Does Dartmouth live up to its "affordability" website claims?

On Dartmouth’s financial aid FAQ’s, the school says, “More information from you or your family, including copies of better financial aid from other schools, may result in award adjustments consistent with an equitable treatment of all our students.” Does this really happen? Say my kid has a full ride (or even “just” full tuition) to a prestigious liberal arts school–is it really worth it to let Dartmouth know? We certainly don’t have the money to pay for Dartmouth, and simply going there entails other expenses in itself (i.e., distance to travel). The “affordability” info Dartmouth puts out there is encouraging. I just wonder who had experience with this.

Speaking from my own experience, Dartmouth (for the most part) does a very good job covering costs. During my college decision process, a liberal arts school consistently rated better for financial aid (it’s one of AWS) than Dartmouth did not come close to Dartmouth’s financial aid offer. I was not a recruited athlete at Dartmouth. Most of my friends here report similar experiences. Hope this helps!

Dartmouth really does a good job in meeting need. We did not submit other aid packages but I can tell you our award was increased when we provided additional financial info.

Writing our checks still hurts but honestly the figure is reasonable.

If it is a merit scholarship, it will not matter because Dartmouth does not give merit money. It will only consider need based aid packages.

Dartmouth states in its request for a financial review that if you have a more competitive award to submit it.

In our experience, D was accepted to the AWS schools (received likely letter/early write letters with in one day of each other), one, which was tied for her first choice. At that time, one of the AWS schools they did offer a better financial aid package. We sent it in with the request for review form and told the school while D was her first choice, the other school was a more financially feasible option for our household. Dartmouth met the package and our aid package was consistent over D’s 4 years at Dartmouth (we had no major fluctuations in income)

Same experience as @sybbie719 although the other offer was another Ivy, which Dartmouth had (may still have) a pretty firm policy of matching.

That’s really interesting to hear, @sybbie719. Dartmouth did match my daughter’s offer from another Ivy League school, but one of the reasons she ultimately went with the other school was that we had concerns that Dartmouth would not maintain the offer after the first year. Guess that fear was baseless.

So just got accepted and out of the $69,944 tuition cost. Dartmouth is giving me a $43,558 general scholarship leaving me to pay $26,386 which I’ll probably get some through scholarships.

That was one of the first questions that I asked when we got the revised FA offer. My D is an '08 and the other school had no loans before D implemented their no loan policy so my D was able to graduate debt free.

D was Class of 2013. Dartmouth did not apply any of the later changes to us, and I felt the award each year faithfully reflected our slightly varying income. I felt treated very fairly all four years.

It is highly unlikely that this is going to happen. Your outside scholarships will first reduce your self help aid (student contribution through summer earnings). After that they will reduce the Dartmouth need based aid $ for $.

Dartmouth meets 100% demonstrated need. The $26,386 is what the school believes that your parents can afford to pay based on their income an assets (minus your student contribution).

In a nutshell, yes. My net cost ended up being lower than what the NPC had said, and I only applied to schools where I felt that the figure the NPC gave me was feasible.