Perhaps this might clarify what a college means by “meets need” and the respective percentage.
When you run the Net Price Calculator, the school will then provide an Expected Family Contribution (EFC). Each school can calculate the EFC however it wants, and some schools are more generous than others in their definitions (and it’s not always a factor of ranking/prestige…see this post for examples).
Also, colleges determine their own Cost of Attendance (COA). So they estimate how much is needed for books, travel, etc. Again, some are more generous than others.
Now, this is where the need part comes in. Need = COA - EFC. That formula will stay the same whether a school uses the CSS, FAFSA, noncustodial parents’ info, whatever, but the numbers change from college to college. But if you look at the post I linked to above, there were colleges that met less need but ended up being lower cost than schools that met more of the need. Probably because of how each university defined both the COA and the EFC.
Hopefully this helps clarify the issue for you.