<p>I have been doing some more looking at the issue of which selective schools are the most "generous" with need based aid (not that D will get any, you understand). The general opinion appears to be that Princeton is pretty loose with the purse strings. What other small to smallish selective schools fit in the category of "most generous" or stated another way, which ones routinely calculate the lowest efc's?</p>
<p>Colgate is very generous- I have heard Smith is very generous as well.</p>
<p>Rice is generous.</p>
<p>Grinnell is generous with merit aid.</p>
<p>Depends what you mean by generous. If by generous you mean an aggregate of the largest awards coupled with the largest number of people receiving them, none of the Ivies break the top 10 (or didn't in 2003-2004)</p>
<p>The top group includes Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, Smith, Amherst, Macalester, Swarthmore, Grinnell, Occidental, MIT, Reed, and Hamilton. </p>
<p>Doesn't tell you anything, however, about how they figure your EFC. Yield management techniques would suggest that, from a school's point of view, the object is to give you the lowest award possible, and still get you to attend. This is not a mean-spirited attitude: on the contrary, it means the additional funds are available, at least in theory, for someone else. It does likely tell you, however, that your need for financial aid doesn't work against you, as, at least statistically, it does at HYP, Stanford, etc. (In other words, there may be extremely generous awards at these schools, but substantially fewer of them.)</p>
<p>mini, I'm really speaking of the 100% of documented need schools and their calculation of EFC. Because of my highly peculiar financial profile (as I've posted before, my situation presents issues that may be cases of first impression at some financial aid offices), I doubt if any of this will make a hill of beans to my kid BUT it does seem to reason that if she was to take a flyer at 3 or so need only schools that she should chose from those with a rep for being generous.</p>
<p>Since we had very "unpeculiar" financial profile, applied to schools with reputations for generosity, and got such wildly different "need-based" awards back, I doubt seriously that knowing the "rep" will help you much.</p>
<p>But, if you wish to get past the rep to the data, I'd start with the 10 schools above.</p>