Trying to Forecast Future Aid RIT vs Steven Institute

My child received scholarships and institutional grants based on a financially difficult. Child qualified for Pell grant.

2022 was a bit better by an increase of $20K. I am predicting child will no longer be eligible for a Pell grant. I also understand the institutional aid might also decrease.

Stevens said that $20K increase won’t effect the institutional grant awarded and it should remain the same. They said if it was $50K difference it would but not at $20K. It’s still a lot of money, but I appreciate the predictability of this.

RIT wouldn’t even entertain the idea. They use the FAFSA not the CSS profile, so the FinAid office says until they know the new rules for how the calculation of the SAI (no longer EFC) are issued, they won’t be able to predict. They said a change in AGI of $8K in either direction triggers a recalculation, but they won’t share what their formula could be to calculate the new grant amount.

At first RIT looks to be better deal based on first year awards, by far, compared to Stevens. It also won’t be too much more than the SUNY my child got into. Just want to go into this with eyes wide open. (Also not sure if Stevens is worth the extra cost. I know, ROI but it’s not an insignificant amount.)

Am I thinking about this incorrectly? I would appreciate any insight. TIA!

Need based aid is recalculated annually. There are a few schools that guarantee need based grants for all four years, but the schools you mention don’t.

You can get a very rough estimate of your net costs with the increased income by running the net price calculator with that increased income. BUT beware that this should be viewed as an estimate only because the NPCs are currently set for 2023-2024…not the following academic year.

Thanks for the tip about running the NPC.

RIT’s NPC uses the CSS profile model, but the don’t ask for it when applying for Financial Aid, just the FAFSA. Do they use an internal version (I don’t know what the term actually is) of CSS to calculate institutional aid?

Just do whatever the RIT net price calculator says. The don’t use the Profile. They DO use the net price calculation developed by the college board. There is a difference between these thing.

Every college has their own way of computing the awarding of their institutional dollars.

There have been some reports here about RIT and aid in subsequent years…I don’t remember the poster.

@Mwfan1921 do you!

I don’t remember a post/thread about RIT FA and subsequent years.

What does this mean? If you mean they are using CB’s NPC format, that doesn’t mean they aren’t using just FAFSA data…the questions they ask will make it obvious which is the case. As the RIT FA staffer told you, they can’t really predict next year’s FA…nor is their NPC set up to do so. You can try the NPC, but whatever the result suggests for next year, we just don’t know how accurate it will be (nor would it support an FA package from RIT next year). When you spoke with RIT FA, did you talk to a director level? If not, I might do that, and have one more conversation about this.

Hmmm…maybe it was RPI I was thinking about…