Which colleges use the PROFILE?

Paying for College
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<p>Since the FAFSA and PROFILE aid applications can produce big differences in a family’s Expected Family Contribution, it’s useful to know which colleges use only the FAFSA and which ones also require the PROFILE. The common wisdom is that all private colleges use the PROFILE, but actually there are plenty of private colleges that don’t use it.</p>

<p>The College Board has a list of institutions that use the PROFILE:
profileonline.collegeboard.com/PXRemotePartInstitutionServlet/PXRemotePartInstitutionServlet.srv</p>

<p>The list contains over 500 institutions, but many of them are graduate schools, private high schools, and scholarship foundations. I tried to filter out everything but the undergraduate institutions and came up with a smaller list of 240 schools. </p>

<p>This means that most private colleges in the U.S., do not require the PROFILE. So if the PROFILE is a problem for you because it produces a high EFC, you should be able to find quite a few colleges that don’t use it. It is unfortunately true that many of the private colleges that are high on everyone’s list do use the PROFILE.</p>

<p>Some colleges that don’t use the PROFILE do require their own supplemental financial aid application. From the examples I’ve seen, it looks like college supplements are not necessarily equivalent to the PROFILE. It’s possible that a college supplemental can lead to more favorable outcomes for students than the PROFILE would. For example, some college-specific supplements don’t include the income of a non-custodial parent’s spouse, while the PROFILE does include this data.</p>

<p>I hope this will be useful info for someone…</p>

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<p>To further confuse the issue … not all schools on the Profile list actually use the Profile formula to award aid. I don’t know how many fall into this category. Furman University, for example, gives an early estimate of aid for ED students … it requires the Profile for these students … but only because FAFSA can’t be filed before Jan. 1. I assume they transfer the info to an internal program that uses only the FAFSA-relevant numbers. FAFSA is used for all other applicants.</p>

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<p>To expand upon what kelsmom said, and risk more confusion, colleges use some pretty sophisticated software to manage and analyze finAid information. PROFILE is the creation of College Board, which also sells the most widely used financial aid software for use by the schools, PowerFAIDS. In addition to being able to import data from FAFSA and/or PROFILE, the [url=<a href=“http://professionals.collegeboard.com/higher-ed/financial-aid/inas]INAS[/url”>Financial Aid Management – Higher Ed | College Board]INAS[/url</a>] component of PowerFAIDS, “offers an expanded range of options for adjusting [Institutional Methodology] calculations that gives the user control over virtually every aspect of the calculation, including the ability to access PROFILE local data questions.” What this means is each school can craft its own formulas, for better or worse, for determining financial need.</p>

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<p>That is correct. And the conventional wisdom that Profile will yield a higher EFC than FAFSA is also not always the case. And that varies from school to school, due to the school-specific questions & the school-specific treatment of various assets.</p>