Wondering if anyone has experience with the rice investment. Have you been accepted, been within the 130K boundary, but didn’t receive full tuition because your house has been paid off and your parents have been saving money? I heard from someone (on YouTube) that they were accepted but didn’t get full tuition because of their home equity. LMK what experiences you’ve had, considering this program is new and rice still hasn’t updated their financial aid calculator to account for the rice investment.
UPDATE:
I found the link to the NPC calculator, use this if you want proper results.
https://npc.collegeboard.org/app/rice
DONT use the mytuition quick college cost estimator. It is NOT accurate.
Last year there was some discussion on the Rice Class of 2023 threads about what Rice considers “typical assets.” Perhaps some of those students and parents that have experience with the roll out of the Rice Investment can chime in. @jmeryllman may have some insight into the process.
Here is a recent article from The Thresher the student newspaper on the subject. https://www.ricethresher.org/article/2019/10/the-rice-investment-students-receive-respond-to-aid-and-expectations
Last I looked, the Rice NPC had not updated for this new initiative but that was early fall.
Rice has not been transparent about what they consider “usual assets”. I personally find that their financial aid office is poorly run, a shame at such a fine school.
A call to their financial Aid Director is the best way to get any meaningful answer to your question. Straight from the horse’s mouth and you hope it’s not coming from the other end.
The Thresher reports that the Rice Investment “resulted in a 29 percent rise in the number of applications and an increase from 44 to 50 percent of matriculating students receiving need-based financial aid.” So it seems the Rice Investment has met, at least in part, its stated goal of extending need-based financial aid to more students. However this may also have lessened the pressure to keep geeral tuition down because Rice can now point to the RI as evidence that only those who “don’t need help” are being asked to pay more.
Some will like that and some won’t, but it is the direction nearly all the top universities have gone lately.
As to whether savers can be denied RI support even if their income is below the threshold, they can, though media coverage surrounding RI hasn’t really mentioned that. Several people have even posted to CC about accepting ED under the assumption they’d be covered by RI, only to be later told their families saved too much to qualify. Now you can certainly respond to this by saying, well, it is their mistake for not looking into RI more carefully. You might be right about that but it would still be better to make clear that saving as much as you can for college is considered “unusual” today and may have consequences for RI.
Thank you all for your help. The NPC calculator does in fact factor in the RI, so getting an estimate of whether or not my assets are ‘typical’ were made obvious.