Can anyone clarify if things have changed on these NPC calculators in recent years? When they first came out some years ago, my understanding was that Dept. Of Education required that each school had them available on their websites; however, there was no regulatory “teeth” that said they had to be “real”. In other words, schools could mislead people with the calculations (imagine that!) and the results were not true indicators of the family results. Further, not all schools can meet people’s needs equally and money can be allocated differently despite the need being equal…I could go on and on…
Has anything really changed since then? Any updates/thoughts would be greatly appreciated…thx!
@perilous
I believe some schools have adjusted their net price calculators since they became the norm.
However, no one, repeat…no one should view these as anything but a decent estimate of what a student will actually GET for need based aid. And some NPCs don’t ask about stats at all…so these are not reliable for merit aid.
The bottom line when I look at the NPC…the more extensive the list of questions, the more likely the are to be accurate.
You know “garbage in, garbage out”.
Right. This is called “the real world,” as opposed to someone’s fantasy world. I hope that nobody is expecting Podunk State University to have the same financial aid resources as Princeton or Stanford.
I think NPCs are best used to estimate aid relative to other colleges. Even if the numbers are not entirely accurate (they rarely are), you can see which colleges in general would grant more or less aid to someone in your situation.