If you try the Harvard net price calculator, a student getting a $46,000 grant from Harvard is still likely to come from a family with income well over $100,000 per year. I.e. even many of the financial aid recipients at Harvard come from the upper levels of the family income scale in the US.
About a third pay nothing.
The problem with “averages” is that, for many people in the middle income brackets with decent but not amazing stats, it can be very difficult to figure out if YOU will fall above or below the “average,” and how much above or below. Not everyone is able to compete for a spot at those colleges with generous aid policies, which make it a bit more easy to determine where you may fall. For many families, even a $5,000 deviation from the “average” could make or break a decision. But they won’t know until their particular numbers come out in the spring.
@prospect1, true, you won’t know exact numbers unless you get admitted, but if the parents just have salary jobs, the NPC’s should be pretty accurate.
If there ends up being a gap between what they say you can pay and what you think you can pay, I guess it’s time to either re-evaluate or go the loan route.
Yeah, “average” isn’t a very useful statistic. Median is a little better. Having median, average, and standard deviation helps paint a better picture. I’d be pretty surprised if the distribution was normal either.
Also … there was this thread:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-connecticut/1791654-financial-aid-taken-away.html
While there is also risk in guaranteed scholarships (merit), it seems more of a manageable risk.
EFC isn’t stable either; it ebbs and flows. This year it ebbed in a big way for some families:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1789580-2016-2017-college-financial-aid-formula-penalizes-middle-class-8-000-p1.html
I don’t fault anyone for relying on grant aid to attend a university. Two of the schools DD has applied to use grant aid in a big way in fact.
But I will aways have this vision of hooded gnomes in a smokey room ladling FA numbers from a murky cauldron into some supplicant’s plate. Thinking there’s a better way, or at least a more reliable way.
NPCs do not typically tell you what merit awards you are going to get, which are often decisions made by admissions to lure you (as the article suggests), not by the FA office. The ultimate price remains a crapshoot.
@prospect1, true, except for automatic merit awards.
Minimum net price in Harvard’s net price calculator is $4,600 for domestic students.
Not sure where you got those figures, but Stanford’s own 2014-15 Common Data Set reports that in 2014-15, 3,414 Stanford undergrads received financial aid, out of a total of 6,980 undergrads. That’s 49.6% receiving aid, so 50.4% not receiving aid, i.e., full-pays. The percentage of full-pay freshmen was actually slightly higher, 53.5% (779 of 1,677 freshmen received financial aid). Perhaps you’re looking at older figures, during the recession? FA budgets at some schools did uptick sharply for a time, but are now close to pre-recession norms.
Percentage of full-pays at some other schools, per their 2014-15 CDS:
Harvard 39.5 * [note: 2013-14 CDS data, latest available]
Yale 50.1
Princeton 41.2 *
Cornell 52.6
Brown 54.8
Dartmouth 48.9
Penn 52.2
Duke 55.3
Northwestern 55.8
Johns Hopkins 53.5
Vanderbilt 51.6
Rice 60.8
Georgetown 61.8
Notre Dame 54.9
- Harvard and Princeton have uncommonly generous need-based FA policies, with students from households earning up to $200K typically receiving FA---or higher if more than one child is attending college. If I recall correctly, Princeton also recently increased its FA to cover the cost of "eating clubs," well entrenched off-campus private clubs that traditionally have provided meals and social events and have been the center of social life for well-heeled Princetonians. Since it was deemed socially divisive to allow the cost of club membership to exclude less affluent students, the university decided to provide financial aid to allow the less affluent to join the clubs.
Bottom line, on average about half or slightly more than half of the students attending the most elite private research universities are full-pays.
Both of the schools my daughters attend had NPC with the merit included. They asked for the scores and gpa, and it was included. For one daughter, it was very good that it did because when her award came out it was a lower amount. After questioning, I found out that the school’s data base had an older, lower, ACT score and it hadn’t been updated. Would have cost us $5k/yr if I hadn’t caught the difference from the NPC and what was offered.
Exactly. When you’re looking for a place to live, all other things being equal, you’re going to go with a more attractive (or just generally “better feeling” area). I see no reason that college shouldn’t be any different—after all, this is going to be the kid’s home for four years, so why not have pleasant surroundings?
