<p>My child is considering (and has a very good shot at) some highly selective Ivy League/Ivy-ish schools that offer only, or nearly only, need based financial aid. The on-line calculators most have available suggest that we won't qualify for need based aid. </p>
<p>However, I was reviewing the College Board financial aid stats on these schools and noticed something unusual; across the board the % of applicants for financial aid was about 60% and of these about 90% were given and award. This suggests that many families attending schools of this caliber don't even bother to apply for aid. Am I interpreting this correctly? And if you make the effort to complete the aid application, you have a nine in ten chance of receiving something?</p>
<p>I'm grateful for our families financial success, but paying sticker price for one of these schools could put us on a raman noodle diet for the next four years to make the numbers work.</p>
<p>What am I missing</p>
<p>You can run the Net Price Calculators for those types of schools and get a good idea of whether you will qualify for need-based aid. So most people run the calculator and if it looks promising, they file.</p>
<p>Here’s the thing with these statistics: Though only about 5% or less of US households make over $200K a year, about half the population of the most selective schools come from such households. So the fact that about half the kids at these schools qualify for financial is more a reflection of that statistic than anything else. </p>
<p>As BobWallace says, the NPCs for these school, in fact, of most schools that do not have merit awards and that meet 100% will be close. If you have yourown business or a non custodial parent situation, the numbers can be skewed, but, for the most part they will be close. You can always apply for financial aid, which entails filling out FAFSA and PROFILE and see what you can get. These schools are need blind in admissions so applying will not hurt your student’s chances in getting accepted. </p>
<p>I’ve been on a ramen noodle diet for many years now. In fact, I’m have Lo Mein tonight made from parboiled and then sauteed ramen noodles with some left over ham, sauteed wilted lettuce and a can of carrots and peas. That and left over rice, made into fried rice is a staple here. We spent a lot of our money in buying a big comfortable house in a great neighborhood, in a nice location, plus we put our kids in private schools and provided all sorts of extracurricular opportunities and weren’t exactly frugal either in a lot of everyday living ways. So we are finding that paying the college tab and keeping up this standard of living very difficult. If we dropped our standard down to those who would meet full need, we’d have the money to for college, but we don’t want to do that. Our choice. So ramen and rice it is.</p>