<p>From the materials I’ve seen, it appears that Columbia offers a better financial aid package based on need than does Barnard; any insights?</p>
<p>I have not gotten that impression from my daughter’s and our four years of working with Barnard’s financial aid office. They were pretty generous. Of course, I cannot speak specifically to Columbia College’s financial aid…</p>
<p>Thanks for your insight here and about interviews. My daughter is currently more excited about Columbia, but I’m hoping our visit next month will light a fire about Barnard for her as well.</p>
<p>Aijabaija: the two college, though very much affiliated (and the two “experiences” thus very integrated in many ways) offer very significantly different things. Barnard is definitely more “intimate” and offers generally smaller classes and more individual attention when it comes to academic advising. Then there is the whole core vs “Nine Ways of Knowing” , which is also quite significant. So your daughter needs to carefully consider those things.</p>
<p>What she does NOT need to be concerned about is any perceived negativity associated with attending Barnard vs Columbia, in spite of what she, or you, might read on these boards. It just is not an issue on campus (according to my d who is now in grad school), and she is very, very glad (always has been) to have attended as a Barnard student rather than a Columbia College student.</p>
<p>You can’t compare financial aid unless you have both packages in hand.</p>
<p>Columbia’s financial aid office is separate and operates under a different set of policies than Barnard’s. Columbia has a larger endowment to work with, but its in Barnard’s interest to maintain policies that are roughly equivalent – after all, they don’t want to be losing cross-admits on the basis of aid alone. </p>
<p>But because the policies are different, it means that the aid packages may vary depending on how different circumstances are treated by each school. In my case I am self-employed, divorced (ex-husband also self-employed), and own a home. So it was very hard to predict what sort of financial aid package I might get – there are all sorts of contingencies involved. </p>
<p>Barnard has been very tolerant of my ex’s lack of cooperation with the process. (He has submitted the required info, but generally not in the time frame or form required). So I could see how in my situation, my daughter could lose if she attended a school that had more generous financial aid policies, but less flexibility or tolerance for issues such as late or incomplete filing of documents. </p>
<p>On the other hand… when it all comes down to it, I’ve probably had to pay about twice what I really could afford in order to keep my daughter at Barnard. She has been Pell-grant eligible for a couple of years, and our contribution has generally been assessed at $10-$15K above our federal EFC. Its hard for me to tell where that extra is coming from, because no school will disclose to me any details about how much the ex’s income figures fit into the equation, an since he is self-employed in a high-overhead occupation, that’s a mystery to me as well. </p>
<p>If financial aid is important to you, then it is important to have your daughter cast a wide net, including both schools that purport to meet 100% need, and schools where she is likely to win substantial merit money. You simply cannot make that decision in advance.</p>
<p>(And if your daughter prefers Columbia to Barnard and gets admitted to both, if financial aid is comparable, she should go to Columbia. My own d. did not even consider or apply to Columbia and I would not have wanted her too. Her experience has borne out my initial impression – which all relate to Columbia Administration, not to academics.)</p>