Was reading through Middlebury’s website and they note: “Middlebury typically provides grant aid to about half of the student body. For the Class of 2018, the average grant was $41,046.”
Does that mean the average grant was $41,000 a year (that’s very generous, btw) or are they calculating over 4 years (that is, $10,500 a year?)
That’s the average grant per year for those students receiving financial aid.
Also look in the Common Data Set to get the break down between need and merit aid.
So the grant was $41K, but it is all need based. They have no merit aid.
It is the average award given to those who chose to ENROLL. Many others may have gotten LOUSY aid pkgs (maybe because they were high need, or didn’t warrant a preferential pkg, or whatever), and didn’t enroll…so their pkgs aren’t figured into the stat.
This stat and the % of need met stat can be misleading. A school that gives lousy aid to low EFC students who don’t enroll, can appear to have a high % of need met, but the reality may be that their enrolled students had a modest amount of need that could be filled with a stafford loan and maybe a small grant.
Remember…when computing averages…there are students who get very very small need based awards, and students who get larger than the average.
If you are looking at this average as a way to determine what you might get…don’t! Your situation is your situation…and it could be at the bottom…or top of the need based award pool. The average is really not as important as your own financial stats and what they will net you.
I said that it’s the average grant per year for those students receiving financial aid. A student who isn’t enrolled at Middlebury won’t receive financial aid from Middlebury. I thought that was kind of obvious.
It actually wasn’t obvious to me. The CDS is a mix of info., isn’t it – some about accepted students and some about those who actually enrolled? Maybe it’s obvious to families who’ve been at this a while, but many of us are still learning.
So you thought that someone who wasn’t enrolled at a school might receive financial aid from that school? I guess I’ll have to be more explicit in my posts. And you don’t have to know anything about the Common Data Set to get the meaning of my post (at least I hope not).
Someone who is accepted to a school receives an award letter. The school gets to claim XXX students received admission, so why not claim $$$ was awards to the class of 2018? It wasn’t clear to me that the Middlebury total was just for merit awards for one year and not all awards, including loans.
High schools claim all the time $5M awarded to the class of 2014, when many of those awards are from multiple schools to the same student who can only use one. In my daughter’s case, they read the award amounts for some kids for all 4 years, but my daughter’s as just her first year. There was no telling how off they were for some students. My sister keeps bragging that her son got a $90k offer from one school, which was for all 4 years while my daughter only got $22k - but hers is for one year and she’ll get it for 4 years, plus other scholarships.
It won’t help to know the average, and expect the average, if some kids are getting 100% and some are getting nothing.
Clearly, at colleges some kids are getting 100% of need met and others are getting nothing. But out of the enrolled students who qualify for financial aid by the schools definition, one can get some idea as to what kind of grants are being given by that average figure. There are schools that look impressive in the % of need met, until one finds out that those getting most and all of need met have low need. Meet need for all the kids who need $10K or less is a lot cheaper than meeting the need for the same number who need a full ride.
Middlebury does not give merit money as a rule. Maybe a student here and there , really wouldn’t even count that as it’s a fluke. 280 freshmen who enrolled at Middlebury got an average of nearly $39K in grants. Middlebury met 100% of the enrolled freshman class’s need as their forumula defines need. But out of that 280 freshmen, some got under $5K in grants, and some may have gotten close to the $60K COA in grants to average $39K. What that breakdown is, we don’t know.
Because they deal in hard numbers, not could’ve, should’ve, would’ve. Number admitted is a hard number. Financial aid dispensed (as in, actually given to enrolled students) is a hard number. The total amount of financial aid offered means nothing, because the total amount offered will never be dispensed, unless the school has a yield of 100% (won’t happen in the real world).
Awarded but still can be declined (not enrolled). However, I do believe the financial data are for enrolled students.
Nope. What I thought is that every accepted student receives a financial aid package and perhaps that data is what schools use in the CDS if it makes them look good.
The common data sets require that the numbers get reported a certain way. And that way is regarding the aid and awards that the enrolled students get, not what is offered to those accepted. Be aware that what is offered is not always what ends up being received even by enrolled students. Verifications, new circumstances, outside awards, etc, etc, can all change the initial offers.
Right, which is why the quoted language in the first post talks about aid received by members of the student body, not aid offered to the pool of accepted students.
Clarification never hurts. It can get very confusing.