@ucbalumnus - I do think that would be very helpful. Also, I find it helpful when people list the colleges that gave them the best aid and who gave them the least. Obviously even among the meets need colleges, the range of what is offered can be pretty big. For those of us who don’t have accurate estimates on NPCs, that kind of information is useful.
Net price calculator accuracy survey thread created under the financial aid and scholarship forum section:
@chipperd - Congrats! Bentley’s a great business focused school and highly thought of by employers (what really matters). Great recruiting into corp finance and accounting in the NE, especially Boston. Know several kids that went and they were all quite pleased and are doing well. My brother heads up a consulting firm in Cambridge and has always been impressed with Bentley kids (and actually prefers them to recruits from other more area based name brand schools).
Your son sounds very focused and is on his way!
@rickle1 : Thanks so much for the info and the kind words. Much appreciated!
Our son went to Ithaca, and our cost was close to the NPC - we also had a lot of equity in our home (half). His stats were high for the school and they wanted him, so they almost met our need.
The basic lesson that I completely missed with D1: If you don’t qualify for need based aide on the NPC, you will not qualify for need-based aide. No amount of balloons and streamers in your EC, grades, etc will get you there. If you need merit aid, there are only two ways to predict it. One, consider where your stats fall against the average student body. DD2’s merit aide ranged from nearly full ride to nothing in an extremely predictable pattern based on where her stats fell, her NPC, and the Kiplinger link here: https://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-private-colleges/index.php?table=all. Although Kiplinger’s other statistics are silly to me (salary yardstick for example) their columns of average non-need based aide and percentage of non need-based aide were dead on in our experience. To investigate schools that were not on Kiplinger, we simply went to the colleges own college data set. Pain in the neck to do college by college, but dead on accurate for predictions. If you pick a school like Pitzer, where 2% get a small amount of merit aide, you need to be prepared to pay full price. If you apply to USC, where 20% get merit aide with an average of 19,665, you may have a chance if your stats and ECs are over the top 25% and you are extra excellent. I honestly found it pretty predictable in the end.