Reply to Any reason to fill out FAFSA when higher income?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here. This is all good info, thanks. Our income ranges from 425k to 550k based on bonus. 2 kids, 3 grades apart, so only 1 dual year. My EFC was in the mid 100s, I just guesstimated numbers.

So, I’m basically hearing that it is simple to fill out so may as well. My only concern is I don’t want schools thinking we need financial aid if we are not going to be offered it either way.

Do I check off that we don’t need aid, but still fill out the FAFSA form because some schools use it for merit and if we have a future job loss? I don’t care about the paperwork, my concern is admissions, don’t want to hurt it if not getting aid regardless.[/quote]

I feel like the common apps for the individual schools will ask if you are applying for aid and there are some cross checks where they will remind you if it hasn’t been received and you said you are applying.

In general I’ve found the following reasons to apply when you don’t qualify for need based aid

1. If merit consideration requires it - as someone mentioned it’s only a few schools.  You would need to be applying to a school that offers merit and where you see under the merit details that it’s required.  I think schools will sometimes do that if they don’t want to leave any federal aid on the table and if the specific scholarship considers financial need

2. Federal Loans and federal work study  - this only applies if student loans and/or campus job during the school year is part of how your family is funding college.  In our case, our family did not qualify for federal work study but majority of campus jobs aren’t restricted to federal work study but there are some jobs. We also only qualified for unsubsidized federal loans. When we have two in college, we might be on the edge of qualifying for subsidized loans.  Also note, we had to also fill out CSS as well even if we are only being offered unsubsidized federal loans at a school that uses FAFSA and CSS.

3. Schools that say you have to apply for financial aid first year or not at all.  Bryn Mawr was like this.  I know financial aid calculations  are changing regarding multiple kids in college but at least under current calculations when I ran NPC there was a chance we would qualify for some aid once we had two in college.

4. If there is some kind of state aid that you would qualify for that requires FAFSA - I think folks mentioned DCTag.
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