Yep needwallet.com indicates that 100k in Des Moines = $285k in Manhattan (NY).
A NYC resident is far more likely to pay for Tufts than an Iowa resident.
âNeed-basedâ refers to who gets aid, not what form the aid comes in. Need-based aid means financial aid is awarded based on financial need, not on academic merit. The type of financial aid awarded can come in the form of grants, loans, and work-study funding. Some need-based-aid-only colleges are also no-loan colleges, only giving FA in the form of grants. (Tufts is not one of those schools.)
Which highly selective schools do you think offer merit awards? No Ivy League school does. WashU and Vanderbilt give a handful of awards to lure certain students away from HYPSM.
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I am it equating HYP type rankings with Tufts. But USC has generous with merit aid. Rice and Emory have merit as well.
Yup, USC started offering generous merit aid 15-20 years ago to game the rankings, to lure high-scoring middle-class students away from places like Tufts. It worked. Merit aid is not an altruistic prize for a job well done; it exists to benefit the college. It also reduces the pot of aid available for those who need need-based aid. Tufts doesnât play that game. All its aid is reserved for the need-based pot.
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Wow- why are you so harsh. USC also has no tuition to low income high stats kids. You may think they are gaming the rankings- but I respectfully disagree. Based on many donut hole families and for the OP who started his topic, itâs a shame Tufts ignores those middle class high stats kids (unlike USC) instead of catering only to the opposite ends of the wealth spectrum. Tufts ignores this middle class group. I do not care to discuss with you further. Good night.
Tufts doesnât play the merit game because it canât. It doesnât have the endowment USC has.
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Schools canât take available cash flow into account as such a system would not be fair. It would incentivize families to spend rather than save for college and reward those who live in high cost of living areas to the detriment of those who live in low cost of living areas. Where one lives and oneâs consumption habits are both choices and therefore should be neutral factors for financial aid by and large.
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According to Rice CDS, they gave merit aid to 32 freshmen.
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So youâre saying thereâs a chance! 
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So what does Tufts do to attract its tippy-top admits who are middle class and would get scholarship support to USC, Rice, BC, W&L, etc.?
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Actual middle class (letâs say 25th-75th percentile of income) does get aid. Rich people who feel ashamed to call themselves rich are another matter.
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$200k is upper middle even for California. However, being asked to pay $53k per year is stout. Not impossible with $200k in savings but this was a renter profile I assumed. I know someone who chose USC with a $15k merit scholarship over Vandy full price.
I am fortunate to know some rather wealthy people (probably $5MM+ assets - corporate VP types) and few pay full freight to a private U. They go to public flagships with various reputations. Someone I know paid full price to Wake and visited Tufts, BC and Dartmouth on a northern tour.
There are surely people who prefer Tufts over Dartmouth, Cornell, Middlebury, etc. for its urban sophistication and fabulous international programs.
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While Tuftsâ overall endowment pales in comparison to USCâs, you also need to take into account the number of students.
In 2021, Tuftsâ endowment was $222,807 per student, while USCâs endowment was $161,787 per student.
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It depends on your state. If I lived in a state with a really good public flagship university Iâd probably encourage my daughter to go there: California, Texas, Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina.
I live in New England and many of the best colleges are private. So itâs pretty much the same if she wanted to attend an OOS state school vs a private school - $60k on LAC , $53k OOS at a U Michigan/UVA, $60k at Rice etc.
It makes the decision easier because the costs are similar. She can just pick the school she wants without us having to decide whether itâs worth it to save a few $ sending her to the state school that she doesnt want to attend.
Itâs not necessarily true that merit aid comes at the expense of need based aid. The funding often comes from different donor pools.
Example: the Ervin and Rodriguez awards (and maybe others) are funding options for WashU donors. That is how they are funded annually. I personally donate to the diversity assistance initiatives, but because these are restricted donations, this isnât a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Thatâs like comparing apples to hotdogs! The endowment per student is what matters. Tufts endowment per student exceeds USCâŠand they are two totally different schools.
Harvard has the largest endowment âŠyet they donât give merit. Many top schools do not offer merit. Has nothing to do with endowment in those cases.
Agree. This is typically the way endowment is evaluated.
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Thatâs precisely my point. They donât. Itâs not an institutional priority. Many/most middle class students can get need-based aid at Tufts.
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I find these median income statistics really a poor way to depict the financial profile of schoolâs student body. Sure, these numbers are the mid point, but I canât imagine these incomes have anything even close to a normal distribution. Whether Tufts, another NESCAC LAC, or a very competitive university like NYU or BC, there must be a barbell shape to these student body income profiles - lots on the left attending at essentially zero cost, and lots on the right (Tufts with 19% in the $630k+ category according to Chetty data in NY Times). Would make sense if there was a big dip right around median, as this seems to be the income level close to the point where need-based aid evaporates. (~$200k)
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100% - and what I was alluding to earlier.
200-300k income is seen as huge money nationally, but in higher cost of living areas thereâs hardly anything left after bills at that income to scrape together for college for a family of 4/5.
Iâm sure many schools, use that barbell approach. They obviously want to maximize the number of 600k+ families. Ideally they would go with only those full pay families, but they know this profiles very badly and looks bad. So they offset it with a chunk of low income families. As few as possible but as many as are needed, this gets their âmedianâ numbers to where they want them, but typically at the expense of middle and slightly upper middle class families who are making above average National income but have no extra cash for college costs. Not their problem, of course. Just taking advantage of the system. State schools have more guard rails to stop the pure capitalism. But they have their own challenges as well.