Comparing colleges, some of which claim to “meet full need”, using a hypothetical student with parents who earn $150,000, have $10,000 cash and $100,000 in financial investments (stocks, bonds, etc.), a $750,000 house with $200,000 mortgage, we get:
| College | MFN? | Net Price | NPC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Harvard | Y | $18,800 | Net Price Calculator | Harvard |
| USC | Y | $79,136 | USC Financial Aid : Net Price Calculator |
| UCLA (CA resident) | N | $31,471 | UCLA | NET PRICE CALCULATOR |
| UCLA (non-CA resident) | N | $66,907 | UCLA | NET PRICE CALCULATOR |
Lol about USC. That’s meeting full need for someone, I guess, but not anyone who actually NEEDS it.
How much it means might depend upon your situation.
For the small business owners that I know, “meets full need” doesn’t mean anything.
If you are retired and are living largely off money that you have in the bank, the money that you thought was retirement funds starts to look like college funds to the schools. It might seem unusual to be retired with students who are still in university or even still in high school, but it definitely does happen.
Fortunately at least for us we were able to find schools that were good fits for the student and that also met our definition of “affordable”. However, this does not mean that these were the schools that claimed to meet full need.
And in the example that you site in the original post, the net price for USC does not seem to meet what I would have meant by “full need”.
Running NPCs should really be step 0 of putting together a college list.
Yes - but the answer is different school by school - and includes things like home equity (differing amounts) - as well as loans and work study which some use and some don’t.
Obviously, USC’s definition of “need” in this case is different from your (or Harvard’s) definition of “need”. It is not hard for a college to “meet full need” when it determines that you have little or no “need”.
If “meets full need” schools meant something, one would expect that if a school meets 100% of demonstrated need, that it would cost less for students from similar financial situtations than a school that does not meet 100% of need. That, however, is not the case.
In December 2022 I did some research (post here) for a student who needed significant financial assistance. Here is the list of schools that I researched, sorted by percentage of need met (as listed in College Board’s profile for that school):
| School | % Need Met | Net price for $0-30k | Net Price for $30-48k |
|---|---|---|---|
| Occidental | 100% | $13,983 | $13,285 |
| Pitzer | 100% | $985 | $4,759 |
| Stanford | 100% | $0 | $0 |
| Whitman | 94% | $14,774 | $18,861 |
| Santa Clara | 89% | $23,618 | $27,708 |
| U. of Puget Sound | 88% | $9,749 | $12,232 |
| U. of Redlands | 83% | $13,981 | $12,984 |
| Whittier | 82% | $14,301 | $13,280 |
| Pepperdine | 76% | $28,304 | $26,285 |
| Willamette | 75% | $25,081 | $24,078 |
| U. of the Pacific | 71% | $10,439 | $13,200 |
| U. of San Francisco | 71% | $30,235 | $30,787 |
| Loyola Marymount | 70% | $28,383 | $22,329 |
Here is that same list of schools, sorted from lowest net price for families earning $0-30k to highest:
| School | % Need Met | Net price for $0-30k | Net Price for $30-48k |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stanford | 100% | $0 | $0 |
| Pitzer | 100% | $985 | $4,759 |
| U. of Puget Sound | 88% | $9,749 | $12,232 |
| U. of the Pacific | 71% | $10,439 | $13,200 |
| U. of Redlands | 83% | $13,981 | $12,984 |
| Occidental | 100% | $13,983 | $13,285 |
| Whittier | 82% | $14,301 | $13,280 |
| Whitman | 94% | $14,774 | $18,861 |
| Santa Clara | 89% | $23,618 | $27,708 |
| Willamette | 75% | $25,081 | $24,078 |
| Pepperdine | 76% | $28,304 | $26,285 |
| Loyola Marymount | 70% | $28,383 | $22,329 |
| U. of San Francisco | 71% | $30,235 | $30,787 |
One can see that there are three schools (meeting between 71-88% of need) that have lower net prices than one of the 100% need met schools. There are two schools that meet 82% & 94% that are right behind the price of that 100% need-met school, too. U. of the Pacific, which only meets “71%” of need had a lower net price than seven other schools that meet a greater percentage of “need.”
All in all, I used to think that the percentage of need met meant something, but not anymore.
USC no longer uses home equity, but their NPC hasn’t been updated to reflect that, I think.
(Their NPC says its for a student entering in 2020). Extremely frustrating.
