<p>Is It true that, if you get in, you will receive more financial aid for a private school than a public one?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>There is no guarantee that you will get any financial aid from any school, except for Federal entitlements such as the Pell Grant and Stafford Loans.</p>
<p>Moreover, the dollar amount of aid is not really what matters - the amount of money you end up needing to pay is the real important figure. Private schools often entice students with “big-dollar” scholarships that only reduce tuition from “insane” to “expensive.”</p>
<p>Private school A: $50,000 sticker price
In-state public school B: $15,000 sticker price</p>
<p>Private school A aid: $25,000 scholarship
In-state public school B aid: $5,000 scholarship</p>
<p>Is the private school a better deal just because the scholarship is five times bigger?</p>
<p>There are private schools that can be very generous to students with good grades and/or other qualities that make them attractive to the school. Some scholarships are based only on academic achievement or community service/EC’s; some are based on financial need. Many public schools have much less money to offer.</p>
<p>There was a newspaper article in our local paper just yesterday that pointed out how only 1/3 of the students who attend the two local private universities pay the “sticker price”. For example, at the Catholic school, all local Catholic high school graduates get a large discount, and ALL students from our county get a different discount. In addition there are numerous academic and financial scholarships and grants.</p>
<p>For SOME students it is much cheaper to attend a private school if they find a school with generous aide. My younger daughter attends an expensive private school, but pays less per year than her sister paid to attend one of our state universities. Back in my day, I attended Ithaca College because it was much less expensive than my first choice (Binghamton, a state school, accepted me but not with as much aid).</p>
<p>You need to do your research and choose private schools with generous aid.</p>
<p>Sometimes.</p>
<p>As KKMama says, do your research first.</p>
<p>But then, make sure your list of schools has one genuine financial safety - a school where (a) you are sure you can get in, (b) you are sure you can pay for, given the most pessimistic assumptions about financial aid, and (c) you would be happy to attend.</p>
<p>The financial safety may be the hardest school to find. Finding a “dream school” is easy. But if you go into your college search with the right attitude - that your college experience will be what you make of it, that you can “fit in” almost anywhere if you decide that’s what you’re going to do, and that you can get an excellent education almost anywhere if you resolve to follow the high-payoff student behaviors that lead to success - then you will find one. </p>
<p>The financial safety may be a private school, if you have very high stats and qualify for a guaranteed merit scholarship. Or it may be your local public university. Or it may make sense for you to start at a community college and then transfer to a public university. Different people’s needs and situations vary, and what works best for you may not be what works best for your high school classmates.</p>
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<p>Actually, I’m surprised it is that high. Some of the schools we looked at claimed that 90%+ of students received some kind of aid.</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>You both may be right. The schools claiming 90% may be including those who just got loans…which others may argue is paying sticker price.</p>
<p>My personal anecdotal experience would lead to the conclusion that in many cases, sticker prices are simply for show. All three of the privates where DD was admitted came back with substantial merit awards - far more than we were expecting, based on her stats - with their acceptance letters, and before we had filed any FA documents (though she had indicated on her apps that she would be applying for FA.)</p>
<p>After both the merit and need awards, one of the privates was very near her financial safety (a low-cost OOS public) in bottom-line cost, and another one was with the possible range, though it would have been a stretch. She chose the public based on the fact that she liked the school better than the almost-equal-cost private and that she didn’t like the next-cheapest enough more to take on the debt it would have been necessary to go there.</p>
<p>It’s diifficult to say what percentage of students pay sticker price. If you look at the information on schools, it appears that about half the students are on financial aid at most school, and for those schools that also give merit money of sorts, that covers even more. Then you have those on ROTC or have some built in discount. </p>
<p>My kids did not get much at all in terms of merit money and a lot of the schools to which they applied offered them absolutely zilch. As a rule they were the more selective school on their lists. Some give no merit money, or very little and we did not qualify for financial aid. </p>
<p>In most cases, our best deal would have been either one local private or a number of local state schools. If our kids commuted, it would cost little. One got a full scholarship for a local private. To go away to college, the least expensive choice was our state u’s. One son did get a nice merit award, but even $30K did not bring the cost down to what the state u would have cost. But there are kids who get nice scholarships from private schools that can bring the cost down to what it would cost to go to a public school.</p>