<p>It appears that the phrase does not always mean the same thing.</p>
<p>For example, some may use it to mean that net price = EFC after deducting only grants from list price. But others have used it in the context of "meet need with loans".</p>
<p>Many universities also have an ESC (expected student contribution) of around $8,500 ($5,500 Stafford loan + $3,000 in savings from work or work study). If net price = EFC + ESC, does that count as "meet full need"?</p>
<p>At most colleges it seems to mean “We meet what we consider your full need, which is a heck of a lot less than what you consider your full need. Also, unless we really, really want your kid, we ‘meet’ a substantial portion of it with loans.”</p>
<p>You can check with the FA gurus, but I believe that the truly “meets full need” schools can only call themselves that if they count only the Stafford loans as part of meeting need, not PLUS or anything else. I know that was my experience. </p>
<p>Yes, they do decide need (I mean, who would say themselves they could pay anything if they had a choice?), but the formulas track pretty close if you don’t own a business or have other outlyer issues.</p>
<p>When my S went to a “meets full need” school, I could calculate ahead of time almost to the dollar what he was offered.</p>
<p>I believe there are only about 40 true “meets full need” schools.</p>
<p>If your options are to go to college and take out federal loans to help pay for it vs not going, who cares if your package has federal loans. I agree with not taking any other loans though but people here act like the federal loans are a kiss of death to a student.</p>
<p>Its what Marian said. There was someone last who got into several elite schools with FA only choices. The individual contribution was anywhere between 2k to 15k which is a big variance. </p>
<p>Then there is one more category which is meet full need but you get borrow all of it.</p>
<p>SteveMA, it all depends on what you include in the Federal Loan category. PLUS are federal loans too. And the reason there are the private loans out there willing to give out money for college with co signers is that they are also backed federally. A student can get Perkins, Staffords, Additional Staffords that can add up to clos to $15K freshman year alone and go up from there, and may not be a good idea at all.</p>
<p>The schools that I’ve seen that guarantee to meet full need to not tend to include the unsub Staffords or the PLUS. Some do include the full Staffords however, and some even throw in the PLUS which, to me, is outrageous, given there is no guarantee the parent is even going to qualify. </p>
<p>Meet full need has different definitions since schools do use different criteria in defining need. Even those schools that agree to use the same methodology have come up with quite different results so when you have schools capping Home equity at 1.2X income vs 2.4X income vs no cap or not including home equity, you can get varying results. Also, schools have different ways of calculating what the student’s contribution should be. Some have a fixed minimum amount which can very onerous to students from low income families. Some Catholic schools will give credit for tuition being paid for siblings at a Catholic k-12 school. Some take 401K funds into consideration. One school, I recently learned guarnatees to meet full need as defined as their tuition/fees/room/board minus FAFSA EFC which I thought was about as generous as I’ve ever seen.</p>
<p>Given the lack of consensus on what “meet full need” means (based on the posts above), is a list of schools that “meet full need” actually meaningful?</p>
<p>For example, UNC-CH and UVA are commonly said to be the only two state universities that “meet full need” for all (including out-of-state) students. However, putting a hypothetical in-state student from a $50,000 per year household into their net price calculators produced significantly different results, with UNC-CH giving a net price of $8,272 (including a student contribution of $4,605, implying a family contribution of $3,667) and UVA giving a net price of $10,667 (including a student contribution of $7,000 and family contribution of $3,667). The UNC-CH student needs either a Stafford loan or work earnings to make the student contribution, while the UVA student needs both. The flagships in FL and WA appear to be similar to UNC-CH in this respect for their in-state students; the flagships in CA and MI appear to be similar to UVA for their in-state students (so one could say that these schools “meet full need” for their in-state students, although the definition used in their common data sets may be different again).</p>
<p>But both situations are still far better than the situation of a similar student in PA looking at Penn State, which gives a net price of $24,176 even with an expected family contribution calculated to be $3,077 (though Penn State has never been claimed to “meet full need”).</p>