Also extremely frustrating that when they made that change, they didn’t grandfather in existing students who were already receiving financial aid. 
Wow, this is really interesting and great information to have. Kind of skews the “meets need” in some of the schools.
I laughed when I saw the USC stats! That’s exactly what I thought it would be. They are definitely making their money there! Nice business to be in!
But wouldn’t no longer assessing a part of home equity in the EFC formula make an impacted family’s NPC decrease?
Regardless, it is well known in the counselor community that USC is not all that generous with FA. USC regularly calculates NPCs for EFC 0 students with no assets in the $10K to $20K range. Which is ridiculous, I’m not sure how a thoughtful EFC formula could come up with that result. I have had EFC 0/no asset students appeal these results with no adjustment. None.
Yeah, I don’t see why you would care about that phrase. You need to check the NPC.
Here are the results of NPC runs for parents and student with all $0 income and assets information:
| College | MFN? | Net Price | NPC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Harvard | Y | $3,500 | Net Price Calculator |
| USC | Y | $11,727 | USC Financial Aid : Net Price Calculator |
| UCLA (CA resident) | N | $9,000 | https://app.financialaid.ucla.edu/FASEstimator/Dependent.aspx |
| UCLA (non-CA resident) | N | $40,206 | https://app.financialaid.ucla.edu/FASEstimator/Dependent.aspx |
Actually, a significant surprise is that UCLA actually lists in its NPC a non-zero grant offer to non-CA resident – but it is still far from being affordable for the example student. Although maybe it is a mistake in the NPC in that it reflects an older policy of offering grants as if the applicant were a CA resident but not covering the non-resident extra tuition that is currently $31,206 (a few years ago, UC announced stopping offering any grants to non-resident students other than in the context of merit scholarships).
There are a number of schools where the NPC is really inaccurate or hasn’t been updated in years. Baylor for example, is notoriously awful. Lovely school, but so misleading.
I feel for the families waiting on the new NPCs to come out with the new FAFSA info taken into account. I hope the schools realize how important it is to get it updated as soon as possible.
UCLA does not guarantee to meet full need for all accepted students. Not sure why you are comparing their net costs with schools like Harvard that have very generous need based aid awarding for all accepted students. This is not the case at UCLA.
UCLA is there as a comparison to USC (these two appear to be very popular cross applications), which does claim to “meet full need” but is commonly more expensive than UCLA for the same financial situation. Note that UCLA is clearly marked as not claiming to “meet full need” in the second column of the posted tables.
In any case, “meet full need” is a nice sounding marketing phrase that actually does not mean very much, since the college can define “need” however it wants.
And so can the applicant.
We found the NPC to be soooo important! We would fall into a similar situation as your “hypothetical” and “needed” to pay under $25,000 for school for each of our 2 kids. They are both at “meet full need” schools that do not include loans, and they will graduate without debt. But, for some schools the price far exceeded what we thought was our “need”. We eliminated those schools immediately! It seemed like a hard choice - but in the end it helped to make our choices clear.
We have not found that any calculator other than the individual school NPC can predict what any given school thinks is “need”. Each formula is different, for some it is higher than the FAFSA, for some it is lower.
And there are other schools that are misleading in the other direction. Mount Holyoke College, for example, includes home equity in their NPC formula as a much higher rate than they do in their actual FA calculations. When I directly asked one of their FA officers during a pre-read process why this was the case, they replied that they wanted the NPC to provide a conservative estimate of aid, so they wouldn’t disappoint applicants in the aid packages offered with acceptances.
Because of this though, many families who are comparison-shopping NPC’s could rule MHC out at “step 0,” which would be a shame.
That is very useful and interesting information. We just attended an online financial aid session with Mount Holyoke last week and the question of home equity came up. I asked specifically if they take all home equity into account and the financial aid officers told me they do. I was surprised by their response but your information gives me hope as a homeowner in SoCal (maybe they misunderstood my question 
). Mount Holyoke is on my daughter’s short list but the numbers do run a little high.
In some cases, a student can be worse off with a school that is stretching to be able to say that they “meet full need” by implementing a stingy formula.
If that same student applies to a school that calculates documented need more favorably, but doesn’t cover everything with need-based aid, that student still has the chance to fill the gap with merit scholarships, which will “stack” to get them to their calculated Family Contribution.
But if the formula is stingy, there’s no remedy. Additional merit scholarships will be absorbed into the need-based package - at best, they may cancel out loans, but the out-of-pocket won’t change.