<p>does usc meet 100% of need? do they give mostly grants or mostly loans?</p>
<p>there's a limit to loans and limit to grants. Depends on what your expected familiy contribution is... (they calculate it based on your parent's income and how many people in your family attends college at the moment)</p>
<p>like loans they give out, (to the student) the limit is 5000 dollars (two loans, freshman year) The grant usually is alot more than that... Like my grant was 31K. They are usually really good with grants because they have alot of money.</p>
<p>For ex- my financial aid</p>
<p>grant 31K
loan 2.5K (one loan) another 2.5K so 5K all together
workstudy- 2.5k</p>
<p>So left over was 8K for the whole entire year. That matched my state school tuition so...</p>
<p>So no, they don't meet 100 percent because nobody ever usually does, but it gets pretty close to it... and they give you more grants if you need alot of financial aid. (so if you get like 5000 dollar scholarship you won't have any loans)</p>
<p>If you can't fill the gap however, parents usually get a loan called the PLUS loan to fill the gap... (NYU's fin aid mostly consists of huge plus loans... so. i don't think USC gives them out.)</p>
<p>thanks so much for the specifics! if i go to usc i would be going rhp, so i would have 1/4 merit scholarship. my familys contribution is expected to be around $10,000.. this is managable for us, so as long as i will get aid for the rest s'all good :)</p>
<p>just wondering where did you get 10K for efc? Once again, USC does its own calculation- my efc was actually 3K from one of the financial aid sites (collegeboard one i think..and some other ones) but it ended up being 8-10K after all the finaid stuff. It's little iffy until you get the actual numbers after you get accepted....</p>
<p>good luck to you though, because USC's really good about finaid.</p>
<p>my 10k efc is not a sound number at ALL, its just from a simple website calculator (dont know which, my mother came up with that number)</p>
<p>as an absolute must my mother could pay up to 20-25k a year, this would all by borrowed from our house though and quite strenuous, but it IS an education and im the first high-acheiving student in my close family (siblings+parents) so it means a lot</p>
<p>you'd want to minus any private loans our mortgages on your family's house</p>
<p>the efc shouldn't include things like the above scenarios</p>
<p>im going to pay a bit more @ usc than i would at UCR but its because they use CSS profile which adds int o account my parents' assets etc...</p>