HMC uses the CollegeBoard NPC template with its own parameters, like many other colleges.
https://www.hmc.edu/admission/afford/determining-your-eligibility/ has an NPC link that points to https://npc.collegeboard.org/student/app/hmc .
How does Rice come out financially? On other threads you say that Rice is far and away her first choice!
Also, you talk bout having your daughter look at some schools…like Vandy, for example. Sounds like she is a HS JUNIOR.
Please be alerted…the net price calculators are currently set for students entering college fall 2018…and are using 2016 income tax form data.
If your kiddo isn’t starting college until 2019, you should look at those net price calculators again…in the early fall…when they reset for the 2019 freshmen.
And lastly…remember as pointed out…there are some meets full need colleges with MUCH deeper pockets, and need based aid for higher income earners. This is not the case everywhere that guarantees to meet full need.
Mudd teams with CMC and Scripps for sports. They are still D3, but have some decent teams. Women’s volleyball won the NCAA D3 title last fall. @VickiSoCal
Rice has merit up to 28K+ and their COA is about 10K less than average schools due to a lower tuition. Their NPC is on their page and takes a few minutes to fill out. I haven’t heard of them stacking Need and Merit. They didn’t for my child.
It depends on the specific type of unearned income, and there are also differences between federal and state income taxes.
I agree with a previous poster who said that most of the EFC difference that OP came across is probably due to home equity. MIT does not factor home equity into the need calculation, while Harvey Mudd does (capped at 2x income).
Okay, I did find a mistake!! In the place where the students info is entered, Harvey Mudd has a line that is not on the MIT version (since my info is saved I had just “next”ed through the pages. That question was about real estate equity the student holds and somehow the value 150,000 was in that spot. I took that out and now the numbers for HM are much more what would be expected at about double MiT estimate. Sorry about the panic but also glad you all got me to look closely at each form and not cancel our trip to CA!!! Going now to recalculate at those other schools!
I know the result isn’t accurate since she isn’t attending next year but felt it would give trends on which schools gave us better numbers and if a place was generally feasible so we knew where to “cast our nets”.
They did not even use the first dollars of merit scholarship to replace loans and work expectation before reducing FA grants?
Yes, the difference is primarily driven by equity in the primary home. Home equity could increase your “income” as much as 5 times for financial aid purpose. Only a few colleges exclude primary home for consideration. Among them are MIT and Caltech.
Yes, CalTech is slow. Not quite as slow as Tufts but slow. She has a few of these on her early looks because they are swim safeties. We are lucky enough to need to look at academic safeties, financial safeties and swim safeties. And try to find the magical alignment of all three. CalTech is a big ole reach for admittance but while we were in the area we thought why not.
Harvey Mudd is more of a swim match along with Vandy, MIT, CalPoly-SLO, University of New Mexico (her true financial safety), Mines, etc.
Unfortunately Rice is a reach for swim and probably admission too (do they say at a certain selectivity it’s a reach for most everyone?) We will know more after sectionals. It wouldn’t take too much improvement to put her more solidly in the mix there.
Does “meets full need” mean anything?
In my opinion, yes it does.
If colleges are making this claim in good faith, it means that for many low to upper middle income families, these colleges will tend to have lower net prices than colleges that don’t even make the claim.
It does not mean all colleges making the claim will be equally affordable … but that may not matter, if the “full need” colleges that accept you are more affordable than otherwise attractive colleges that don’t make the claim. Of course you still need to run the NPCs on your initial candidate schools. However, for many excellent students, the “full need” list is a good starting point to identify which reach/match schools are most worth taking the time to do that. Almost all these schools not only over good-to-excellent n-b aid, they are also have excellent academic reputations.
An important caveat is that need-based aid isn’t the best focal point in every cost-management strategy. In some cases, merit awards will result in a lower net price. In many other cases, it makes sense to consider the lower sticker prices of in-state public schools.
In our experience, when both our sons were in college, the FA packages were wildly different – not only in terms of amounts, but as well in terms of how the FA was packaged between loans. grants, subsidized vs. non-subsidized. It was quite interesting, to say the least!
This is not necessarily true.
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1675058-meet-full-need-schools-can-vary-significantly-in-their-net-prices.html is an older thread on this subject. USC claims (and did at the time) to “meet full need” for all students. However, most California resident students saw lower net prices at UCLA which did not make that claim (since non-California residents did not get anything close).
