<p>chaptertwo - your case is a good example of why it is difficult to be “transparent”. Universities look for more than just stats. Don’t get me wrong, they are important, but as you imply they are not everything. If an academically good student can bring more to the table, such as acting ability, a great singing voice, first rate debate skills, an excellent tennis game, plays the oboe, is a leader in helping feed the homeless, whatever they think will help balance and broaden the life of the university beyond academics, they will try and entice that student more so that a kid with better stats but little else going for them. The problem, if you want to call it that, is that these factors can shift somewhat from year to year. Needs and priorities can change, and it is fluid depending on the kind of applications they are seeing. So it is hard to know what they would post that would help with transparency and not end up tying their hands.</p>
<p>I definitely think a lot of <em>soft</em> factors can come into play when awarding aid. DD went to a private independent middle school. At first we declined due to not enough aid. They upped twice, so she went. Our family volunteered a lot, esp. DH, who did a lot of unglamorous stuff that a lot of people don’t or can’t do. Our aid increased the following years, not so much due to changed financial circumstances but, I think due to our non-financial contributions since other families did not have the same experience. DD was awarded both merit and regular financial aid from her LAC. No problem in getting more aid partway through sophomore year due to changed circumstances, and they said they would switch over her music scholarship to a leadership scholarship when she studies abroad for a semester since she won’t be able to participate in music but has been involved in leadership activities up the wazoo. She seems to be contributing a lot to her campus community at least by the number of advisory committees and awards that she’s been nominated to/for, so I can’t help but think that the school wants to do what it can to keep her as long as she is on track to graduate on time.</p>
<p>Consider how many times we have to tell parents and kids to run NPCs- and they’ve been pretty universal for several years now. Certainly college web sites make them apparent. I’m afraid that, just as with admissions, people discount the info that is there. Consider how many can’t understand what Fafsa EFC is.</p>
<p>D was accepted to 8 LACs all different aid packages. One was 15K higher and with a no merit aid claim. Happy but seems funny. Hope its not a bait and switch next year. </p>
<p>@bigdaddyvee - Highly unlikely they would do that. Colleges depend on word of mouth and reputation even more than “normal” businesses. If they did something like that to you they know you would be all over this site, Facebook, whatever trashing them. Considering there would be no reason you would be the only one they would do that to, they would be risking disaster playing those kinds of games.</p>
<p>Bait and switch isn’t the norm - certainly not with reputable schools. Net price calculators have a wide range of reliability - if you run the one NYU - you might think you could afford to go. That said financial awards are not only about your EFC - sometimes the colleges are looking for something specific in a candidate and offer more because of it. Also each school has a different abilty to grant - you have to check the endowments - the ones with large ones can offer more money to more people.</p>
<p>At this point, I can safely say that the NPC’s are only good if you are accepted to their school with statistics that the school wants to attend. You may get in, but they won’t offer you aid in terms of grants or scholarships if even one of your statistics would risk lowering their ranking. Pretty frustrating. My daughter has a friend who has always been considered her equal in terms of success in school. Both have about a 4.0 GPA. Her friend comes from a similar family background financially, socially and they both are considered in the top 25% of their gifted high school class (although the school no longer ranks as of recently). Same schools offered her friend in-state tuition and other scholarships and paid for the family to visit. We got offers of loans and nearly all of them (although a few have still come through). The difference - my daughter had a lower ACT score - 23 instead of 27 - and the friend is considered a minority at these schools. That’s it and it is about a $20,000 difference per year at state schools.</p>
<p>My experience has been that Colleges that fulfill 100% of demonstrated need all gave us the same package. The more expensive places gave us more the cheaper places gave us less. We applied to 13 schools. For every school we applied to the part of the tab we had to pay was always between $24-$27K per year. The schools that did not meet 100% of need gave us merit scholarships that brought us up to the same family cost, and our states public schools cost $27,000 without aid (which they told us we didn’t need). So I guess my experience has been the exact opposite of yours, and my budgeting and figuring tells me that I can just about swing 24-27K per year if I live on top ramen and bologna sandwiches for 4 years. BTW my daughter is going to Colgate in the Fall GO Raiders! :D</p>
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<p>You’ve never been to a private school in NYS, have you? I attended one many years ago that gave out financial aid awards at the beginning of the year, then changed some of the 1st year grants to loans the last week of the first semester, even though my information hadn’t changed. It felt like bait and switch to all of us who were affected because that’s what it was. I was given a bill for classes I’d already taken that I was originally told would be paid for with grants. I didn’t go back. </p>
<p>Because they’re a private institution and the grants were from the college, the affected students would have had to file a lawsuit against the college to get the original grants reinstated. My dad’s lawyer said it would cost more to fight it than we would get awarded if we’d won, so I dropped it.</p>
<p>@austinmshauri - I cannot believe that is legal. I agree with the lawyer you would have won, and since there were a number of you that were affected you could have gone in as a group. That’s just theoretical, I agree the easier thing to do was to just leave, although I wouldn’t have paid the bill either. I know that this would have meant they wouldn’t send out your transcript, though. Frankly I think besides the civil case you also had a case for fraud, and i bet one call from the local prosecutor’s office would have changed their minds. Maybe not, maybe it is just a contracts issue. Would have been interesting to find out. However, see the next paragraph:</p>
<p>@bigdaddyvee - I found out how you can see if a college plays bait and switch. Go to <a href=“http://www.collegedata.com/”>http://www.collegedata.com/</a> and put the name of a school in the search bar. I put in Tulane, for example. You get a small chart that has the name of the school as a hyperlink on the left side. Put your mouse over the hyperlink and a pop-up menu appears that has “Money Matters” as one of the menu items. Click on that and scroll down to where you see PROFILE OF 2011-12 FINANCIAL AID, which is broken down by Freshman Year vs . All Undergraduates. Then you can compare the line “Average Award: Need-Based Gift” for each one. So in Tulane’s case you can see they gave an average of $26,426 to over 600 freshmen. They also gave an average of $27,164 to 2,533 undergrads, so that includes the freshmen. The fact that it went up shows that not only are they not doing bait-and-switch, but they are actually being slightly more generous as the student progresses. So you can do that for any school, I would think, and if the amount for All Undergraduates is significantly less than for the freshmen, you know they are not playing fair. It would be interesting to look at @austinmshauri 's school to see if they are still playing that game, but we don’t know which school it was.</p>
<p>In randomly searching for a school where those numbers did decline, I found that Pitt decreased aid overall by more than $3,500 and specifically these need based grants by over $1,000. I can only say over because that is about how much difference showed up in the numbers, and since about 25% of the bigger number includes the freshmen, if you took them out obviously the number would drop more. I don’t feel like doing the algebra to determine the true number for sophomores+. If I do it later I will post it. Now there might be other reasons for this at a school like Pitt, I don’t think of them as a bait-and-switch school. But at least it shows you an example where the grant aid decreased after freshman year.</p>