Please help me understand financial aid

Paying for College
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My wife and I are well off financially. We have a daughter who is a good high school student. She will go to college in 2026.

We have a few questions about financial aid. We hear so many things and suspect that some of the things that we hear are not true. We just want to clarify.

  1. If we KNOW FOR CERTAIN that we will not qualify for ANY need based financial aid…should we fill out a FAFSA or CSS Profile?

I have had people tell me that you SHOULD because some schools require a FAFSA/CSS for merit aid. I have had some people tell me that you SHOULD NOT because by not submitting a FAFSA/CSS, you clearly signal to schools that you are full pay and they will love you for that (lol).

  1. One wealthy father that we know claims that he somehow TOLD schools that his family would be full pay. His daughter went on to get into a prestigious school. This same guy retired and moved away so I can’t follow up with him. My question is…how does one tell the school that you are full pay? By not submitting a FAFSA/CSS? By checking a box in the Common App? By calling the college? By telling your high school college counselor who feeds this information to colleges through secret back channels (again, lol).

  2. The controversial question…if schools know that you are full pay, are they more likely to admit you? I suspect that this answer depends on the wealth of the school, whether the school is need aware/need blind, and whether or not the school promises to meet 100% of financial need for other students.

The same guy who moved away said that some schools are so wealthy that they really don’t care. But the “next tier down” REALLY love full pays.

Any perspectives on these 3 questions are welcomed and appreciated.

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  1. Yes, there may be some colleges that require FAFSA to ensure that a full ride merit scholarship + Pell grant does not exceed the total cost of attendance. Otherwise, FAFSA would only be needed if the student wants to take a federal direct loan.

  2. Not applying for financial aid, or applying for financial aid and not getting any, would let the college know that you will be full pay, if the college is need-aware when evaluating individual applicants and has admissions look at that information.

  3. Whether the college is need-aware when evaluating individual applicants is the answer to this question. Note that many other admission criteria do correlate to financial aid need, but there are always some exceptions (e.g. legacy at prestige private colleges correlates to lower financial aid need in general, but there are some legacies whose alumni parents are not high income).

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None of our S24’s colleges required the FAFSA or CSS for merit consideration, which was a relief since that would have been a pain.

All of his colleges asked through the Common App whether we would be applying for need-based aid, so you could tell them you were full pay by answering no to that question (or maybe not checking the box, however it was asked).

There may well be some colleges where it was not that easy, but it didn’t come up for us.

Did it help? We will never know, but unless a college explicitly says it is need blind, it might (and even then, there is a lawsuit alleging nominally need blind colleges were finding ways around that, and a bunch of those colleges have been settling).

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It’s always rumored that some schools will admit more students who are full-pay. But reading some of the successful acceptances to IVY and top schools with full-ride scholarships or super low COA numbers, I’m not so sure that assumption is true.

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But it’s like Pascal’s wager - it can only help and not hurt you to demonstrate no need; whereas demonstrating need can only potentially hurt and not help. So you don’t know which is true, but going with “showing no need” is the better bet.

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BUT that assumes you have the ability to choose. Many high learning parents can’t hide assets (at least not legally). Many low-income students can’t afford not to seek aid during application, because some schools will not give you anything afterwards (supposedly NYU and USC are two such examples).

So the bottomline is really just be truthful and take it as is…

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Fair point. But in the case of OP, not filing a FAFSA might be the signal to send as it could only help and not hurt their chances (even if there is no clear proof that it will help).

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I think like #NiceUnparticularMan said, just don’t check the box that says applying for AID will be enough to signal willingness for full-pay.

The advantage of still submitting FAFSA is so you won’t keep getting automated emails from school “reminding” you of missing paperwork.

My kids do DE and every 2 months, they get the automatic email to remind them they are still missing FAFSA stuff.

Also you never know. S24 applied to WashU and did not seek FA. But when they processed his FAFSA, they still gave him money. I guess we’re not as full-pay as I thought.

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A college can be need-blind for individual applicants, but still manage its admissions process and criteria to target a specific level of financial aid need in the resulting frosh admit class. Most college admission criteria have some correlation to financial aid need, even though there will be individuals for whom the correlation does not hold. But over the overall frosh admit class, adjusting the weight of those correlated criteria can be used to produce an expected level of financial aid need for the overall frosh admit class, without explicitly looking at the financial aid application (or lack thereof) from individual applicants.

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So… Does OP check the box or not? I think that’s his main question.

