Private college students: Tackle the CSS Profile

Financial aid season is upon us, and in addition to filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, the form that qualifies students for federal grants, loans and work-study jobs, some students will also have to file the College Scholarship Service, or CSS, Profile. Used by more than 350 private institutions throughout the U.S., the CSS Profile is much more extensive than the FAFSA and can qualify students for enormous nonfederal financial aid packages funded by their college. Here’s what you need to know.

More questions, fewer sheltered accounts

The CSS Profile is a much lengthier application than the FAFSA. That’s because the application considers income streams and assets the FAFSA does not such as retirement accounts, life insurance plans, home equity on a family’s primary residence, and income and assets held by a noncustodial parent in cases of divorce.
“(The application) basically asks you about every little bitty detail about parents’ finances and assets,” says Dan Maga II, vice president of American College Funding, a college planning firm in Wilmette, Ill. “It can get down into what kind of car you drive, what kind of church you go to, just about everything under the sun they can ask.”
In addition to the basic CSS Profile, many colleges also add their own supplemental questions to get an even fuller view of your financial situation. The reason, explains Michael McLaughlin, director of financial aid operations at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vt., is because at private institutions that require the CSS Profile, bigger aid is often at stake. Whereas the FAFSA can only qualify students for a maximum need-based grant package of $9,550 per year — and only the lowest-income students will qualify for a package that big — the average yearly grant package at Middlebury tops $32,000.
“We need to be more diligent on the information that we collect and get a more accurate picture for each student when giving out high amounts of institutional aid,” he says.
The Profile assesses the money you have, but it also takes the money you pay out into consideration by asking questions about your family’s medical expenses, debts, whether your family’s home is underwater, business expenses and other miscellaneous costs that aren’t included on the FAFSA.
The Profile may ask for more information, but that doesn’t necessarily mean all assets will subtract from a student’s financial aid package.
“As far as retirement assets go … we like to have that information available, but it’s not factored into (our) actual aid calculation,” says Kim Downs-Burns, associate vice president for student financial services at Middlebury.
Unlike the FAFSA, which determines how much government aid you’re eligible for regardless of where you attend school, colleges and universities individually decide how to interpret CSS Profile information and which assets and expenses to take into consideration.

Maximizing your aid

The Profile is more thorough than the FAFSA, but there are steps families can take to maximize their aid eligibility. Maga says the number one mistake families make is overestimating the value of their primary home.
“The lower they keep their value, within reason, they’re going to help keep their expected family contribution down and potentially garner more aid,” he explains.
Maga adds that as with the federal aid methodology, many schools also give greater weight to assets held in a student’s name than those held in a parent’s name, though it’s difficult to quantify by exactly how much because aid formulas vary from institution to institution. To up your federal aid eligibility as well as potential aid eligibility on the CSS Profile, Maga recommends that families shift assets from accounts held in a student’s name to those held in a parent’s name prior to filling out either form.
With so many questions, mistakes are easy to make, and deadlines are easy to miss, says Al Hoffman, director of the College Funding Service Center college consulting firm in Waterford, Conn. Whereas the FAFSA is free, goes to all schools and doesn’t become available until Jan. 1 of the year students will attend college, the CSS Profile is limited only to select private schools, costs $25 to submit for the first school applied to and $16 per school after that (fee waivers are available to certain students) and becomes available in fall of the year before the student will attend school.
The CSS Profile is frequently due significantly earlier than the FAFSA as well. Many schools require students applying for early decision or early action to file the application by Nov. 15 of the year before they attend. And regular admission students often must file by Feb.1 of the year they will attend. Financial aid deadlines for both the CSS Profile and the FAFSA vary from school to school and in both cases, families are urged to estimate their income tax figures and submit the forms as early as possible to take advantage of aid awards that are distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis.
“You really can’t wait,” says Hoffman.
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The Choice Blog: From the Mail Bag: On Taking a Gap Year

Over the holidays, readers flooded The Choice’s mailbox with thoughtful comments and observations, including on the initial student postings to our first-person “Envelope, Please” series.
In response to Robert Clagett’s essay on gap years, some of you also weighed in on the value of taking time off before college. Many were supportive of taking a break, though several wondered about the financial feasibility of doing so.
As one commenter wrote in response to Mr. Clagett’s advocacy of taking a year off between high school and college:

Great advice in theory, but for some families, like ours, the financial aid consequences can be prohibitive. Our younger son probably would have benefited from a gap year, but when we ran the financial aid calculators, we discovered that it would end up reducing his older brother’s financial aid by about $20,000 and reduce his own financial aid in a few years by about $25,000.

Similarly, another commenter wrote:

Lots of kids can’t afford to support themselves for a year without education because they actually derive financial benefits from being a student, whether it be the ability to take out loans that displace expenses for living or an existence in a town that has the amenities that their hometown doesn’t.

Another reader provided an example of financing her time off through work abroad. She wrote:

I took a gap year to study French in France, and it set me on a path of lifelong intercultural learning. I paid for it (mostly) myself by being an au pair nanny, which in France (unlike the U.S.) is structured to ensure one gets enough time off for school and cultural immersion each day.

As it turns out, Mr. Clagett, former dean of admissions at Middlebury College and a former senior admissions officer at Harvard, was following the discussion. On Tuesday morning he weighed in by e-mail, writing:

To address the economic factor, it’s true that many of the organized programs cost a great deal of money, and that can be a limiting factor for many.  But some of the programs (I know of financially needy students who have attended programs like Thinking Beyond Borders and Global Citizen Year in particular, but I suspect there are others as well) offer financial aid to those who need it.
More important, however, taking a gap year does not have to cost a lot of money.  But then it entails more initiative and creativity on the part of the student.  I know of one Middlebury student who spent a third of her gap year working at a monastery in North Dakota, a third working for a judge in Oklahoma, and the final third working in an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, all activities that she found on her own.  Since she was doing volunteer work for most of the time, her living costs were mostly covered, with little cost to her and her family.

Mr. Clagett also addressed the concerns some readers raised about an uneven socioeconomic spread of students who take time off, citing research to dispel the argument that the higher-than-average G.P.A.’s of those who took gap years might actually stem from separate factors of privilege. He wrote:

It’s true that since many students who currently take gap years come from more affluent backgrounds, it may not be surprising that most of them would perform more strongly once in college.  However, in the analysis that we did with gap year students at Middlebury, we controlled statistically for that factor by comparing their actual G.P.A.’s with how we would have predicted they would perform on the basis of their various academic credentials from high school (in the form of an academic rating assigned by the admissions office that is arrived at on the basis of H.S. grades, rigor of academic program, scores, etc.; at many colleges like Middlebury this academic rating is the best predictor of actual academic performance in college).
So when we looked at the G.P.A.’s of gap year students when factoring in their academic credentials from high school, on average they still performed better than we would have expected.

What do readers of The Choice think of Mr. Clagett’s response? Keep the conversation going by sharing your reactions and general thoughts on gap years in the comment box below.

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