When I ran NPC, Brown showed me a lot higher than its peer schools. It’s 30k-40k higher than all the other schools in my DD’s list. I know Brown’s endowment is relatively small but estimated net price for Brown looks a little absurd compared to other schools. I read many thread here and found people said they gave generous aids. My only guess is Brown might consider primary residency a lot as an asset to pay for college.
I wish to have some input from who was accepted to Brown regarding financial aid.
Well HYP give much better aid at the higher income levels and maybe the mid level too. Brown gives about the same at the low income level. The other Ivy schools should give about the same as Brown, maybe Dartmouth gives a little better. If you get offers from peer schools you always have something you can talk to them about.
@BrownParent I already checked Dartmouth and the difference is 37K. Both use collegeboard NPC calculator and I just clicked the next button to proceed. So they used the exactly same number I put into the NPC website and I really wonder what made the huge difference. My feeling is that in the end their FA will be similar to the peer institutions, but the number is a bit wild for me.
Well, I believe collegeboard just uses the formula the college supplies, and colleges are supposed to have their own not public method, but not really sure. College Board certainly does not do this independently of the college, they cannot.
No, Brown and Dartmouth should be very similar, not so far apart. It sounds like user error to me. I am trying to think of the outliers that could occur. I would think those outliers may be on the very high end of income and assets for need aid. Like second home, or Brown having a lower cutoff for need aid, say 150k vs 175k families? I would not be surprised if Dartmouth was a tad more generous, but not 37k more for most situations.
You might like to ask this in the financial aid forum, as some posters there really dig into this sort of question.
I changed numbers a little bit and found that the expected market price of our house impacts a lot for calculation in case of Brown. I am not sure they really put the house price into account even though a house is for primary residency.
I don’t know what to think with those net price calculators. They seem unstable; i.e., fluctuate a lot with seemingly small changes in the numbers. It makes applying ED a little risky but it seems like, if the actual financial aid offer were to end up significantly different from what came out of the NPC, well, then maybe there’d be some adjustment or the student wouldn’t be held to an ED offer of admission (were he so lucky to get the offer!)
I found the exact same thing using college board’s saved data and Brown; it came out at full price for us unlike almost every other school using the same saved data. It’s got to be the value of the primary residence. I guess we’ll have to see once daughter actually gets accepted anywhere how accurate the calculator is. The only other school that came up with the total lack of aid for our moderate income is Northwestern. Most others come with up considerable grants for our data.