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<p>Your Rice numbers are correct, explaining how I rounded up to zero.</p>
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<p>I’m getting the numbers through inference. Let’s say the COA for a school is $55,000, of which $3000 is calculated for non-billable expenses. Your student contribution is a mandated $2500 and your work study contribution is a mandated $2500. Your student portion is $5000. $3000 is allotted for “non-billable expenses” within the COA. So, $3000 of the expected $5000 student portion is for non-billable expenses. $2000, the remainder, goes to billable expenses. You can find this information on any college website that has such a financial aid plan. I recommend reading up on Rice, UChicago, Yale, and Stanford.</p>
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While the school calculates this amount in your cost of attendance, they do not give your $ for books or travel expenses (you must pay for these things yourself).
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<p>Wrong. Many top schools (here may I cite Stanford, Yale, Rice, and UChicago, for example) include non-billable expenses in the official Cost of Attendence.</p>
<p>Rice CoA: [Financial</a> Aid at Rice University](<a href=“http://financialaid.rice.edu/main.aspx?id=46]Financial”>http://financialaid.rice.edu/main.aspx?id=46)
Chicago CoA: [Office</a> of College Aid](<a href=“http://collegeaid.uchicago.edu/cost.shtml]Office”>http://collegeaid.uchicago.edu/cost.shtml)</p>
<p>Let me put it this way. I’m an EFC 0 student. Suppose I get in and attend Stanford, since I know Stanford’s situation a little better, having spoken to a low-income counselor there. Stanford requires a $4500 student portion between a student summer contribution and work study. Stanford “allots” $1485 for books and supplies and $2345 for personal expenses. The Stanford CoA is $53,652. For an EFC 0 student, all but the $4500 student portion is covered. That leaves $4500 to be paid to the university. Now, the CoA includes books, personal expenses, and supplies. But, books and personal expenses come to a total of $3870. If you don’t include non-billable expenses (which I don’t, since work, not loans - which I’m trying to calculate - can cover that) that leaves $630. What does that $630 cover? Billable expenses. The same goes for Yale. (As a side note, Stanford differs because it does not include transportation as a stable number. Transportation is added to each student, at the cost of two round trips per year. Since from my home to Stanford would almost certainly cost more than $630, I would actually “owe” the bursar nothing.) So, every year, I’d owe Stanford $630 on my bill. For Yale, at the end of ten years, it would be $6750. For Rice, it would be $0, and so on and so forth.</p>
<p>So, the $4500 student contribution is supposed to cover the estimated $3870+ for books, supplies, personal expenses, and transportation. If the total of that number comes to less than $4500, some money is owed to the bursar. If that total comes to MORE than $4500, the money is loaded onto the Stanford ID card and can be used to purchase books and other supplies (as per the low-income counselor at Stanford).</p>
<p>If you think that this works another way, let me know, since that’s actually BETTER for me, not worse.</p>