<p>Hey, everyone! </p>
<p>I received my financial aid from Caltech today and I want to know how the aid looks like for others. Mine is in line with my FAFSA EFC. Can you compare and contrast Caltech's aid with other Ivy's aid?</p>
<p>Was it email or snail mail? We’re still waiting.</p>
<p>This was my son’s first official statement, and it is in line with FAFSA EFC.</p>
<p>My son’s came in email this morning!! First was an email saying “it’s coming in an hour or so, here’s the PDF password” and then in an hour or so came the actual PDF aid statement.</p>
<p>Maybe you should check your spam folder.</p>
<p>mine was very generous!!!</p>
<p>Geekmom63 is exactly correct. My son’s aid package arrived in the same way.
Littlemikey4, generous means what? What is your income level and how much you are asked to pay. Our ‘parent contribution’ is $19K and ‘student contribution’ is $1,500. Our income is about $90K with normal assets. Is our Aid looks in line with other colleges?</p>
<p>^ my letter looks about the same as yours except my family income is ~120k, but my dad was laid off this year so our income is about to hit rock bottom…</p>
<p>Ultimately they covered what they said; my EFC was 19k (about 2k lower than what the FAFSA calculated) and student contribution was 1.5k, so they doled out around 30k (although 3k is from a perkins loan… which is kind of disappointing as they didn’t max it out). Does anyone know I can get in contact with the FA office and try to negotiate at least a bigger perkins allowance?</p>
<p>we’ll have to take out about 15k in loans for my first year, but part of it is my fault as well; I didn’t pursue outside scholarships at all this year… hopefully the following years will be a little better as my dad is searching for a job and I’ll be actively pushing for outside scholarships. Still, I don’t see how this offer can be beat by any other comparable schools unless by a very small margin.</p>
<p>I still haven’t received my aid decision 
I contacted them and they said I should expect to hear by Wednesday. Hope everything’s fine. Any international students hear yet?</p>
<p>@kiruyama - We got Perkins loan as well - I think ANYTHING from Perkins loan is surprising, because that is for students with the <em>most</em> need, and you and I don’t qualify (or you didn’t when you filled out the FAFSA). I think Caltech is dumping a lot of its own money into Perkins or something to make it more attractive to middle-income students.</p>
<p>Did you call Caltech about your changed finances?</p>
<p>Mine was significantly less generous than UChicago’s package.</p>
<p>^ I had the exact opposite occur - my UChicago package is pretty much unaffordable. My Caltech aid is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a while :)</p>
<p>I get somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 from the school in exchange for me throwing away the best 4 years of my life.</p>
<p>“Throwing away”?</p>
<p>THROWING AWAY?!</p>
<p>Spending 4 years learning science, mathematics, technology and engineering from the most amazing place in the world is “THROWING AWAY” those years?!</p>
<p>Honestly, it all sounds better in theory. In practice, however, it is a different story…</p>