<p>I think it depends on your state. The cost of tuition at publics in my state is relatively high, and state funding for low income students is almost nonexistent. My son goes to an in state school, and even with a scholarship we pay more for him than we did for my D when she was at Vanderbilt.</p>
<p>*After all the gloom and doom talk, I’ve been reasonably encouraged by the results from most of the NPCs I’ve experimented with over the last week or so - some public, some private. *</p>
<p>I am very suspicious about some of these NPCs that I’ve experimented with. Some seem to be putting out “best case scenarios” with grants, scholarships, and other aid (Perkins, work-study, etc). Some are including merit scholarships without even asking for stats! </p>
<p>Some NPC calculators are brutally honest (PSU’s!!), but some OOS publics either have a new treasure chest of aid to hand out or they’re outright lying about how much they’ll give in need-based grants (beyond gov’t grants) to OOS students. </p>
<p>The fact that some NPCs are including merit without asking for stats is especially troubling since we know that a good number of schools engage in “preferential packaging” and try to give better aid pkgs to those with better stats. If some schools have rigged their NPCs to always reflect a “preferential pkg” then there are going to be many upset people next spring. </p>
<p>Since schools do not want to see a drop in applications, there would be motivation to rig their NPCs in an extra generous way.</p>
<p>While schools are now required to have these NPCs, what’s the mechanism that requires these things to be fairly accurate? Is there any oversight to see if the predicted numbers come close to actuals? I doubt there can be since the colleges can easily claim that the figures students/parents put into the NPCs are often not completely true or that there are other factors that the NPCs don’t take into account. </p>
<p>Since no one expects these NPCs to be 100% accurate nor even 90% accurate, that gives these schools a lot of wiggle room to appear more generous with their NPCs than they actually will be. If schools can claim 70% accuracy, then they will probably consider themselves successes, but that will still mean that a number of students received inaccurate estimates after inputting correct information.</p>
<p>It will be interesting to see the posts next spring when people mention how their real FA pkgs square with their NPC results.</p>
<p>The NPC result from one of the two OOS publics my D was considering was “brutally honest,” which caused us to drop it from the list. We’re now down to a mere 10 schools.</p>
<p>^^</p>
<p>Which one was that?</p>
<p>@m2ck -> Replied via pm</p>