit or FA aid. Nothing to me at all, even to my daughter who was 17 through first semester.

13

What your daughter received, was shared with you, was it not? I don’t get get bills from my son’s school either. They go to him, but I want to see the breakdowns and check it over. I don’t just give him a check for the amount. We go over the costs carefully. But we also do not have NCP issues, so everything there is attributable to one household’s financials. Even though, we give our son a set amount, and he picks up the rest of the costs, I check over the billing. Though we’ve had not issues with this student, there have been times in the past, when there were disputed items, mistakes and I was able to catch them and have my student get them fixed. One time ,the issue could not be resolved by the student, and this old war horse had to get involved

14

There is a question in NCP Profile:
I1. Do you authorize the college to discuss the information collected on this form with the student applicant?

I assume the OP answered “No”
It is probably the only protection of NCP’s financial data.

15

Oh, my kids happily shared their portal access codes so I could pay! But I’m just saying nothing on a bill or even in the awards letter said anything about how the awards were calculated and it was very clear the STUDENT is expected to pay. Where the student gets that money from is up to the student.

I’m totally involved in the bills and keeping track of financial aid. One daughter has had no trouble and we (I) even found an extra scholarship that was posted to her FA award page and her bill that we’d never received a letter about (knowing this daughter, there could have been an email she didn’t open or lost). The other daughter’s bill has been nothing but trouble. For a reason I really don’t understand, they post a charge, then back it off, then repost it (exactly the same). Sometimes this goes on for days. I think in July there were 4 posts/repost, and in Dec. only post/retract/post. I really don’t understand it. Then they post the awards, and sometimes those are backed out too. Anyway, this makes for a long and complicated bill, but it is only available online, on her portal. My kids have signed the release for me to get financial info, and I think I could set up my own online account for financial info, but nothing is sent.

The bill would show payments made, so if both parents have access to the portal, he/she could see that a payment of a certain amount was made and the date, and if he didn’t make it could assume the other parent did.

16

Okay. D1 has applied to 3 (that I know of) CSS NCP Profile schools, been admitted to 1 (so far), no word from any school anywhere yet about FA or need calculations.

The clause in the divorce decree is a bit complicated, but the way it works out is that no, there is no requirement for the parents to pay for a specific school, only to split the cost of an education after all available grants, scholarships, and loans are applied. (Yes, loans.) D1 qualifies for automatic full merit scholarships at several schools, so that would be splitting room/board/books. That means we could have been legally on the hook for some $5k each, max, which is clearly less than we each expect to provide. D1 is not interested in any of the free ride schools, though.

The CSS NCP Profile schools are likely to be much more expensive, and her mother is almost certainly neither able nor eager to pay half those schools’ out of pocket costs. She has promised D1 a specific dollar amount, which is just under 3/4 of what she’s been receiving in CS (a large amount for one child, I assure you).

The concern is that either D1’s mother, or D1, will assume I have money available, according to what some expensive private school decided they could get out of both parents combined without maybe bankrupting us. The concern is that D1 is trained to think that I am the one cruelly depriving her of (rather than mostly paying for) everything she enjoys, and that the FA calculation will reinforce that delusion.

If the number comes up more than I can afford, I theoretically should be able to just say, “No, I cannot afford that,” without her retorting, “They have all the information and they say that’s exactly what you CAN afford.” She doesn’t know my income or expenses, but she will see that bottom line out-of-pocket cost.

I hope those 3 schools do not break it down by parent, and just tell her the total. That seems like the least disruptive way for them to release the calculation result. I am glad to hear at least some schools do what they can to keep the info private. I would be inclined to not pay anything at all if a school let slip any private information; in fact, I’d consider suing them them for the trouble they caused instead.

And now, we play the waiting game.
(The waiting game s*cks! Let’s play Hungry Hungry Hippos!)

