Do any of you remember how accurate or inaccurate the net price calculators for the schools you applied for turned out to be when all your aid came in after your acceptances? I would appreciate it if you could name your school and the others to which you were accepted and give me a hint. I don’t need exact figures. “Accurate,” “close,” “inaccurate,” or “way off” will do."
The main schools I’m interested in hearing about are CMU, Tisch, USC, Syracuse, Calarts, and BU but feel free to chime in about others.
Thanks!
Wow, great question, @exotic vegetables. I’m sure a lot of us would love to hear people’s various answers to this one. Too bad the threat hasn’t seen any action yet.
With Syracuse the NPC was accurate - but, my D was invited to apply for (and received) a competitive scholarship- which changed our overall cost.
D attends Tisch. NPC also accurate there. Something nice is that while D did not get very much $$as a freshman, she has received additional aide every year, so our cost has gone down over the 4 years rather than up
I watched a Lynn O’Shaughnessy video ( http://www.thecollegesolution.com/) which explained each college sets up their own NPC, or they can use a federal NPC. It depends on whether the calculator mirrors their practice, and she did warn that schools with NPC displaying a green calculator image are using the federal version which isn’t as accurate. In the end, the take away I received was to call the school and ask them about the accuracy of the NPC. Kid is a senior, and I have no experience with receiving offers yet, and I do wonder about the “talent” portion of scholarship being a factor that NPC can’t predict.
Best I found was on cappex. You pick a school, enter GPA and test scores, and they tell you the estimated actual cost.