My earlier post discussed incomes of up to $200. It mentioned 99% of Yale FA applicants in the $150k to $200k income group received generous grants, an income group for which both Harvard and Yale claim to be less expensive than top publics.</p>
<p>
This thread is titled “difference between an ivy and a top public”, and most ivies have generous FA policies. For example, I get the following NPC FA grant sizes for a 4-person family with 1 in college that has a $200k income (split up as $100k x2 ) and not large assets for the following 5 ivies. If anything Columbia and Penn seem more generous than HYP with these financial parameters.</p>
<p>Columbia – $24,500 grant
Penn — $20,000 grant
Harvard – $19,500 grant
Yale – $19,000 grant
Princeton – $10,000 grant</p>
I’ll use Brown as an example. On Brown’s website at <a href=“http://www.brown.edu/about/facts/financial-aid”>http://www.brown.edu/about/facts/financial-aid</a> they mention 53 international freshman received aid or 223 international students across the full 4-year class in 2013-14. In Brown’s CDS at <a href=“Office of Institutional Research | Brown University”>Office of Institutional Research | Brown University; , they mention 211 internationals received FA across the full 4-year class in 2012-13, so one might estimate ~211/4 ~= 53 in the freshman class. Both sources are reasonably consistent with one another when you consider they are looking at different years, and both sources suggest most international students do not receive need-based grant FA at Brown, disagreeing with the numbers in the links you listed. Stanford’s CDS suggests far less aid is available for internationals than Brown – only 114/4 ~= 28 international freshman receiving need-based grant aid. Perhaps the difference relates to different definitions of “aid”, such as your link with the large totals including loans.</p>
<p>I don’t think this is the norm with need based FA in private colleges. You probably have assets that are considered liquidable?
I have a different experience. I have 2 kids go to college at the same time (MIT and Penn). I pay about $15,000 more a year for the second kid, not $60,000 when both of them were in college. I have decent asset too.</p>
<p>I would have guessed that net $130 is close to $200 gross so, if there are savings/investments, such a family would generally not likely to get much financial aid. </p>
<p>@Data10
The “Desperate Guide” data I cited apparently is a few years old.
Their numbers for Stanford and Williams line up with CDS numbers from 2009-10.
Their “% Intl Awarded Aid” figures represent the percentage of all undergrads receiving aid.
For Stanford, according to the CDS for that year, 258 internationals got aid out of 469, or 55.01%.
For Williams, according to the CDS for that year, 133 internationals got aid out of 143, or 93.01%.
The percentage of internationals receiving aid at those 2 schools has dropped since that year (to 63.5% at Williams and 20.2% at Stanford in 2013-14, according to CDS figures).</p>
<p>For Brown, the 2009-10 CDS numbers don’t line up with the Desperate Guide" numbers.
According to the Brown CDS for that year, 174 internationals got aid out of 536, or ~32%
(not the 59.02% cited by Desperate Guide, and not a majority). The average amount was $37,734 (not the $42,860 cited by DG). Perhaps DG did not use figures from the same year for all schools. </p>
<p>According to Yale’s 2013-14 CDS, 349 of 570 international undergrads received FA that year (~61%).
According to Princeton’s 2013-14 CDS, 408 of 569 international undergrads received FA (~72%).
So it appears that at some selective private schools (but not at all, or not in every year), a majority of internationals receive FA.</p>
As I mentioned earlier, there are only 6 US academic focused colleges for which international FA is need blind and meets full need. Most international students at those 6 colleges no doubt receive notable FA. However, the vast majority of other elite US colleges have lesser FA for international students than for US students. The degree to which international students get cut varies quite a bit from college to college. For example, Cornell is especially highly regarded outside of the US, yet fewer than 14% of international undergrad students receive FA… only a small fraction of the of the percentage of US students that receive FA. Some elite private colleges with generous FA for US students are even more stingy for internationals, giving FA to fewer than 10% of international undergrads. At many elite US colleges, the difference between US and international FA is enough to significantly pull down the overall average.</p>
<p>As an aside, people have talked about the per capita rates of achievement of the top publics compared to the Ivies, and in my own personal rankings (that look at 4 factors of alumni success), I’d put Cal just at the end of the Ivies (similar to Rice & JHU) with UMich and UVa just a little lower. That’s because of the 4 factors, in 2 that are solely per-capita-based, Cal actually produces more prestigious award winners (like the Rhodes, Fulbright, etc.) and more go on to get PhDs than UPenn, while in the “American Leaders” category (which is a blend of per capita and absolute numbers of leaders in business, government, and the arts, but likely weighted towards per capita because the WAS LACs are still top 15 in that category), Cal at 13th beats out Columbia and just trails Cornell & Brown. In getting in to elite professional grad schools, Cal lags in per capita rates, though UVa and UMich just trail the last Ivy (Cornell). In absolute numbers, UMich only trails HYPS while Cal trails those 5 + UPenn & Duke. In terms of undergrads who go on to get science and engineering PhDs, Cal is #1 in absolute numbers & UMich is #3 with Cornell in between. Even by per capita rates, Cal beats out Dartmouth, Columbia, and UPenn in that category.</p>
<p>You do realize that your EFC decreases when you have more than one in college?</p>