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The answer to that question should be consistent with whether the OP’s student files a FAFSA and/or CSS Profile.

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Great responses everyone.

It looks like our strategy will be to NOT check the “will you require need based financial aid box” UNLESS the school requires a FAFSA/CSS Profile for merit based aid. We certainly are not above getting some merit aid, especially from “safety schools.”

One potential complication…do you click that “need box” on each INDIVIDUAL school application or do you click it ONCE for the entire common app? Does anyone know?

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No need - unless your kid is applying to one of the very few schools that require FAFSA for merit aid.

Otherwise there’s zero reason to file. We had our reasons not to fill out FAFSA or CSS and didn’t.

An extremely small advantage IMO, especially given the effort involved (and having to disclose your financial situation to your kid )

But sometimes you do. If, like OP says, you absolutely know you won’t get any need based aid, then save yourself the time and effort.

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Almost all those sorts of colleges have some sort of policy of trying to increase the socioeconomic diversity of their classes, which is then backed by a significant (usually growing) budget for need aid, which they are then using aggressively to compete for the sorts of lower-income applicants they want to add to their enrollment lists.

However, at the same time they still have net tuition and fees (net of aid) as an important contributing factor to their operating budgets. And in fact they are all still also admitting many high-SES kids, including many full pay kids, and then many more still paying a large amount of tuition and fees net of aid. Those stories don’t get passed around much, as they are not particularly interesting. But statistically, even with the recent increases in things like Pell Grant percentages and so on, the people paying very little in net costs are still in the minority.

That said, I agree in most cases this is not really actionable information. About the only case I can see it mattering is if the NPC showed a substantial award and you wanted to voluntarily give up that option by not applying for aid–which I would not usually recommend as I think the plausible admissions advantage is too uncertain to outweigh the potential benefit if you do get admitted.

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It was for each college. So in theory we could have applied for aid at some and not others.

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I love it! Thank you!

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I think that you are right for the Super Rich schools with (say) $1 million in endowments per current student attending the school.

I am betting that the value of full pays goes up as the endowment per student goes down. Probably a lot of prestigious LACs ranked 10 through 50 probably love full pays.

I saw an article once about how Colorado College regularly admits an obscenely wealthy class. I will try to track that down.

That is just a guess. I always assume that these colleges are run like businesses.

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The devil is in the details, and the way schools operate varies.

That is fine of course.

But I know of schools/AOs who state they like to see a high EFC confirmed by FAFSA because then they know this family is unlikely to ever request FA.

Next, some schools will not allow the family to ever apply for institutional need based aid unless the student applies for aid as an incoming first year. So, if a family has a high EFC partially due to high assets that they could use to fund college should income decline or go to zero, they would be more comfortable with this situation as opposed to the opposite situation of relatively high income (that could be lost) with relatively low assets. CWRU and Drexel are examples of schools where the family can’t apply in the future for institutional need based aid if they didn’t as an incoming first year. Note: the family can always fill out FAFSA to get federal financial aid, including the direct student loans.

Some schools that may require FAFSA (and CSS as appropriate) for merit aid are Va Tech, PSU, Rutgers, Fordham, Santa Clara for the Johnson’s scholarship, and NYU (murky at NYU.) Fordham specifically will grant merit aid upon a student’s acceptance/shortly thereafter without a FAFSA, but if the student attends they have to file FAFSA in the Spring to have the award disbursed.

Another point…during Covid when schools received money from the government, some of those schools disbursed the money to any student who filed a FAFSA.

Lastly there are schools that see filing FAFSA as demonstrated interest and will give extra merit aid (relatively small amounts) for the students who filed by the priority deadline. Ithaca is an example here.

When it comes time for your D to apply, double check the policies for all the schools on her list, often times you need to speak with a director of admissions or above to feel confident you are getting the right answer.

You can look up the proportion of full pays in section H of each school’s CDS.

For Colorado College, in Fall 2023, 884/2139 (41%) undergrads had financial need, so 59% had no need and most of those would be full pay unless they received merit or athletic $. Section H2 here:

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They are businesses that need or want to stay in business (not go bankrupt). Being a private non-profit business still means having to avoid making negative profits that would eventually cause unintended bankruptcy. Being a government subsidized business still means having to be concerned about finances, since asking for more subsidies can be politically risky (indeed, many public universities’ budgets’ state subsidies have been shrinking shares over the years or decades).

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Rutgers does not require FAFSA for merit aid.