Is anybody a subscriber to The Chronicle of Higher Education?
They published a ranking of the colleges that are “most generous with financial aid” back in January. Duke was ranked number one (of 958) and Tufts was ranked number twelve.
A subscription is needed to access the Chronicle article and get the ranking…
https://tuftsdaily.com/news/2020/03/04/tufts-leads-among-us-colleges-financial-aid-generosity/
Really? What is this based on? There are colleges with far more generous need based aid awarding policies than Tufts. Places like Princeton and Yale.
Tufts is generous. But not as generous as some.
There are a small number of very generous schools with amazingly generous need based aid policies even for higher income families…Princeton, Yale, Stanford are great examples.
Of course the first hurdle is getting accepted to these very generous schools because only accepted students get their generous need based aid.
Many prospective students can make their own rankings by using colleges’ net price calculators.
Of course, the college net price calculators require accurate information, so if parents are unwilling to give that (particularly common in divorced situations), then it may be more difficult to get good results.
There are 10 places between #1 and #12 - which is plenty of room to fit Princeton, Yale and Stanford.
I would be surprised (and very disappointed in them) if they were not close to the top - given the size of their endowments.
My source is the Tufts Daily article whose link is at the bottom of the post. That article provides a link to a Chronicle of Higher Education article, but it requires a subscription to read it - hence my request for someone who has a subscription.
The Tufts article that I linked did provide some information on methodology, but I was curious for more detail. A senior editor at the Chronicle used IPEDs data to create the list.
Here is an excerpt from the article I linked…
Here you go:
I can send you the excel file with data…just pm me with an email address.
I don’t have the inclination to dive too deeply into the methodology, but I find it interesting that there are more NESCAC schools (6) on this one to twenty list than Ivy League schools (4).
In our situation, where EFC changed a lot from year to year, because we were going from two students in college to one and income increased as well, it was better to look for merit. Need based aid would have been too unpredictable.
Both kids had a higher GPA requirement to stay in their major than to keep the scholarship, so that wasn’t a concern.
It doesn’t really matter how generous a college is to its average student, however the generosity is defined. What matters is how generous the college is to you. That can only be obtained by running NPCs for all perspective colleges, and comparing the results in your individual case.
The Chronicle ranking is hilarious. I don’t know what methodology it used, but in real practice, Duke was unaffordable for us while Princeton’s FA was generous enough that it was cheaper to send my kid there than to our in-state public. I also did an extensive ranking of my own using the NPC with the exact same data among many of the schools listed in the Chronicle, and Princeton came out on top closely followed by Harvard. The next closest were Stanford and Yale, while other schools fell significantly below, such as Duke, ranked #1 by the Chronicle, LOL. Even Williams, ranked #11 by the Chronicle, beat Duke by far. Do your own NPC comparisons.
I stumbled across a copy of the actual article while investigating another topic and it seems that an explantion of the methodology would still be relevant - particularly to applicants with “high need”.
The actual full title of the article is “Colleges that are the most generous to the financially neediest students.”
The methodology used was to divide the average price paid by students in the highest income bracket (greater than $100K) by the average price paid by students in the lowest income bracket (less than $30K).
Based on this calculation, on average, private school students in the top income bracket paid 1.4 times as much as those in the lowest bracket.
At Duke and 11 other schools (i.e. down to Tufts), students in the top income bracket paid 10 times more than those in the lowest bracket.
So this methodology would tend to penalize those schools that allocate larger (in a relative sense) amounts of their aid budget to the applicants in the highest income bracket (for example HYPS). It would tend to reward those schools that allocate a larger (in a relative sense) of their aid budget to applicants in the lowest income bracket.
As long as one does not get too hung up on the exact ranking, this methodology helps identify schools with smaller endowments worthy of further exploration by applicants in the lowest income bracket.
Since this info gets dated quickly, since the last response was 2 years ago, any new info is better place on a new thread. Closing.