The Federal Financial Aid Methodology

A computer under the direction of the U.S. Department of Education crunches the numbers on the FAFSA, assigning different values to various assets, liabilities, and the family situation to calculate the Expected Family Contribution. The Federal Need Analysis Methodology—commonly referred to as the federal methodology—is set by law.

In theory, there are two propositions that underlie the calculation of the EFC:
1. When it comes to paying for college, parents are expected to pay as much as they can afford.

2. The student is expected to contribute an even higher proportion of any assets held in his or her own name.

And then there is a third piece of the pie, something that exists outside
of the computer’s ability to assign a number: special circumstances. The EFC
is based on a family’s current finances, not on its financial history over time,
and not on expected increases or decreases in coming years. And though the
FAFSA asks questions about marital status and touches on medical expenses,
it cannot take into account all of life’s events: divorce, illness, death, loss of
job, loss of income, or other happenings.


3. If your life situation does not translate easily to a sheaf of
papers or a computer form, get in touch with the financial aid
office of all schools where your student has applied or has been
accepted. Send a letter, with documentation, that augments
the information on the FAFSA as filed. And specifically ask the
college to adjust its financial aid offer.

The EFC is based on a combination of factors:
• The family income, as reflected in the modified adjusted gross income
• The assets of the family, excluding the home
• Investments held by the parents
• Investments held in the name of the student

Before the EFC is calculated, adjustments are made to take into account
certain tax credits and benefits taken by the parents or students, certain
untaxed income, and the number of other children in the family who will be
in college at the same time.

How the Student’s Assets Are Allocated
If your child has managed to put aside $100,000 in earnings from his
lemonade stand or from her personal investments in Chicago Mercantile
Exchange frozen pork belly futures, the federal methodology is going to
say—in an electronic sort of way—“aha!” and ask the student to start writing
checks to the college bursar’s office.

The same goes for children whose well-meaning parents, grandparents,
other relatives, and friends of the family have given money that is listed in
the student’s own name: UGMA and UTMA accounts, savings accounts, and
piggybanks. The standard formula calls for students to contribute 35 percent
of their assets each year.


If a child started out with $100,000, and leaving aside any interest or
dividends earned on the investment, the contribution would be something
like this:
• Freshman year: as much as $35,000 of the $100,000
• Sophomore year: as much as $22,750 of the remaining $65,000
• Junior year: as much as $14,787 of the remaining $42,250
• Senior year: as much as $9,612 of the remaining $27,463

The bottom line is that the student would be expected to pay nearly
$82,000 from savings, which essentially is full freight for four years of college
at most institutions of higher education.

Are you thinking that perhaps your student would be better off making
a gift of that money to you a few years before college, and then receiving a
gift from you after graduation? Or perhaps the student might want to fund
a retirement account at age sixteen. Done properly, either is a good idea.
Consult a tax preparer or accountant for specific advice.

How the Parents’ Assets Are Allocated
In the government’s infinite wisdom, recognition is given to the fact
that parents have expenses other than those of their college-bound student.
You know, things like a mortgage or rent, utilities, health care, and food for
the table.

The basic formula calls for parents to contribute 5.6 percent of their
assets (not including the value of the family home, retirement funds, and
some other exclusions) to college for one child. The percentage goes down a
bit if there is more than one child in college at the same time and goes up a
bit if parents have certain types of investments or deductions from income.
The percentage is also effectively reduced based on the age of the parents;
the older they are, the larger the portion of assets protected from allocation
to college. The thinking here is that older parents will have greater need for
their savings when they retire.


Let’s assume that a pair of relatively young parents have that same
$100,000 nest egg (not set aside as an IRA or other retirement fund). Under
the basic federal methodology, the annual contribution (without taking into
account interest or dividends earned on that money) would be:
• Freshman year: as much as $5,600 of the $100,000
• Sophomore year: as much as $5,286 of the remaining $94,400
• Junior year: as much as $4,990 of the remaining $89,114
• Senior year: as much as $4,711 of the remaining $79,412

The bottom line is that parents with $100,000 in savings would
be expected to contribute about $20,588 for four years of college at most
institutions of higher education.

So What Have We Learned?
Saving for your child’s education is a good thing. Putting the money in
your child’s name is probably not.

Consult a financial adviser or a tax accountant as early in your child’s
life as you can to set up 529 Plans (which are not considered the child’s assets)
and other investments that are to your best advantage. And if as you read this
page you have a significant amount of money listed in your child’s name, you
may want to consult with your accountant about legal ways to transfer the
funds to shelter them from the EFC.
Read More: The Federal Financial Aid Methodology

Criticisms of analytic of Education methodology

Three methodological criticisms of APE have been particularly important in pointing the way to post-analytic alternatives in philosophy of education. The first, widely felt in analysis and articulated by Edel (1973: this volume, p. 40), is epistemic: ‘A central difficulty in analytic philosophy of education seems to me to reflect a soft spot in the analytic theory generally – how to judge what is a correct or adequate analysis.’ Edel locates the difficulty in APE’s heritage from positivism: an untenable distinction between analytic (or conceptual) and synthetic (or empirical) claims.

By the early 1970s, Edel was in good company, for the analytic/synthetic distinction had sustained damaging criticism from Quine (1951, 1960) and conspicuous appeal to analyticity had greatly diminished as a ground for the justification of claims in mainstream, Anglo-American, philosophy. Indeed, its lingering influence in philosophy of education was something of an anomaly. With appeal to analyticity disallowed, the structure of justification changes. Take, for example, the defence of S: ‘Teaching is an activity conducted with the intention of bringing about learning.’ Instead of engaging in the usual meaning analysis of ‘teaching’ in order to establish a case for conceptual truth of S, we can view S as providing the most immediate context for understanding the conceptual role of ‘teaching’.

