<p>I know for a fact that all Ivy League schools have a very generous financial aid policy. Are there any schools that perhaps mirror the same caliber of financial aid?</p>
<p>A number of schools have committed to reducing student debt. You can find a partial list here, along with the details of their policies:</p>
<p>[Project</a> on Student Debt: Financial Aid Pledges](<a href=“http://projectonstudentdebt.org/pc_institution.php]Project”>http://projectonstudentdebt.org/pc_institution.php)</p>
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<p>There are different levels of generosity within those 8 schools.</p>
<p>Based on the net price calculators I have used for my daughter, Stanford is similar to Yale and Harvard and together these three offer the best financial aid, at least for my daughter. Next are Princeton and Chicago. For us it appears that Pomona, Amherst, Williams, and Wellesley offer financial aid similar to the other Ivys.</p>
<p>A simple method of comparison is the collegeboard website. You can look up comparable data when you look at data for each college, including the % of need met, etc. and the average amounts of merit aid. </p>
<p>For more detail, google “common data set” and the name of the college. The details on financial aid are usually towards the end. </p>
<p>Keep in mind that there may be some colleges that claim to meet “100% of need” but may consider need in their admissions. The most generous colleges are “need-blind” in admissions and meet 100% of need. </p>
<p>It is common for colleges to be less generous with financial aid for students accepted from a waiting list, and to be most generous with the students at the top of their applicant pool. Therefore, the most generous aid for most colleges is available for students at their safety school, not their reach school. A college that meets 60% of need overall may still meet 100% of need for a student they really want. </p>
<p>Also, remember that meeting 100% of need usually means taking out the maximum allowed amount of federally subsidized loans over 4 years (around $24,000) and doing work-study jobs during the school year. A few schools that had removed loans for lower income students have now gone back to expecting them.</p>
<p>Some of the most generous colleges for financial aid found themselves overwhelmed with applications from low income students and had to cut back.</p>
<p>Also, keep in mind that most public universities do not provide much need based aid to out of state students. There are some exceptions.</p>
<p>*I know for a fact that all Ivy League schools have a very generous financial aid policy. Are there any schools that perhaps mirror the same caliber of financial aid? *</p>
<p>I think that H, Y, P, and S have the BEST aid policies.</p>
<p>However, even the schools with the best aid policies will still expect families with high incomes to pay for most/all of the costs. There are families that don’t get any aid from these schools.</p>
<p>Vanderbilt U. in Tennessee meets 100% of need with no loans. Priority deadline is 2/5. Vanderbilt uses the CSS Profile in addition to the FAFSA; we haven’t gotten any numbers back yet, of course, but I suspect the EFC will be higher b/c of the questions on the Profile. It is highly selective - about 12-18% of applicants are accepted.</p>
<p>It’s a very special place (for the right person…male), but Wabash University is very generous.</p>
<p>When rounding out D’s application list we were attentive to adding schools with different FA policies and ways of calculating. Other than Stanford - at which she was denied SCEA - we chose schools that do offer some component of merit aid as well as a range of selectivity. Some times a school that doesn’t guarantee to meet need will meet or exceed with merit money. She has 2 state schools which offer decent merit aid, 2 need blind full need met schools (one Profile and one ‘in-house’ FA supplement with loan limit), and 2 FAFSA only privates which offer merit scholarships and institutional grants that skew towards most desirable candidates. The jury is still out, but I feel pretty good about the strategy. I might have added one more less reachy reach that is no or low loan, but D didn’t find one that really caught fire with her.</p>
<p>Answer: yes, many - many chances for you to search on CC in the many such threads</p>
<p>if all you count is “need”, maybe not</p>
<p>if you count all aid (“need” based and merit) many schools</p>
<p>its the “net” cost that counts for a specific student, not the aid policies</p>
<p>that’s why McGill is such a good deal: net $28k all in</p>
<p>U Rochester - 73% of students get non-need based aid</p>
<p>I have been doing the NPC’s for various schools to try to judge their relative fin aid generosity. I’ve found that Williams, Amherst, Haverford, Wash & Lee and Swarthmore are all near the top, right after HYP and Stanford.<br>
To an earlier poster’s point about variation among Ivies, Penn came out almost twice as much as Princeton.</p>