17

Anecdotal- a single example: The college communicates directly with the student and offers a parent portal IF AND ONLY IF the student signs a FERPA document. The parent portal can be set up to ONLY allow visibility into billing. The school does not share any analysis or process. The school presents the finances as credits and debits: Family Contribution, which includes (presumably) student savings as well as contributions calculated that others in the family can provide. WITH NO BREAKDOWN
Then line items for merit, scholarships, loans, work-study, etc. etc.

There is no information to shore or not share. They simply detail what the school is offering to the student, and it includes a single item for “family contribution.”

If they made a mistake in their analysis, a calculation error, a wrong assumption- there is absolutely NO transparency or opportunity to correct it. If you find out they may have made an error, you can read the tea leaves and appeal pointing them in that direction. But there is no transparency to their inputs or processes- just an offer from the school to the student.

It is up to you (all) to pay the family contribution or to appeal it. Not their movie.

18

If the school gives the student the total amount owed with no breakdown between parents, and each parent gets his/her breakdown, it’s not going to take a math genius to figure out what the breakdowns are. All it takes is one parent to share the info with the kid. Most parents will want the actual bill from the school; I do and would in a NCP situation as well.

The mom has told the student what she will pay, positioning it, I am sure, as what she can pay as a firm figure. So the student knows exactly what she can get from mom. But dad…well, has he come up with a firm number on what he can afford? Or is he hedging, for any number of reasons? Maybe it’s dependent on what transpires financially in the way of jobs and payments and other things.

FCCDad, are you going to be continuing with child support during college in addition to college cost, or is that obligation ending by the time your daughter goes to college? Do you know what you can afford to pay? Would you pay the amount that you were paying in child support towards college costs, say, if they are ending?

We told each of ours except the oldest, that we’d pay so much, and the rest they had to get. They all just took schools that cost more than what they could make up in cost off the table. Yeah, all but one soaked us for every bit of what we committed to pay, and we paid up without a murmur though they could have gone for close to nothing had they picked such choices. BUt we laid out what we could pay, and we stuck with it.

19

You are absolutely correct that it depends on other factors, especially on my wife’s work situation (she was unemployed and we drained our savings to pay bills when I filled out the CSS NCP Profile last fall. She has worked on a temp contract since then, but it is supposed to end soon; what I can commit to contributing depends on whether my wife has a regular job/income or not. If my wife isn’t working, then I cannot provide anything for college costs, I can’t even cover our household costs on my income alone.)

CS ends when D1 graduates HS. No, I do not know what I will be able to pay this fall. I hope to have a good idea (wife gets a job?) before D1 has to send in a deposit May 1. If my wife is working, I expect to be able to pay more than CS was. Not twice as much, but more than it was nonetheless.

If she chooses a public school in my state (she has applied to the best 3 here), then I will need to claim D1 as my dependent on my tax returns, as well, for her to maintain residency through me. Her mother is not going to like that, but it’s not negotiable; the OOS tuition surcharge is simply too expensive, and unnecessary.

20

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What a school could do is follow the example of the public schools and simply use the household/FAFSA information. Whoever is actually a parent in the household and raising the child gets the bill.


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ha!

If schools only used FAFSA then suddenly most of the full need schools would suddenly not be.

Many/most custodial parents are MOMs…whose household incomes are often lower than the bio dads’ household income. Excluding all those bio dads would just mean MORE GAPPING. The schools aren’t going to suddenly be willing to cough up more money (to pay for YOUR child).

you seem to think that suddenly schools are going to have more money to give away. no they won’t. They’ll just start gapping.

Plus, WE ALREADY see a lot of hanky panky with families lying about who the custodial parent is to get more aid. If schools did what you’re proposing, we’d just have more lying going on. all kids who have a NCP that lives in the area and earns less, would suddenly become the CP on paper.

Again…your child wants college money from an unrelated entity…but you’re shocked that your D wants college money from her “related entity” (her father). hmmmmmmmmmmmm