But relevant context extends beyond S to other related sentences: S is embedded in some theory, T. Defending S now becomes a matter of arguing the epistemic case for T against rivals. Although theory choice has its problems it has considerably more resources for decision than meaning analysis. Note that in formulating the problem of justification in this manner a move has been made against merely assuming the epistemic privilege of ordinary language and its embedded commonsense theory of the world (see Evers, 1979).

A second problem lies with the provision of necessary conditions for the correct use of a term. While analytic philosophers of education might be willing to concede on sufficient conditions, it is important to hold the line on necessary conditions. So, to Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialist charge that, for example, there is no common feature to all games (which would undermine the condition that the presence of such a feature is a necessary condition for something to be called a game), Hirst and Peters (1970: 6) respond that he overlooked something: ‘A necessary conditon of calling something a game is, surely, that it is an activity which is indulged in non-seriously.’

One need not have played poker for oil wells, on a Mississippi riverboat, to query the ‘surely’. In response, analysts might want to distinguish two concepts: a fun one for those whose sense of propriety prevails, and a more serious one suitable for higher stakes. But now, is the sentence ‘a game is an activity indulged in non-seriously’ a conceptual truth, or even a truth? Well, once we begin to factor in the relevant social, cultural, and geographical factors that specify the surrounding theoretical context in which each use of ‘game’ figures, the epistemic sense of the question either drops out altogether, becomes relativised to prevailing local contexts, or becomes a matter of theory competition.

And the same conditions of justification will apply to distinctions between so-called central and peripheral uses of ‘game’, or ‘education’, or ‘teaching’, or ‘learning’. Since the presence of necessary conditions of usage in a sufficiently restricted domain is equivalent to their absence in a broader domain we can ask whether consideration of domain size really matters in explaining how humans can master and readily employ concepts (or use terms).

According to Stephen Stich (1992: 248–50), who appeals to empirical work in the psychology of concept acquisition, the answer is no. To appreciate the relevance of empirical conditions, consider an example. A small child is playing with a stick which at first is a gun, then a sword, then a walking stick, and finally a golf club. Analytic ways of thinking might suggest that these things all have something in common – perhaps that length exceeds breadth.

Well, this is true of every solid object in the universe that is not perfectly symmetrical. Moreover, guns can contract smoothly on their major axis without lapsing in gunhood, and likewise for swords, and even walking sticks. Perhaps the child’s imagination is not constrained by affine invariance (maintenance of proportion), or topological invariance (maintenance of boundaries). Given that language – which is quite grainy, discrete, and finite at the level of vocabulary – is being used to describe a world that is infinitely partitionable, one would expect cognitive advantages to accrue to creatures whose learning permits plasticity of feature detection.

But to meet this condition, it is better to see concepts as the result of categorisation by similarity to a prototype, or alternatively, similarity to an exemplar, where neither prototypes (the most typical members of a set) nor exemplars (the most familiar) satisfy anything like necessary or sufficient conditions (see Stich, 1992: 249). It is customary in APE to analyse the nature of human cognition and knowledge through its products, which are invariably taken to be rule-based symbol systems, from natural languages and informal sign systems through to the artificial systems of logic, mathematics, and computing. Certainly, a belief in rules underlying performance would lend credence to the otherwise quite brittle and implausible demands of analysis.

However, when it comes to explaining the human learning of these competencies, it is important nowadays to attend to theories of brain functioning (see Grossberg, 1982). But from a neutral perspective, categorisation and concept formation (and, more controversially, reasoning) are better seen as products of pattern recognition and processing – processes characteristically driven by the application of soft constraints – rather than as being rule-based with precise conditions of application (see Bechtel and Abrahamson, 1991: 220–54; Evers, 1990.)

Notice that analytic methodology needs to challenge more than the truth value of these psychological reflections. In maintaining a conceptual/empirical distinction, it needs to challenge their relevance. The task of meshing a theory of conceptual analysis with a theory of concept acquisition was attempted in the early APE literature – and most clearly seen in the writings of Peters (1974: 119– 50) – by a shift in favour of Piagetian stage theories (shorn of their empirical excrescences). The last major criticism raises the question of whose concepts are being analysed. It is important, because various answers strike at the assumption of epistemic privilege analysis allots to ordinary usage.

For example, theories which see ordinary language as an ideology functioning to reproduce capitalist economic social relations of production, will count almost all the APE claims to conceptual truth as the most central falsehoods of a systematically false theory of education. (The best early critiques along these lines are Adelstein, 1972, and Harris, 1977.) More generally, the concepts of those for whom language is actually a structured misrepresentation of reality will not bear the epistemic weight required to justify educational claims. So gender theorists, for example, who see familiar discursive practices as gendered and part of the male symbolic order, would place little value in ambitious versions of analysis (see Davies, 1989).

A more drastic depature from analysis is to deny the possibility of a preferred knowledge of the semantics of language, and standards of rationality, sufficient to give sentence tokens the stable representational structure required for what are in any case debatable demands of educational justification. Rorty’s (1979: 357– 94) account of philosophy without mirrors (and some of the literature of post-modernism) raises the option. In what follows, I shall canvass benign rather than drastic post-analytic consequences for philosophy of education.
Read More : Criticisms of analytic of Education methodology