<p>Below are a Calif private school's FA stats....</p>
<p>Number who applied for need-based aid: 1,030
Number who were judged to have need: 760
Number who were offered aid: 750
Number who had full need met: 136
Average percent of need met: 67%
**Average financial aid package: $24,069<a href="not%20much%20considering%20that%20the%20school%20costs%20$55k..and%20it%20can%20incluce%20Cal/Pell%20Grants,%20fed%20loans,%20&%20work-study">/B</a>
Average need-based loan: $4,623
**Average need-based scholarship or grant award: $18,469<a href="this%20can%20include%20Cal%20&%20Pell%20Grants">/B</a>
Average non-need based aid: $8,116
Average indebtedness at graduation: $29,906</p>
<p>Average percent of need met: 67%</p>
<p>Can anyone clarify what this means? Does it mean that they look at each person's need (which can range from $55k down to a few thousand), and then determine what percent of each person's need was met....then do they average that all together? If so, that can be very misleading if they are a school that accepts a lot of students who don't have much need. </p>
<p>so...if a school only has 4 kids with need.......</p>
<p>Student A has $5k in need....100% met with a loan
Student B has $8k in need....100% met with a loan and work study
Student C has $55k in need...$40% met with grant, loan, and work study
Student D has $40k in need...$70% met with merit scholarship, grant, loan, work study.</p>
<p>So, is the "average" need met 77.5%???? if so, that can be very misleading to someone who has a lot of need and won't qualify for merit, since such a person didn't get close to that much in aid.</p>
<p>No. what it means is that you add up all of the need and divide into the aid given. That is the percentage of need met. $67 dollars was allocated to every $100 of financial need. But you have to also look at the fact that 136 kids got their full need met. which means whatever it cost meet their need comes out of the pot and the rest is allocated to everyone else. Depending on how much those 136 kids needed to get their full need met, there might not have been much left in the pot. Everyone else could have gottten only 10% of their need met if those 136 happened to be kids who needed full freight and were given it. This is even before the splits between self help and grants. For all you know, the 136 kids could have gotten all of the grant money and everyone else got loans and work study. Unlikely, but you see what I mean. basically 614 kids, about 85% of those who were found to have need are not going to have 100% of need met, They aren’t going to get 77.5% of need met because that percentage is jacked up by those 136 kids who got 100% of need. And who knows if those were kids who demonstrated $1000 in need or $50K in need. The information really does not tell you a whole lot. That’s why a lot folks who look at the NYU numbers ask how they can be viewed as not meeting much need when it doesn’t look so bad in composite. There may not even be a “average” student in the entire school when it comes to need and the numbers are all composites. If your kid is one of the 136 that got full need met, the school looks pretty good to you. If he’s on the other end of the scale, he could be gapped big time under this scenario.</p>