<p>So I was hoping some of the financial aid gurus on CC would help enlighten me on this. I applied to Brown, Stanford, JHU, and Princeton, and my EFC is around 7,000. I always thought that because these schools accept a smaller number of students and the fact that they have large endowments they can afford to give substantially higher amounts of financial aid per student. Is this a valid assumption and if this is true how much aid are we talking?</p>
<p>yes it is a valid assumption. However the schools intepret "need" differently than you do, so they could end up giving you a chunk of loans, or when the factor in the CSS profile they may judge ur EFC to be different.</p>
<p>princeton just switched to "no-loan" fin aid, though...so that'll be a lot more work study, and some more grant. but their interpretation of need is definitely different...especially if they require the PROFILE. b/c assets are a killer.</p>