Starting this fall, undergraduate applicants will need to complete the CSS Profile to be considered for financial aid from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
In addition to the FAFSA, applicants seeking financial aid will now complete the CSS Profile, including questions about home value and 401(k) balances.
By Natalie Yahr
Wisconsin Watch and
Becky Jacobs
Cap Times
Students applying to the University of Wisconsin-Madison will soon need to complete a second, longer financial aid application if they want a share of the millions of dollars in financial aid the university gives out each year.
Starting this fall, UW-Madison will require applicants to fill out the CSS Profile, an online application used by around 270 colleges, universities and scholarship programs to award institutional aid, separate from a different form used to apply for federal financial aid. Students can start working on their CSS Profile Oct. 1.
Many colleges that use the CSS Profile are private. Others are highly selective public universities, such as the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia. In Wisconsin, two private schools also use the application: Beloit College and Lawrence University.
UW-Madison says requiring the application will help direct funds to students who are most in need, but some student advocates worry the extra step could hinder the very students the university aims to help.
The CSS Profile is an online application used by roughly 270 institutions, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to award institutional aid. (Courtesy of College Board)
Wisconsin Watch and the Cap Times teamed up to find out what students and their families need to know about this new requirement.
Who needs to complete the CSS Profile?
Only incoming undergraduate students at UW-Madison who are U.S. citizens or eligible noncitizens must complete the CSS Profile to be considered for institutional financial aid. This group includes both new freshmen and transfer students.
Continuing students and new graduate students don’t need to complete the form. The university encourages them to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, which guides eligibility for federal assistance.
Does the CSS Profile replace the FAFSA?
The CSS Profile is separate from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, which guides eligibility for federal assistance. (Courtesy of the office of Federal Student Aid)
No. The FAFSA is used to apply for financial aid awarded by the U.S. government, including Pell grants and federal student loans. That form was simplified in recent years to make it easier for families to fill out, despite hiccups during the rollout process. Students who want to apply for federal aid still need to complete the FAFSA each year.
The CSS Profile is a supplement to the FAFSA, said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor who studies education policy at UW-Madison. The application is run by the College Board, the not-for-profit membership organization that makes the Advanced Placement exams and SAT college admissions test.
The CSS Profile helps colleges decide how to allocate their own financial aid and scholarship funds by gathering a more detailed picture of a student’s finances than the FAFSA offers. For instance, the application asks about medical debt and about businesses an applicant’s family may have.
“If you’re a low-income student, while completing the CSS Profile is an additional step for you, it is often potentially in your best interest because it paints the truest picture,” Odle said.
How much does it cost to complete the CSS Profile?
UW-Madison applicants will be required to pay a $25 fee to complete the form. But that fee is automatically waived for applicants with a household income below $100,000.
What’s the deadline for UW-Madison applicants to submit the CSS Profile?
UW-Madison recommends students applying for the 2026-27 school year submit the CSS Profile by Dec. 1, 2025. Students may submit the form after that date, but December is the deadline for priority consideration for funds.
Why is UW-Madison now requiring the CSS Profile?
UW-Madison previously used the FAFSA to allocate all types of financial aid, said Phil Asbury, executive director of the university’s student financial aid office. The CSS Profile will allow UW-Madison to more specifically target university resources toward certain students, especially after the FAFSA recently got shorter, he said.
“We’re really fortunate in that we have more students coming from low-income families or lower-income families each year. Those are really good things, and we want that to continue,” Asbury said. “But we also want to help as many families as we can, and so this will help us to better focus those funds on the families that need it the most.”
Asbury worked with the CSS Profile in his previous positions at Northwestern University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While he doesn’t expect the form will be a struggle for UW-Madison applicants, he recognizes it’s an additional step.
“If families know they will only qualify for a federal loan, or maybe they know they’re Pell Grant eligible and that’s all they need to go to school, then they can continue to only do the FAFSA,” Asbury said.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison awarded roughly $200 million in institutional support to undergraduate students last school year. Most of that funding was need-based financial aid. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
UW-Madison provided roughly $200 million in institutional support last school year to undergraduate students, Asbury said. About $150 million was need-based financial aid.
Students received on average about $17,000 in aid from the university last school year, Asbury said. Nonresident students may receive a bit more since their tuition rates are higher, he said.
UW-Madison is requiring more information from families amid efforts to game the country’s financial aid system. For example, a Forbes article in March advised parents to use investments or businesses to generate losses that would reduce their adjusted gross income and then qualify them for financial assistance.
People trying to hide assets on financial aid applications is “an open secret,” said Carole Trone, executive director of Fair Opportunity Project, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit that offers online counseling to help students across the country apply to and pay for college. She worries abuse of the financial aid system is increasing barriers for students who otherwise couldn’t afford to attend college.
Why are some concerned about the newly required form?
A 2021 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called the CSS Profile “The Most Onerous Form in College Admissions.” Since then, the application has been shortened and now uses “skip logic” to bypass parts based on students’ answers to previous questions.
UW-Madison is using a “lighter version” of the CSS Profile, which has fewer questions than the full version, Asbury said.
Wisconsin Watch and the Cap Times asked the College Board for the maximum number of questions on the form and for a copy of the application in advance of its Oct. 1 launch. The College Board declined these requests.
