How much did you get in grants, work study, and loans. Especially interested in info from low income students.
My financial aid package was quite generous (I recently was accepted as a transfer)! I am not from a super low-income family (we’re more in the middle range), but we definitely would have had a difficulty paying the tuition without aid. I won’t go into the exact amounts, but I got a grant, federal work study, on-campus workstudy, and federal loans. Try filling out the aid calculator on College Board’s website! That may help you get a sense of what to expect.
I’ve worked with middle income families have received extremely generous FA packages from Barnard, Columbia, Brown, Smith and Michigan, and “doable” ones from Chicago, Georgetown and Notre Dame. Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, MHC and NYU were less generous (NYU and Boston Univ seem to love giving loans).
mine was generous. still a stretch for my family, but they made it very possible. you can message me if you want more specifics about loans/etc, but my income is about 50k and we received around 62k overall. i will be on work-study.
edit - failed to mention, my brother is in college and whenever he leaves i believe my aid will decrease quite a bit.
What difference does it make what others got? The best way to get an idea what your net cost might be is to run their Net Price Calculator. How much can your parents afford?