Applying to college is an exercise in paperwork: recommendations, essays, the application itself, and the FAFSA — the form that determines whether your student is eligible for federal financial aid.
But there’s another financial aid form you may also need to fill out: the College Scholarship Service Profile, or CSS Profile.
What is the CSS Profile?
A product of the testing giant the College Board (which runs the SATs), the CSS Profile is the application required to access institutional aid, including grants and scholarships, from about 230 colleges. Each year, the profile gives access to more than $9 billion in financial aid to thousands of students, according to the College Board.
How is it different from the FAFSA?
The CSS Profile looks at every part of a family’s finance that the FAFSA (officially named the Free Application for Federal Student Aid) considers: income, bank accounts (and any interest they earn), stocks, bonds, mutual fund shares, investment and vacation property, 529 plans, and any UTMA or UGMA accounts that benefit the student.
But the CSS Profile goes further than the FAFSA. It also considers the value of a family’s primary residence, if it owns one, retirement savings and any annuities. In addition to taking a deeper, more detailed look at your family’s finances than the FAFSA, the CSS Profile also considers a greater percentage of those assets as part of what you can afford to pay for college expenses.
The CSS Profile is also more flexible than the FAFSA. Colleges use the FAFSA in a fairly standard way. After filling out the FAFSA with information on your family income, assets and family size, you’ll get a number called your “expected family contribution.” That’s how much the FAFSA algorithms have determined that your family can afford to pay for college. Your financial need is defined as the difference between a college’s cost of attendance and your expected family contribution. Your financial need, in turn, determines your aid eligibility for federal grants, work-study or subsidized federal student loans. Some colleges may also use the FAFSA to award their own scholarship money, but they’re always doing so based on that same measure of financial need.
Colleges can be more flexible in how they handle the results of the CSS Profile. One college might weigh various parts of your financial information differently than another. Individual colleges can even add their own supplemental questions to the form.
Who has to fill out the CSS Profile?
If you want financial aid, you’ll first need to fill out the FAFSA, as nearly every college and university uses it to award federally available financial aid. More than 200 highly selective schools also ask that you also complete the CSS Profile, which helps determine eligibility for aid from the college’s own funds. The vast majority of profile schools are private colleges, though a few elite public schools, like the University of Michigan and University of Virginia, also require the profile.
If your child is applying to one of those schools or is already enrolled and plans to attend next year, you should complete both the FAFSA and the CSS Profile. Note that some colleges only require international students to fill out this financial aid application.
What information do you need to answer the form’s questions?
The CSS Profile asks for all the information the FAFSA requires and adds questions about annuities, home equity, retirement funds and sibling …….