I’ve said elsewhere that when my oldest toured Georgetown, she said she didn’t like it. I asked her why, and she hesitated, because she said it was such a little thing that it sounded dumb. I pressed, and she finally said it was because she didn’t like the smell in several of the buildings. Well, I hadn’t smelled anything off, but you know what? I told her—and I firmly believe this—that that was a completely valid reason to knock the school off her list. I mean, if you have the choice, why spend four years living in a place that smells bad to you? Or that looks ugly to you? Or that isn’t your preferred architectural style? Or whatever that people might think is shallow, but is actually a meaningful part of one’s life.
And that’s why I will never criticize a college for doing silly cosmetic things to attract students. I may not like all of them, but someone out there presumably does, and it’s important to their experience. (And if it isn’t important to anyone’s experience? Then there’ll be no payoff to the school, and others will learn to avoid the same mistake.)
PurpleTitan, No full pay students don’t subsidize those getting reduced tuition. Investments and alumnae contributions bring in huge amounts of money-more then covering the reduction in tuition for those getting grants/scholarships.
Depends on the school.
Not all schools with high list prices have huge endowments.
Specifically, @OHMomof2 was wondering how schools without a large endowment manage to afford a high percentage of the student body getting merit/finbaid awards.
And even among elite privates, you don’t have to go too far down the list to reach schools whose endowments just can’t be big enough to pay for all of their fin aid/merit outlays.
Say a school has a $3B endowment. A 5% draw is $150M. Say half the student body gets fin aid or merit. 4K students. Average of $40K. That’s $160M each year. And that’s with the endowment paying for nothing else (like academics/research).
But, because that’s an average, not a uniform f/a amount, the “official” total would probably be a lot less. For a school of 4000, I’d say $75 million would be closer to the mark. Your point is well taken, however. That’s still quite a chunk - 50% of the endowment return.
You can only drill down so far when talking about generalities. As you know there is both ‘parental contribution’ and ‘student contribution’. It’s the parental contributions that come to ‘zero’.
As I believe someone noted, the student contribution is generally intended to come from Work Study or a Summer job, but the reality of that is it can be met with loans or outside scholarships or even, parental contributions if they don’t want their DS/DD to have to sweat her brow or bruise his heel while studying at the academic institutions of the West.
Once again, generalities. There are many kinds of financial assistance being given. You cannot quote from the need-based figures and assume that the remainder is full pay.
^https://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2013#financial
I still get 49% received need based aid at Stanford.
I’m glad I can still do a basic math function.
JustOneDad, I really don’t get your logic. I posted a fact which you corrected and then you write about “generalities”.
I guess I can make the “generality” that my son will be full pay at all but the most generous schools. And Yes, I do assume that the remainder of the students, who don’t receive financial aid, are indeed full pay.
@txstella You said “not even 50% of families receive aid”. Had you been talking about need-based aid, I wouldn’t have felt a need to clarify, but you went on to extrapolate how many are full-pay and that caused the “generality” to diverge even more.
49; #56
BC’s numbers pretty much nail it.
While his figures don’t account for merit aid, that list of fancy schools provide very little merit aid (Vandy and Rice being modest exceptions). So pretty much, if you don’t get need-based aid, then you are paying full sticker price.
Those elite schools typically have annual stickers of $60+k, and they need to get half of their customers to full pay. So pretty much 50% of the customers are from 1% families. That’s $380k in annual income.
While those those schools provide awesome assistance to lower income smart kids, they still have a budget for that assistance. And the budget at Georgetown and Duke is a lot smaller than the budget at Harvard and Princeton. Which means they all work hard (using early decision, legacy admissions and other means) to find all the necessary full payors.
If you are a 3% or 5% or 10% family and hit the donut hole for need-based aid, those schools are beyond expensive. Look at what full paying for one kid at Georgetown did to Martin O’Malley. Those families really can’t access those schools. Unless they are nuts like O’Malley, they steer their kids to schools a notch or two down where the kids can get substantial merit aid discounts. They can’t afford Georgetown, but they can afford Fordham with merit aid.
As a friend describes full paying, for each kid you buy a new Mercedes. Next year, set that one on fire and buy a second. Next year set that one on fire and buy a third. Next set that on fire and buy a fourth. Few can do that for one kid. Very few can do that for 2 or 3 kids.