<p>We figured our EFC out for when we have two in college, using a rather high EFC of $40,000 per year (ours is really more like $35,000). For each year we have two in college, the EFC will be reduced drastically, to $48,000 for two in college versus $80,000 if they didn’t consider how many in college.</p>
<p>The more overlap, the less you have to pay overall. coolweather’s experience is the general case.</p>
<p>Unless you have an EFC of 99,999 with one kid in college, and still an EFC of 99,999 when the second is in college. I don’t see that from 130,000 net salary.</p>
<p>I don’t think Parchment breaks down cross-admits by state or major or income level, however. I’m of the opinion that the top publics (and certain other publics in certain majors) are an attractive proposition vs. the Ivies/equivalents for in-state folks who are full-pay everywhere and usually not as attractive a proposition for OOS kids who can get in to an Ivy/Ivy-equivalent (because there would be little or no cost savings).</p>
<p>The folks who are full-pay and cost-conscious and have good public alternatives may not have applied to S (or Ivies) in the first place. Why apply somewhere that you would not be able to afford or don’t think is worth the cost? I know that a relative limited his daughters to Cal (well, the UC’s; but essentially Cal). The first one would have done well anywhere and almost certainly could have gotten in to Ivies and maybe SM as well. She went on to get a MD from UCSF (obviously numerous other prestigious med schools as well). Also got a Masters from H later for the heck of it.</p>
<p>That is true in Virginia as well. Many top kids do not bother to apply outside our very good instate schools. The ones that do have already shown they would quite possibly pick another school, like an Ivy, if they are admitted. For anyone in Virginia whose EFC is above about 22,000 these days , our state schools are a great deal . Unless a kid gets lucky and gets into one of the top schools with great financial aid or who pursues merit aid elsewhere, state schools can be a good choice.</p>
<p>That’s why OH always sends more kids than MI to Ivies/Ivy-equivalents (at some schools, more than twice as many) even though they are 2 states of similar size in the same geographic region.</p>
<p>That said, I think that it really depends on what your kid is aiming for. For example, Haas, McIntire, and Ross are targets for the Street. However, while Ross has preferred admits (which are tough to get), entrance in to Haas or McIntire is not guaranteed even if you originally get in to Cal or UVa. In IN, Kelley of IU is also a Street target and you can get in directly from HS, but getting in to their IB or IM workshops (which are the main ways to get recruited for Wall Street) is a competitive process and not everyone gets in to those programs.</p>
<p>PT, I see the same thing here. Kids who would be admitted and do well at top privates stay in state because it is so much cheaper and the quality is there. </p>
<p>Yes, this. I’ve long argued that the “cross-admit data” are not worth the toilet paper they’re printed on. Why? Because if your first choice is your state flagship, you’re not going to apply to an Ivy as a back-up. But if your first choice is an Ivy, you might well apply to your state flagship as a back-up. So “cross-admit data” is asymmetrical: the cross-admits who ultimately choose an Ivy over their state flagship will almost uniformly be people who preferred the Ivy ex ante but also applied to their state flagship as a back-up, while those who preferred the state flagship ex ante will only show up in the “cross-admit data” in rare instances. More broadly, if you peruse the “cross-admit” data you’ll find precious few examples where the less selective school wins the cross-admit “battles.” This doesn’t prove that the more selective school is almost always more desirable; it only proves that college applicants are realistic in their application strategies and once they’ve identified their “dream” school, they apply mainly to schools of comparable or lesser selectivity as back-ups. </p>
<p>“One additional question I had: how much do department rankings matter in terms of recruitment? I find it surprising that although Cal EECS is ranked a lot higher than similar programs at all the ivy schools, the engineering programs still have lower acceptance rates at the ivies (a berkeley prof told me EECS hovers around 10-15% while schools like Columbia are around 7%).”</p>
<p>@puzzled123 - Please forgive me for not having read if there are other replies to this, but there is an important demographic reason for the above. Around the same time that CS (and other “modern” STEM fields) were expanding the most quickly, there were still quotas on Jewish and Asian faculty at a lot of the ivies/privates. This led to excellent Jewish/Asian faculty being snapped up by (and going to) some of the state schools, including some of the Big Ten and of course, the UCs, in particular, Berkeley.</p>
<p>Coming from North Carolina, where the public university system is strong (and fan loyalty equally so) and generally quite affordable, I agree with bclintonk and Purple Titan. Only a few of the very top students in the state apply to Ivy League or other highly-ranked private schools. The vast majority of these very top students choose UNC, NC State, or yes, even lower-ranked state universities, over the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, etc. by not applying to those other schools despite being possible, sometimes very likely, admits.</p>
<p>There are people on CC who really don’t get this, but this happens all the time in North Carolina and probably in most states in the country – mainly the ones that are not located in the Northeast. Cross-admit data are worth little because they don’t account for this when they purport to measure student preferences.</p>
<p>One way to measure student preferences would be to ask every senior in the country where he/she would go to college if given the choice of any college in the country.</p>