This has been debated on CC lately, but here is a report that addresses the school-order issue: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/02/25/paper-finds-some-colleges-may-use-student-preferences-reduce-aid-practice-not .
"Our main takeaway is that that doesn’t seem to be going on much,”
It shouldn’t be going on at all.
The colleges on my son’s FAFSA are in alphabetical order. I just don’t see how colleges can inference anythings about a preference from this.
Yup, D did alpha also. F schools that do this, I agree with @middkid86 , it shouldn’t be going on at all. It feels like one more advantage families who don’t need financial aid have - the ability to keep their cards close to their chest with regard to school preference, and for that matter, the entire list of schools applied to.
An article about NACAC requesting that the government stop sharing the list: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/10/06/group-asks-federal-government-stop-giving-colleges-information-students-choices
But what about college board? Can’t colleges see all the schools listed on the profile?
I do not understand why this problem even exists. There is no reason of any kind why the FAFSA should display the names of any other colleges. State programs that rely on the state scholarship program also being listed in first place make no sense either. None.
@neatoburrito - good question. But when I sent to Profile, each one was sent by itself. Once sent to a school, you can’t edit it anymore FOR THAT SCHOOL, but you can edit it for the next school(s) you send to,. That suggests to me that each one is sent individually.
@OHMomof12- no idea if this is true or false, and don’t remember where I think I heard this, but I recall seeing somewhere that with the CSS Profile, the first school (or batch) sees only itself (or themselves if you sent a batch). But, the next batch you send will see themselves listed PLUS the first group. So, depending upon which school or schools you care about the most with regard to knowing your list of schools, there can be some strategy to be employed.
Isn’t it state financial aid or scholarship programs that one does not explicitly target your FAFSA to, but which determine eligibility by checking whether a qualifying school in the state is listed (e.g. Cal Grant)?
Perhaps the data in the computer databases is organized so that it is easy to get a brief profile of the student’s FAFSA that includes the first school, but more costly to get or search the full list of schools, when one is a state financial aid or scholarship program that is not an explicit target for FAFSA sending. So it may be cheap for the state program to say “give me all of the FAFSAs where a qualifying school in [state] is listed first”, but more expensive to say “give me all of the FAFSAs where a qualifying school in [state] is listed in any slot”.
If so, that would be a bad design decision on the part of whoever designed it, but such things can be difficult to change due to the need to maintain backward compatibility.
@prospect1 - that’s the way FAFSA works but I don’t think it’s how Profile works. Changes to Profile to schools that already got it have to made by hand, whereas you can make online changes and submit that to schools that haven’t gotten it from you yet. Sounds like the old schools don’t get it, or hwy would they need hand-submitted changes?
OHMomof12- you could be right. I thought that changes to an already-submitted profile had to be done by hand, but a new Profile to a new school is done online, generating a report that shows all previous schools to whom it had previously been sent. Again, not sure where I heard that and it could be inaccurate.
Could be I guess. Something to ask, maybe…