Yesterday was Day 1 of the annual FAFSA application challenge – the fall season in which you are filing paperwork from which colleges will determine how much financial aid they will provide your student. In many ways families find FAFSA season even more challenging than spring tax return season – you aren’t going to get a refund, and the size of the college bill is much larger than the annual amount of remaining taxes due.

The point of my hosting a FAFSA application challenge is to help you get organized and accomplish this task, with encouragement and to help you keep from feeling overwhelmed. So let’s look at what today’s bite sized piece is.

Today there are four tasks, and none of them requires any math or forms completion, you’re still safe on that front 🙂 But it is time to check in with your student, and start involving them.

1. Determine which schools you want your college-bound child to consider. Regularly talked about is the importance of having an acceptance safety net school. Less discussed but equally important, make sure there are some financial safety net schools in this list, such as an in-state public school, and a local community college. If you love your alma mater, list that too.

2. Talk to your student, about which colleges they want to consider. They may have big dreams about going to well marketed big name colleges on the coast, and it’s okay to let them throw a dream school or two on their list.

3. Sort your list of potential schools into three bins, and obtain the school IDs. These three bins are: Those that calculate an Expected Family Contribution (EFC) using the federal method (FM) from the FAFSA. Those that calculate an EFC using the institutional method (IM) from the CSS Profile. And those that calculate an EFC using the consensus method (CM) from the CSS Profile.

As the list of schools using the FAFSA is very large, the list of schools using the IM is only a couple hundred, and those using the CM is just a double handful, I recommend looking for your schools of interest on the CM list, then the IM list, and then the FM list.

Here are the sites you need to go to figure out which schools use which methods:

• Consensus Method schools
• Institutional Method schools
• Federal Method schools

Having schools of all three types on your list of schools of interest is useful because the different methods plus the endowments at the different schools result in vastly different (read as: tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars with of differences) in 4 year college out of pocket pricing, depending on the student and family situation. Also, depending on the field, the average salary after school may vary widely based on the college attended; for example, engineers don’t tend to have a salary benefit from paying a tuition premium, but some other fields do.

Check into the schools you and your student are considering. For example, if you’re set on being an engineer, though, make sure the colleges you’re considering have an engineering program. The US Department of Education’s College Scorecard website has information on college’s fields of study, admissions, “results” (read as: graduation rates – but by the 8 year mark, starting salary), average annual out of pocket costs including broken down by family income, etc.

Note that this College Scorecard data is all undergraduate information, if you want to know how many graduate students are around for you to brush elbows with and maybe get involved in undergraduate research alongside, this information isn’t there.

4. Rank order the schools in each bin.

Don’t cross bins here. You’re allowed up to 10 schools using the federal method to be listed on the FAFSA, and those are all free. The CSS Profile form from which the IM and CM EFC’s are calculated is not free, but the cost per school is small compared to the variation in financial aid.

You and your student should work together on assigning these rankings, making sure that the acceptance and financial aid safety net schools rank sufficiently high in the lists that you will include them when filling out the forms.

Now select your cut-off threshold, so you wrap up the day knowing which schools you plan to include on the FAFSA and on the CSS Profile.

That’s it, you’re done for today! It wasn’t too terrible, was it?

Don’t forget to check out my other articles about college, and to come back for tomorrow’s FAFSA application challenge Day 3.