NYU fin aid for 0 efc

[calmom]

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But to put forth an argument that schools routinely exercise professional judgement with no contact with the family is disingenuous and misleading.

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<p>OK, it only happened to me 3 out of the 6 years that I participated in the financial aid system, involving two different unaffiliated college, because it is a strange and unusual coincidence. It never happens to anyone else on the planet, just me and my rotten luck. </p>

<p>I didn’t say routinely – you said “never” – I provided 3 examples to disprove “never”. </p>

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I do find it interesting that this was done by a school that guarantees to meet 100% of need…thereby saving themselves a bit of cash!

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<p>Actually, it didn’t save them money. They lowered my EFC by $2800 but only brought in $1300 in Pell money as my daughter wasn’t eligible for a full grant. So their exercise of PJ to make my d. Pell eligible resulted in an increase of the college grant by $1500. </p>

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But to argue that any school would use PJ to deliberately take away aid that a student is legally entitled to is beyond illogical.

When the school use PJ by definition it means that they have a different view as to what the student is “entitled to”. They use PJ to change the figures because they feel that because of circumstances unique to the student, based on documentation that they have, the numbers on the FAFSA do not accurately reflect the financial situation. </p>

<p>Or to put it another way, NYU might have decided that people who have $1million in bonds lying aroudn are not “entitled” to Pell grants, no matter how creative they get with tax filings.</p>

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Calmom, I did not tell you that your D’s school didn’t make an adjustment to your data fields and they certainly must have verified the figures if you submitted schedules.

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<p>This is what you said in post #293:

Calmom, in your case I think it’s very clear that you had made some errors on your FAFSA filings and that’s what the FAO’s were correcting…it was not a matter of excercising professional judgement, in the technical sense of the term, because they are REQUIRED to correct any inconsistencies that exist betwen FAFSA filings and other information, such as tax documents, prior to awarding aid.

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<p>Entering that my tax was $12,000 when it it was 0 is not something that they do when they “verify” figures or correct “errors”. It is professional judgment. </p>

<p>Again, colleges are allowed to use PJ to make ADJUSTMENTS to the figures in various fields. They can not add a new field to to the form, so they have to make additions or subtractions to fields that are designed for something else. The reason they put $12,000 inj the “tax paid” field is that they wanted to subtract $12K from my overall numbers, and that is probably the only field on the whole form that is a direct subtraction from AGI. </p>

<p>Here is why they didn’t want to just subtract that number out from AGI:</p>

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Taxes Paid. It is worth noting that the state and other tax allowance is based on total income. So adjustments to AGI and/or the worksheets end up reducing the state and other tax allowance. (Adjustments to earned income affect the calculation of FICA tax.) Since the state and other tax allowance represents an actual expense, some financial aid administrators will adjust the taxes paid figure instead, or change the adjustment to compensate for the reduction in the state and other tax allowance. This is not quite kosher, unless the special circumstance is related to taxes paid. But it is, practically speaking, the only method of adjusting income that doesn’t decrease the state and other tax allowance.

See: [FinAid</a> | Professional Judgment | Methods of Implementing Adjustments](<a href=“http://www.finaid.org/educators/pj/adjustments.phtml]FinAid”>http://www.finaid.org/educators/pj/adjustments.phtml)</p>

<p>I would note that the paragraph from finaid.org quoted above has been posted at least since February 2005, when it first shows up in archive.org – a full year before my d’s college made that exact adjustment they were discussing.</p>