<p>Can any of you wonderful financial aid experts help me with a comprehension issue? I was looking at the profiles for a couple of colleges my daughter is interested in and noticed that the "average indebtedness" number was quite low. I'm just not sure what that means, how to place that in context. I'd be grateful for any information.</p>
<p>I am not an expert, but I do think using the averages can be misleading, it is only your package that counts, not the average. Though a low # either means lots of people pay cash or they don’t fill their aid packages with loans.</p>
<p>If there is a 1/10,000 chance of a side effect to a drug, but you get it, you got it 100%…same with the loans. I think it would be more helpful to contact finaid and ask them with certain EFC ranges what would a package look like.</p>
<p>I understand all that, of course, but I’m trying to get a sense of what to look for in assessing the trends at particular schools. It caught my attention because the numbers for those two schools were so much lower than some of the schools that my older daughter received packages from.</p>
<p>Some of the very top schools have been trying to decrease amount of loan. Given the current endowment problems, that may be more difficult.</p>
<p>zoosermom - if this school doesn’t promise to meet 100% of need then it could mean there are a lot of kids not receiving financial aid.
Do they list a % of students who receive financial aid?</p>
<p>Ahhhhh. Yes they do JustAMomOf4. That’s something good to look at and I wouldn’t have thought of it.</p>
<p>It can be tedious to dig out for various years, but line H5 of a school’s Common Data Set shows the average cumulative undergraduate indebtedness per FA-receiving graduate.</p>
<p>The numbers I pay attention to are:</p>
<p>% financial need met
% of award in grants/scholarships
% of award in jobs/loans</p>
<p>Those number you can apply to your individual financial need and get a fairly accurate estimate for that school.</p>
<p>In my opinion, all the other average financial aid numbers are virtually meaningless.</p>
<p>Average indebtedness can be meaningless. First of all, just on a statistical level, I always wonder whether for “average” they are reporting the mean or the median. The mean is adding up all the students’ debt and dividing by the number of students. The median is lining up all the students’ debt loads, from smallest to largest, and then taking the middle number of indebtedness and reporting that.</p>
<p>In most things the mean is more accurate, but when you’re talking about money like this, a median is usually better. For a mean, a lot of little debtloads (from the low-income students they admit) can outweigh a lot of, but a smaller amount of, heavy debt loads, even if most students really are graduating with much higher than the school says they are.</p>
<p>Even percent of students who receive financial aid can be misleading. A school may say 75% of their students receive aid, but “aid” is a catch-all term that includes student loans and such. Plus, the <em>amount</em> of aid is what’s important – the college could be giving everyone $1,000 scholarship just to say that everyone gets aid, but at a school that costs $30,000 or a year to attend, that’s not even a substantial dent in the costs. And I think JustMomof4’s point is that a lot of schools can average full-pay students into their “average student indebtedness.” A couple of rich, full-pay students with $0 indebtedness can offset those students who owe $60,000 or more after they graduate. (If a school admits as many full-pay students as students who have to borrow more than around $50K, they have effectively cut those higher students’ indebtedness by half in the averages.)</p>
<p>The other thing that makes it meaningless is that it relates to student indebtedness. For example, some top schools like Columbia and Harvard promise to meet 100% of your need and put together a no-loan aid package. Yes…for the student. If they find your EFC to be $20,000 a year, then you (meaning you and your spouse, if you have one) will need to come up with that $20,000 (either out of pocket or through PLUS or private loans) even while your daughter is debt-free. A lot of schools are shunting off the loan debt to parents so they can lower their average student indebtedness number.</p>
<p>Like scottaa said, you need to look at the percent of financial need met, whether the school recalculates your financial need to be less favorable than the federal method, the percent of each award that is made in nonrepayable aid vs. repayable aid.</p>
<p>zoosermom, I found this site to be a bit more detailed and informative in the way they breakdown FA stats (excludes Plus and private loans, self help vs other need based aid, etc.). If I remember correctly, you can also do a side by side comparison of up to 3 schools once you’re logged in. I haven’t found any site that lists the ave. debt load or contribution from parents, but that would be very useful!</p>
<p>[Student</a> Aid on the Web](<a href=“http://www.studentaid2.ed.gov/gotocollege/campustour/]Student”>http://www.studentaid2.ed.gov/gotocollege/campustour/)</p>