Are the net price calculators a good resource to go by? And if so, can anyone explain to me why higher earners over $100K household income after taxes qualify for more (estimated total grant aid) compared to under $100K?
For example: Estimated total grant aid is $12,995.00 for over $99,999. Estimated total grant aid is $4,000.00 for $90,000 - $99,999.
I’m new to all this and can’t wrap my head around why this is. I would think that the lower income would get more help. Any help on this would be much appreciated. Thank you.
That sounds like the NPC provided by DoE. It is absolute junk. You can actually go here Net Price and create an NPC for a hypothetical college, so you see the inner workings of this NPC.
At a real college, some employee needs to enter certain parameters to set up the NPC for that college, and if they enter bad numbers, you can get the type of anomalous numbers, such as higher price for lower income. GaTech uses this junk NPC, and it has these types of anomalies.
The end user can only select income ranges (not an actual number), and cannot enter assets at all, so there is no chance such an NPC can be accurate.
Basically you can assume that the colleges that use this type of NPC don’t care about communicating accurate numbers, and almost certainly, don’t have good need-aid anyway, so they don’t see the need to try.
ETA: There are several off the shelf NPCs that colleges can use, rather than creating their own form scratch. For any such NPC, some college employee needs to set it up with certain parameters, to reflect that college’s finaid, so one thing is they need to enter good numbers. But also some off the shelf NPCs are good and some are terrible. The one you are describing is the most terrible one - it is recognized by the use of income ranges.
Only use the NPCs directly accessible from a school’s financial aid website. Many are accurate, some aren’t. Don’t use MyIntuition which gives large ranges for results.
When you get NPC results, you often have to manually change the COA to reflect the year your kid will attend (assume annual 3%-5% increases). Keep screenshots of your results.
I used the NPC from the university website which appears to be the same as others I used here in Texas.
Just trying to figure out some things prior to filling our 2023 taxes since we can go either way, under or above the $100K mark. Getting the most aide for our daughter is what I’m after so don’t want to shoot myself in the foot. We have tax write offs that can be used to lower our AGI income under $100K or can choose to not take them and increase our income right over $100K.
If you are accessing NPCs directly from a school’s website and it takes you to their net price calculator hosted at the CollegeBoard, note that each school will have a different CSS formula loaded into that site. So the NPCs aren’t necessarily the same, even if hosted by CB (which is the owner of the CSS Profile).
To directly answer your question, I don’t know why you received the strange results you did in your OP. But I would try again, and using more than one college’s NPC.
Definitely doesn’t sound right, so could be an error. Run the NPC on the school’s website rather than a general one. Also know that most likely (sorry to say this !) the info is not accurate going forward due to the FAFSA changes effective this year. Schools have 2023 and prior info. It’s a mess for everyone!
That said, running the NPC will give you a good comparison between schools (since they are all theoretically using the same, now outdated, formulas). It just won’t give you an accurate $ right now.
Thanks. I ran them through the schools website and there are some differences with cost. But my main concern is the estimated total grant aid is a huge difference if earning over $100K. Does that sound correct? I’ve ran it a few different times and get the same results.
A lot of the Texas colleges use the junk DoE NPC I referred to. (They do not use the CollegeBoard NPC, which is one of the good ones (if properly set up) with its obvious connection to CSS.)
By the way, the DoE NPC website Net Price I listed is where colleges can go to get this junk DoE NPC, which they can configure and put on their own website. Anyone can go to this website and make an NPC - it generates a link.
OP, the NPC you saw may make it look like you get more aid for income $101k than $99k, but those NPCs are worthless, and cannot be used for financial planning.
The good NPCs can be used for financial planning, but the bad ones cannot.
Yep! That’s the one! That’s exactly what I expected the screenshots to look like. That’s the junk DoE NPC I referred to. Here’s a blog from more than ten years ago discussing bad NPCs, including this type.
So this problem is many years old, and has nothing to do with recent changes. The junk DoE NPC is so flawed, that it cannot give accurate results, and it should be scrapped, and colleges banned from using it.
I worked exclusively at the graduate level by the time the NPC became a thing that schools offered. Grad schools don’t typically use it. So I don’t know anything about the inner workings of the calculators. But IMO, schools should not even offer an NPC if they can’t guarantee that the calculator is set up properly. Talk about misleading. I am sure that the example above reflects a misleading NPC.
Your 2023 income tax info will be used for the 2025-2026 academic year. The net price calculators for that year are not yet done. Currently, NPCs are set for the 2024-2025 academic year, and some of those haven’t been updated because the FAFSA changes just aren’t finalized yet.
So…what academic year are you looking at? If it’s 2025-2026, you need to wait until near the end of summer 2024 so see the NPCs for that academic year.
Actually, I looked at what I did a couple of years ago, when I went to this website to make a dummy college NPC. It gives an .html file, not a web link, (though it could be posted at a link). But clicking on that .html file (stored locally) gives a functioning (but bad) NPC, using numbers/data entered in the configuration process at the above website.
Thank you so much. I found some other info as well which does not reflect what I posted. The higher the AGI is, the higher the EPC is. So from what I know, the higher the EPC means the less help the student gets correct?
In many cases, the higher the family contribution, the lesser aid is received. BUT the vast majority of colleges do not guarantee to meet full need for all.
Note that there is a relatively small number of NPC templates that colleges use (e.g. DoE minimal one, College Board, College Raptor, etc.). But each college can put its own parameters into the template, so two colleges using the College Board template could give different NPC results.
We did the NPCs on the specific colleges’ financial aid sites, and then followed up with calls to the individual financial aid departments and asked if that’s generally what we could expect/was accurate. This worked well for us.
Thanks. We’ve been going over all the associated costs that we are aware of and not sure how we are going to afford it. My daughter already downgraded schools to help with cost. She’s graduating in the top 3% of her class of over 400 students but unfortunately her SAT score isn’t as high as she had hoped for. She was between 1100 - 1200 range. She’s taken dual credit courses and has maintained over a 4.0 GPA throughout high school.
We plan on getting our taxes done asap so she can submit her student aid application. Time will tell how this plays out.
You can file FAFSA, and CSS Profile (if required) now. FAFSA will automatically pull in your 2022 tax information.
It is what it is. Nothing you can do about that for filing for 2024-25. If 2023 income is dramatically lower, or a parent lost their job or some other significant change, you can ask each school for professional judgment after you file 2024-25 FAFSA.
