And so on…there is one on every college website and it says it’s from the college board. I assumed the CSS profile is through the college board as well but apparently I’m wrong. Perhaps it only links to the College Board. Still, there must be some correlation because otherwise the NPC would be meaningless. I thought I was doing what I was supposed to do. The directions on the college websites say to do this to get an estimate. That’s what I did. Then I submitted the FAFSA, and then my ex and I submitted the CSS profile. The reason I asked my questions on here is because there are so many CC members who are experienced in various aspects of college admissions and financial aid.
Colleges using CSS Profile and the College Board NPC could make the NPC quite accurate.
However, for divorced parent situations at colleges that require both parents’ finances, whoever uses the NPC needs to have correct and accurate information for both parents’ finances to put into the NPC. Unless they trust each other fully with their finances (unlikely), or they can have a trusted-by-both neutral third party do the NPC, the NPC runs with accurate information for one parent and incomplete or guessed information for the other parent may not be accurate.
While the CSS Profile itself allows each parent to enter information without the other parent seeing it, confidentiality cannot be assumed, because someone who knows one parent’s finances and the eventual actual financial aid offer can reverse-engineer a range of values for the other parent’s finances (using the NPC).
Thanks! I just verified when I went onto CSS that it is indeed through the College Board, as are the NPC calculators from each college. My ex-husband and I separately went to each college’s NPC calculator and put our own info in. I trust that he input accurate data. It sounds like when my daughter receives a financial aid award, I can’t expect that it will be broken down by each household’s EFC. This surprises me, though I’m new to all of this.
Yes, College Scholarship Service (CSS) is part of the College Board, but again, that doesn’t mean that there is a direct relationship between a student completing Profile and results that a net price calculator may spit out, even if the net price calculator is a College Board app. If a Profile college has a well-maintained NPC that accurately mimics the school’s institutional need-based aid formula driven by Profile data, the NPC results should be pretty close to what’s seen on a final financial aid package. My point has been: don’t conflate the Profile/financial aid package with the process of getting an EFC from the school’s NPC.
The only thing the college board/CSS profile does is collect information in one centralized place. It is essentially a repository/clearinghouse for your financial documents which are then sent out to colleges that had their services.
Family contributions and financial aid comes from the schools. I have written during my D’s cycle she applied to 7 schools, got accepted at 7 schools and we got 7 different EFCs and packages from 7 need blind, meet 100% demonstrated need schools. our packages ranged from loans, to no loans, different parent/student contributions, etc
Our packages varied by about 10,000. There was about a 5k difference between the package we received from Amherst and Williams- 2 schools that overlap in size, endowments and students that they accept. Williams gave our family a better package than Dartmouth - where there again is a lot of overlap in admissions. (we used the Williams package as a basis for a financial review at Dartmouth as they have a larger endowment). I was surprised at the time that a Bryn Mawr gave a better package than Williams.
When it was time to make a decision, we narrowed things down to her top 3 choices and went from there. She did not attend the school that gave her the best package, nor did we use that package for a financial review - we used direct peer school, were there was head to head overlap in revealed preferences.