Are Net Price Calculators accurate for estimating financial aid you will receive?

Paying for College
21

<p>Can you explain what you mean by not realistic.</p>

22

<p>The net prices for my D with Duke and Wellesleys are below 10K, while the net price with Harvard is above 60K. Does it make sense ?</p>

23

<p>No it doesn’t. Are you sure you didn’t add an extra digit in the Harvard one, either income or assets or enter something in the wrong field? I don’t think either Duke or Wellesley have any guaranteed merit awards. Isn’t the result of the NPC broken down into categories of aid?</p>

24

<p>I double checked. NPCs of Duke and Wellesley in college borad web may include avergae or maximum merit scholarship in the factor. Since these NPCs are in college board, I ran for other schools with saved info. The results were reasonable. (It seems like some college didn’t include merit scholarship at all although they have merit awards different from Ivies.).</p>

25

<p>Wellesley does not give merit aid. They give need based aid only.</p>

26

<p>Duke only gives full-ride merit scholarships. There is no inbetween.</p>

27

<p>****Duke only gives full-ride merit scholarships. There is no inbetween.</p>

<p>Does it mean everyone who is accepted at Duke gets full ride merit? Or it means those who get it, they either get full or nothing?</p>

28

<p>Since it’s a merit-based, a small number of applicants with an excellent merits will get it. But I’m not sure if Duke only offers full-ride merit-scholarships. But Duke’s web site only list full-ride scholarships as follow.
[Duke</a> University | OUSF Office of Scholars & Fellows: Merit Scholarship Programs](<a href=“http://ousf.duke.edu/merit-scholarship-programs]Duke”>http://ousf.duke.edu/merit-scholarship-programs)
Good thing is that all applicants are automatically considered.</p>

29

<p>No idea how you got those figures…there are no merit related questions for either of those schools on the CB NPC and I just reran them both and there was nothing odd nor any mention of merit.</p>

30

<p>Duke merit aid stats:</p>

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31

<p>Some NPCs average everything in the calculators. When you look at averaged stats, think of the person with his back side in the fire and his head in the freezer, and is supposed to be comfortable, over all.</p>

<p>The top 3% of Duke’s entering class get very generous merit awards. No one else does. But Duke does meet full need as they define it.</p>