Unlike the FAFSA, the CSS Profile won’t pull financial information directly from an applicant’s tax returns, Trone said.
Trone remembers completing the CSS Profile years ago when her three kids applied to college. The form asked the value of her 401(k) retirement account and her home and the balance on her mortgage.
She is worried about students whose parents are unable to help sort through these kinds of questions. That’s why, when UW-Madison announced the new requirement, her team at Fair Opportunity Project started preparing to help students with the CSS Profile, too.
“I’ll admit, even when I was filling out, I was like, ‘I think that’s the right answer,’” Trone said.
“There’s no way a student’s going to know that. … Whereas with the FAFSA now you really don’t actually have to have a lot of stuff with you to be able to complete it anymore, with the CSS Profile, it’s going to be a work session.”
UW-Madison recommends students applying for the 2026-27 school year submit the CSS Profile by Dec. 1, 2025. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
Another key difference: On the FAFSA, students whose parents are divorced or separated need to provide information about the parent who provided more financial support over the last year. The CSS Profile requires information from all living biological parents, step-parents and adoptive parents, with exceptions for a handful of special circumstances, including when a parent is incarcerated, abusive or unknown.
There are also differences for families who speak other languages. The FAFSA is available in English and Spanish, and families can read guides or request an interpreter in 10 other languages, including Korean, Arabic and French Creole. The CSS Profile is available only in English, with help available by chat, phone and email in Spanish.
Some who advocate for college access worry UW-Madison’s new requirement will be an additional barrier for students who already struggle to get on the college track.
“FAFSA itself has been a hurdle for some students applying to college,” said Chris Gomez Schmidt, executive director of Galin Scholars, a Madison nonprofit that coaches a handful of high school seniors through college admissions each year. “I think adding an extra, complicated financial application could potentially disproportionately affect students with fewer resources for applying to college, so students from urban or rural areas across the state of Wisconsin.”
Galin Scholars plans to teach its participants about the CSS Profile during an October financial aid workshop but many students won’t be so lucky, Gomez Schmidt said.
Trone at the Fair Opportunity Project isn’t convinced the new requirement will pay off for the university. She noted the vast majority of U.S. colleges don’t use the CSS Profile.
“I’m curious to see how long UW does this,” Trone said. “Maybe they’ll do it for a couple years and realize they’re not actually getting that much better results.”
What help will be available?
As students work through the CSS Profile, they can click on help bubbles for more information. The College Board’s website offers additional guidance, too.
As with other steps in applying for college, students can also seek help from their high school counselors. UW-Madison informed counselors across the state about the new application at a series of workshops in September, and its financial aid office is available to help applicants.
“We do workshops on a monthly basis, and traditionally we’ve called those FAFSA Frenzies,” Asbury said. “We might have to rethink that name now, but we tend to do those throughout the year.”
Applicants seeking more help can find a variety of videos and articles online about filling out the CSS Profile, made by government agencies, nonprofits and entrepreneurs across the country.
Fair Opportunity Project will offer help with the CSS Profile at its one-on-one virtual counseling sessions, which are free to low-income and first-generation college students. Other students may access these sessions for a fee.
The organization is hoping to make help even more accessible by launching a free chatbot that answers questions about the CSS Profile, but that task has proven more complicated than anticipated.
The nonprofit built its existing FAFSA chatbot by training it with the hefty guides and updates the federal government releases each year. The CSS Profile is created by a private entity that isn’t required to make its documentation public.
“We will need to spend more time converting available webinars and presentations into AI training materials. We need to raise more funds to get this extra work done,” Trone said. She hopes the chatbot will be available to the public by November.
Meanwhile, she’s also looking into the “potential risks” of creating a chatbot specific to a privately owned application.
“They are very proprietary about their products, like SAT and AP, so this is a real concern that we need to look further into,” Trone said.
Why do other Wisconsin schools use CSS Profile?
Beloit College is a private liberal arts school near the Illinois border that enrolls about 1,000 undergraduate students. The school started using the CSS Profile about six years ago, but only for international students, said Betsy Henkel, the college’s director of financial aid.
“We also have an internal application,” Henkel said. “But as you can imagine, if students are applying to 10 schools for admission, the thought of doing one application and sending it to 10 schools is much more appealing than doing multiple financial aid applications with each of them.”
When access to the federal government’s simplified FAFSA was delayed in recent school years, Beloit College temporarily used the CSS Profile to give domestic students a financial aid estimate while they waited, Henkel said.
In addition to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, two private schools in Wisconsin use the CSS Profile: Beloit College and Lawrence University. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
Lawrence University — a private liberal arts school in Appleton with roughly 1,500 students — has used the CSS Profile for over a decade, Ryan Gebler, the university’s financial aid director, said in an email.
Similar to UW-Madison, Lawrence University uses a “lighter version” of the CSS Profile, with fewer questions, Gebler said. Overall, the application process has gone smoothly at Lawrence, he said.
“Simply put: Compared to the FAFSA, the CSS Profile provides a more accurate calculation of what a student and their family can pay for college,” Gebler said.
Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership with Open Campus. Email her at nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org.
Becky Jacobs is an education reporter for the Cap Times. Becky writes about universities and colleges in the Madison region. Email story ideas and tips to Becky at bjacobs@captimes.com or call (608) 620-4064.
This article first appeared on Wisconsin Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.