<p>Hey abyss.
I was reading the 368 best college book by Princeton Review and I say the financial aid rating for Tufts was 94, Jhop was 93, American was 83 and GW was 88.
What's up with that? I thought Tufts and Jhop were notorious for sub-par financial aid and I know for a fact that American and GW have some pretty solid offers.
Anyone with some insight</p>
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<p>I believe Tufts meets full need. JHU might as well. American and GW do NOT guarantee to meet full need for all accepted students.</p>
<p>IMO, there is no rating number that can tell any particular student which school would be better for his or her situation. There is great variability in how schools meet. Schools consider loans and work-study to be a component of meeting need. In addition, fin aid in the past couple of years has changed at a lot of schools and any rating or ranking can quickly become out of date.</p>
<p>I could be recalling incorrectly, but aren’t the Princeton Review rankings based on polling students? That’s a very unreliable measure because first of all it would depend a lot of what aid they were expecting to get, what schools they applied to, and their parents’ attitude towards paying for college. Also different schools give different levels of aid to different income brackets, and some are need-based, some merit-based, and some are a mix of the two.</p>
<p>I remember a couple years ago reading on that list that Amherst had a relatively lower rating for FA than some schools with much less generous aid policies. But that ranking could have been influenced by some affluent students not getting the same aid they could get from Harvard, for example, which has more generous aid for higher income students. (Amherst’s is equally generous for low and middle income students, but doesn’t dish out the cash for the $120K bracket.)</p>
<p>So you see how unreliable those rankings will be. Not to mention that students’ assessments are necessarily based on a narrow set of known facts, i.e., you really only know very much about the college you attend or the colleges you received FA awards from, in this instance.</p>
<p>I imagine that the number of students who receive the Pell Grant, as well as those who do not qualify, but have a relatively low EFC will matter. It is going to be easier to meet the need of student who has an EFC of 25,000+, than meeting the need of a student with an EFC of 0, 5,000, or even 10,000. If the school is top heavy on wealthy students, aren’t they going to look better with regard to “meeting need”?</p>
<p>I guess it can work at opposite ends of the spectrum depending on the school’s financial aid policies and which students are answering the question.</p>
<p>Check out the common data set for each college. There is more specific financial aid information there.</p>