Hello,
I am looking for information about the accuracy of College Board’s Net Price Calculator from anyone who used it and then got an aid package from the school. Was the NPC accurate or way off?
Thanks!
It really depends on the school and your families finances. Do a search at the top of this page to see what other threads come up.
Looks like you’re a transfer student. The NPC may not work well for you.
It also won’t work well if your parents are divorced, take business deductions, own extra properties, etc.
I think they are so variable. Our package from Brown was right on. But there is a student in the Brown forum now who applied ED and they did not get the package expected. An appeal only produced a little better offer. I don’t know if they had one of the known situations where NPC can be different or not, not much info given, seems package may have been as high as 5 or 10k over expected.
But the point is you can find a handful of people who say it was accurate and a handful who say it wasn’t.
These situations seems to affect accuracy: self employed or own business, additional property owned, divorced parents, transfer students
I strongly suspect that there is currently a huge bug in the net price calculator run through college board. I put in (bogus) numbers of $500,000 salary, and I still received a $0 expected parent contribution at several colleges (including Emory and Penn). I have tried contacting the college board, but so far no response.
If you’re using a generalized NPC at college board, it’s probably not of much help. You need to go to the finaid webpages of each school and use the one there. Some do link to an NPC hosted by college board but it is customized for that particular school. And yes, the results may not apply to transfer students.
@HideMe
Did you put $500k for the student income? or parents’ income? if you put it for student, what did you put for parent income?
I put $500K for parent income and still got $0 EC for parents and total estimated net price of $3950 at Penn. I saved a .pdf of the output and can send it to you if helpful.
There are a lot of questions on the Penn NPC besides parent income. Maybe how you answered one of them affected your results. I just ran it with $500k parent income and got full pay, no aid at all, as the result. I used modest amounts of assets(under the fafsa allowance), $20k home equity, 5 in the family, no other students in college, no contributions to retirement accounts. So mostly the results were driven by the income.
A-ha. As you probably suspected, the bug was between my ears, not with the net price calculator. Oops.
Did you mis-interpret the results?
What had you done? Had you answered “yes” to the question about having a child that you supported?