<p>My family is middle/upper middle class and probably wont be eligible for a whole lot of fafsa aid, etc, but with a single parent 40k a year will still be a strain. I was wondering what top schools other than princeton offer great financial aid programs?</p>
<p>Most of them do. Williams College in particular is extremely generous with aid.</p>
<p>If you're looking for merit-aid, though, there's a different set of (less selective) schools you should be looking at.</p>
<p>Vassar's pretty cool. I second Williams. I heard Yale is okay.</p>
<p>At 40k, there are several dozen colleges that will serve you well. For upper middle class folks, though, Princeton will likely only be topped by merit aid schools - that's why they instituted the "no-loan" policy, as they feared losing students to the Vanderbilts, etc. of the world (and likely were.)</p>
<p>I think there is a bit of a disconnect here as OP said</p>
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My family is middle/upper middle class and probably wont be eligible for a whole lot of fafsa aid, etc, **but with a single parent 40k a year will still be a strain. **
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<p>If you are from an upper middle class family that would most likely not be eligible for aid from schools that offer need based aid, as great as the FA can be a princeton, yale, williams and vassar they are all schools that give aid based on demonstrated need so they will not help your cause as you would end up paying full freight or pretty close to it once they look at your full financial picture of income/assets and obtain the financial information from your non-custodial parent.</p>
<p>I think that you need to look at schools where you would be at the top of the applicant pool for merit aid. This may even mean looking at a school that is slghtly below HYP and the ususal suspects in the rankings :eek:</p>
<p>I disagree. Even if your family makes $100,000 per year, you can still get very respectable aid. I don't know what your definition of uppermiddle class is (or whatever you are), but this may help.</p>
<p>If you have an EFC of zero, all the HYPSM should be very generous to you.</p>
<p>I hear Cal Tech gives lots of aid</p>
<p>bing, often times many factors are taken into account. Having several children in college or a kid in prep school, will increase your chances of getting financial aid. For a good representation of financial aid, see <a href="http://collegeaid.uchicago.edu/prospective/average_aid.shtml%5B/url%5D">http://collegeaid.uchicago.edu/prospective/average_aid.shtml</a></p>
<p>If you think you will not get a lot of financial aid, I agree with sybbie in that looking for merit money would be a good idea. To check to see how much aid you will get, there are a number of online EFC calculators, including one on this site. </p>
<p>For schools that offer financial aid, it is important to see what factors they take into account, the average debt at graduation, and what perentage of the package is composed of loans. Princeton does not include loans, but it is the only college to have such a policy. </p>
<p>If you are interested in engineering, Olin and Cooper Union are tuition-free. There are still costs, of course, but the overall price is much lower than comparable schools. </p>
<p>Among the top universities, Rice, Emory, and WUStL are merit aid friendly.</p>