If a “meet full need” school has a definition of “need” that is not generous to the student and family, then it may be more expensive than a school that makes no such claim. Also, if a “meet full need” school requires both parents’ finances, students with divorced parents may find it to be more expensive than a school that does not make that claim but only requires the finances of the custodial parent.
^ Note the last sentence in post #29.
Yes, in many cases an in-state public university will offer a lower net price than some “meet full need” schools (even though very few public universities make the “meet full need” claim").
Assume a family in Connecticut makes $90K/year, has one child, $45K in cash savings, and $45K in home equity. Here are some net price estimates I get:
$11,218 … MIT
$21,968 … Cornell
$23,743 … Brown
$23,785 … Harvey Mudd
$28,837 … Syracuse
$29,259 … UConn-Storrs (in-state)
$32,566 … URochester
$39,174 … Providence College
$70,302 … Boston University
The first four claim to meet full need. The next five don’t.
I’ve run many of these trials, and generally (though not in every single case) find the “full need” colleges have lower net prices estimates than the alternatives (assuming merit aid or in-state public tuition rates aren’t in the picture). In some cases (as above) some “full need” schools will offer lower net prices than even an in-state public university.
YMMV. Yes, you need to run those NPCs … but you have to start somewhere. The best starting point is not the same for every family. IMO the 40-60 colleges claiming to meet 100% of demonstrated need do represent a good starting point for many families (esp. low to upper middle income families with excellent students seeking affordable reach and match schools with solid academic reputations). It’s certainly possible, though, that some schools are playing fast and loose with the “full need” claim. It also may be the case that different need-assessment formulas are skewed to favor different income levels differently. It would be nice if all these colleges could get together and agree on common standards.
The first hurdle any student has with those very generous colleges that guarantee to meet full need for all…is getting accepted. The four schools @tk21769 listed in the above post accept about 10% of applicants. I believe MIT is even lower.
Translation…90% do not get accepted.
The very generous need based aid these schools give does you no good unless you are an accepted student.
So…I guess I don’t necessarily agree that these schools are a “good starting point for many families”. The student needs to be a competitive applicant for these to be a good starting point.
BUT IMO every family should build their list from the bottom up…meaning find a sure thing and AFFORDABLE school the kid likes first. And if the school has rolling admissions or early action…so much the better. It’s nice to have an acceptance that is affordable early in the application process.
Hope your Mudd visit is productive, OP. My D graduated from Mudd last year, so feel free to PM me with questions. 
I did the same thing with the same parameters, except that the family lives in California ($300,000 house, $255,000 mortgage).
Claim to “meet full need”:
$31,457 University of Southern California
$36,242 Washington University in St. Louis
In-state public:
$05,568 Riverside City College (commuter, community college)
$15,891 University of California - Riverside (commuter)
$22,866 University of California - Los Angeles
$28,746 California State University - Los Angeles
@ucbalumnus Interesting…though I would add that the median house price in CA is $524,000, and in my neck of the woods, you can’t get a crumbling old stucco box for under $700,000, even if you’re willing to live in a fairly high crime neighborhood. I think part of the issue for OP, and for a lot of us, is the great disparity in housing prices across different regions of the US seems to be accounted for my some colleges but not all. So the net price calculators do end up spitting out some pretty divergent numbers. I ran numbers for about twenty colleges and got vastly different EFCs for our family.
Let’s not assume averages tell any family what their package will be. And remember how much the CSS looks at.
One other issue with most “meet full need” colleges for a very large percentage of students is that they require both parents’ finances in a divorce situation. Divorced parents usually have less money because they have been funding their lawyers’ kids’ college funds, and are less likely to be cooperative.
Here are net price estimates I get for a few other colleges that claim to meet full need (based on the same inputs I used for post #32):
$14,718 … Bates
$19,218 … Wake Forest
$19,280 … Vassar
$19,418 … Grinnell
$19,468 … Smith
$19,768 … Mt. Holyoke
$20,118 … Franklin & Marshall
$21,135 … Macalester
$21,568 … Bryn Mawr
$25,550 … Pitzer
$26,143 … Barnard
$26,820 … Lafayette
The average estimated net price for these 12 schools is $21,100.
The average recent admission rate (per USNWR) is 30% (ranging from 20% for Grinnell to 52% for Mt. Holyoke). UCLA’s is 18% (again, according to its current USNWR entry).
But absolutely, there are less expensive (and less selective) public commuter colleges.