I’m applying to Lawrenceville and for financial aid, Lawrenceville’s financial aid calculator said that our grant would cover about 80% of tuition. While this is great news, I can’t help but be a little skeptical. We are nowhere as rich as some of my other friends who are applying to private school, but the estimation seems a little too generous for my parent’s income (I mentioned it on my thread about merit scholarships way back in the spring). When my brother applied for college, he received a decent grant but it was reduced the following year even though nothing about our financial situation changed. We believe it was to encourage him to attend, but ultimately found it misleading. Is this a common practice at prep schools as well? What were some of your experiences applying for aid and using schools’ calculators? Were the estimations somewhat accurate? Thanks in advance!
In our experience the calculators were not accurate at all. I found them to be overly generous in the amount of aid “predicted”, and not even close to the EFC that the PFS calculated. Schools use the EFC as a starting point and then decide from there how much money they are going to offer you (if any at all). There are so many factors that come into play in the process that it seems nearly impossible to figure how much you will or will not get.