So I jwas accepted to BC a few days ago. I looked at my financial aid reward today, and it was just 3k in work study and 3k in subsidized loans. My FAFSA efc was about 15k. If I’m not mistaken, Boston College meets 100% of need. I find it hard to believe that they calculated I could pay 60k+ per year with my efc being where it was. Have others had similar problems? Has BC just not released the rest of the aid? Or am I screwed?
I doubt it is that they have not released the rest of your aid if you are seeing some of the package. BC also requires the Profile so I imagine there is additional info in the profile that was used by their office to increase BC’s view of your EFC. If you feel there is a mistake in how they calculated your package, give the financial aid off a call as only they can provide definitive resolution.
fafsa is only used for federal aid at many private schools, which use Profile for their own funds. You should run the NPC for BC and see how that ends up.
Good luck.
Is the NPC pretty accurate? My parents had to anmend due to recent loss of income and it’s looking like I’ll get good aid if the NPC is accurate…
Yeah, screw BC. You shouldn’t be able to say you guarantee 100% of aid when they themselves are the ones who get to calculate how much aid you need. No school is worth 65k per year anyways. I’m going to Miami on a full ride. Good luck to you all.
@Hickey wow I am surprised by how irresponsible the financial aid was. Does anyone have an experience like this or does BC usually meet full 100%?
BC meets 100% of “demonstrated need”, they get to decide how much is your need and then they meet that qty which is higher than the FAFSA EFC. Seriously, they are lying when they say they cover 100% need. I see the BC value but in my case, I have a scholarship very close to a full ride at a Big Ten school, why would I pay tens of thousands at BC?
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Is it BC’s fault that some applicants didn’t run the NPC last fall before applying to see if they could even afford attending?
However one must admit with an endowment of $2 billion + the school is woefully restrictive in both its merit and financial aid. This is a well known fact and found throughout many CC posts and forums. Having stated this, it isthe prospective students responsibility do their research in this matter.
So if I ran the NPC, it should be relatively close to this number?
@jpm50 , no, it isn’t their fault, nor do I blame them, but advertising themselves as “meeting 100% of need” is ridiculously misleading and frankly dishonest. It makes it seem like BC places a priority on helping students afford college, while, in reality, that isn’t the case. They should be advertising: “We will give you 100% of what we will give you”. Anyways, as I said earlier, there are few schools (BC not being an exception) that are worth 65k+ per year. A message to future potential applicants, if it comes down to attending a run-of-the-mill school on the cheap vs an overpriced school like BC, pick the run-of-the-mill school.
Side note: My gripes about BC can surely be applied to many other colleges. I, myself, will be attending an overpriced private school in the University of Miami (thankfully Miami actually uses it’s endowment on scholarships, haha).
My package at BC was great. It was pretty close to the NPC, which is amazing considering we have many “special circumstances” that usually mess up the NPC like being self employed small business owners and having a rental property. Still, BC was the cheapest option, including a few peer schools(Nova and Northeastern) and several public schools that gave nice merit options. Its not fair to say the aid is bad because it doesn’t match the EFC. The EFC does not matter at all at private schools, and that is no secret. Its legitimate to complain if your price is nowhere near the NPC, but if its just because you feel like you should have gotten more, then there isn’t much substance to the complaint.
@HSStudent938 , yes, you could boil down my complaint to “BC doesn’t give good aid.”
@Hickey:
Your disappointment is clear. But making a generalization about how BC’s financial aid policy based on one data point doesn’t work.
For more data points which disprove your assertion, read through the financial aid threads in this BC section of CC for the past years. Yes there were disappointed replies. But you will also see many who were thrilled with the aid BC gave them, often saying it was more than expected. I have personally known many BC students whose enrollment at BC was made possible by BC’s generous aid.
Only the BC FinCom dept knows their full track record. But the assertion “BC doesn’t give good aid” is not valid.
@jpm50 I respectfully believe I’ve never heard the terms BC and “generous aid” in the same sentence. I would like to note the school gives out only 15 full scholarships for the entire entering class and partial merit aid is essentially non-existent. $2 billion endowment and giving out less than $1 million in merit aid is a very low number IMHO.
Is no one getting any type of financial aid from Boston College ? I was very pleased with my son’s financial aid package. I think it was very close to meeting our needs. Did anyone else get financial aid ?
@Shade45 Not having a lot of merit scholarships doesn’t mean aid is not generous. Ivies and many other top schools don’t have any sort of merit scholarships at all, and not many would say they are not generous. I’ve never heard that Harvard is not generous because they have a $35b endowment and $0 in merit aid. I will agree that if you are full pay or close to it and can’t pay the full amount, then BC is not a good choice because of limited merit aid. But it’s need based aid is fantastic. The average package is $35k-$40k in grant money, which brings the average cost to an in state school cost.
@Hickey It’s unfair to say the aid is bad because it didn’t match the EFC. If you tried the NPC and it was way off, then that is definitely a legitimate problem. However, saying BC’s institutional aid is way off because it does not use federal aid method(which no private school uses) is not right.
@ma4503 Yes, it was great for me as well. I was terrified after reading stories about small business owners on here, but BC made a private school education possible for me.
Actually, every school that does not use FAFSA only decides how they calculate need, even the most generous Ivies (+Stanford & MIT).
Correct, but what your gripe really is about is that you, the applicant, should decide how need-only schools, i.e., those that don’t offer merit scholarships, should spend their own money. (Yes, BC offers a handful of Presidential’s, but those really don’t count.)
'Grats on the great deal.
BC is the lowest-ranked Uni that is both need-blind and meets full need (as they define it). Pretty much every lower-ranked school offers merit money. They offer merit money since it is in their best interest do so so. (Not your best interest, but you can be the beneficiary.)
But note, U-Miami does NOT meet full financial need of all of its students. Yes, the U is extremely generous with merit aid, but the poor acceptees that only have average grades/test scores will have a financial gap to attend Miami.
It is this group that would be able to attend BC with no $ gap. In essence, BC and other need-only schools choose to spend their financial aid budget on other than merit aid. Their money, their choice; why “gripe”?
My guess is that your family has home equity. (Home equity is what hurts many middle class kids from achieving need-based aid.) While that equity maybe illiquid, it is equity nonetheless. The truly poor don’t even have that advantage.
Partial merit aid IS non-existent. Besides the Presidential full tuitions, all other aid is need-based only.
fwiw: there are many in the BC community that believe that the Presidential merit scholarships are not Jesuit-like, and should be eliminated, since they usually go to kids from wealthy families.
@bluebayou Doesn’t Northeastern also claim to meet need and be need blind? Their financial aid package was not as good as BC, but I think NEU would be the lowest ranked school that’s need blind and meets need.
@HSStudent938 Northeastern I believe is need-aware, though they do claim to meet full demonstrated need. Of course, “full demonstrated need” is defined by the school in all cases of it, as seen here.