<p>PSU has given families with zero EFCs, nothing out of university funds, just the federal entitlements and then also made a summer term before starting that has to also be paid as a condition of acceptance. Yeah. So no surprise there. It does not guarantee to meet need is an understatement. </p>
<p>I’ve been surprised at some of the hefty student contributions that schools that guarantee to meet need have. For those students from very low income families, coming up with that amount of money is going to be very difficult.</p>
<p>Meets full need is more of an idea rather than a strict guideline.</p>
<p>What the instituition determines as your need between the FAFSA, the Profile and their own FA forms can vary so much from each school.</p>
<p>We have seen so much variation for the same kiddo, the same year from many of the meets “full need” schools. And upon further contact and other offers going back and forth the “need” changed over and over again. And after all was said and done, same kiddo had 12 revisions in ONE year alone.</p>
<p>Summer contributions can be waived, costs not figured in initially can be added and the elasticity is eye-opening. Misc. and personal expenses can be S T R E T C H E D. Funds can be added for additional tuition and research elsewhere. Laptops added. More expensive travel accomodations. New winter wardrobe.</p>
<p>Some schools have it set up to advance funds before freshman fall to make sure monies are there for student to travel, buy clothes/dorm supplies and books before classes start. One school included airfare FOR ME to accompany student for a visit.</p>
<p>The info all came together when student applied/accepted to 34 undergrads. 34 financial aid packages. 95% were all meets “full need”. The difference was mind boggling. And in the 10s of thousands. </p>
<p>Add to this data point 4 more siblings and the same EFC. 5 kiddos, 4 years each and all sorts of schools. OOS Public which does NOT meet full need, met all her need and then some. They allowed the financial aid to be stacked with merit scholie which often times does not happen with an OOS public.</p>
<p>So what really matters is the bottom line. How much do you have to pay? Not how much have you been awarded and the more flexible they are in the beginning, the more they will be later on. If they (FA) have no room to move well then, you have a preview to future years.</p>
<p>It means, “we don’t even know you or your circumstances, but we are going to take a look at your tax returns and make a guess at what your “needs” are; if you don’t agree . . . adios.”</p>
<p>My older d got into six “full need” schools. The difference in what we would pay between the lowest and the highest (some of whom claimed to use the same methodology and same forms) was the equivalent of one full year’s COA.</p>
<p>My son got into three “full need” schools, all of them top privates but not Ivies. The differences were only a couple thousand dollars per year between the highest and the lowest. And some of them offered Perkins loans instead of unsubsidized Stafford, even though we are not “low income” by any sane standard (top 20%). </p>
<p>@mini, did your daughter get into Harvard/Princeton/MIT etc? Those have a more realistic definition of what non-wealthy people can afford.</p>
<p>I agree with the others that Marian nailed it.</p>
<p>What may be reasonable to use from a student’s point of view is to run the net price calculators on all of the prospective schools, get the net price estimates using only grants and automatic scholarships (not loans) deducted from list price and comparing that to AFC + ASC.</p>
<p>AFC = actual family contribution that the family is able and willing to contribute (some families will want to use a conservative number if the income is of a type that colleges’ EFC calculations give widely varying numbers or are less likely to match the net price calculators)
ASC = actual student contribution in student loans and work earnings that the student is willing to take on (probably no more than $8,500 at most, but some will want to use a smaller more conservative number)</p>
<p>If net price <= AFC + ASC, then the school meets need for that student. Otherwise, it does not, and the student should check to see whether large enough merit scholarships are available before going further with the school. Of course, which set of schools meet need under this criterion differs for each student.</p>
<p>I hate the fact loans can be counted as meeting need. I can possibly see up to the Stafford loan amounts but that should be clear from the school’s web site, and it’s usually not.</p>
<p>The Common Data Set, together with the FAFSA, are the best sources we have for standard meanings of “need” or “meeting full need”. </p>
<p>From the language of CDS sections H2e-h, I would expect “meet full need” to mean that 100% of the Expected Family Contribution, for every student determined to have need, is covered by some combination of need-based scholarships/grants, non-need-based scholarships/grants, and need-based self-help aid (not to include PLUS loans, unsubsidized loans, and private alternative loans). This is close to the formula ucb stated above: A school could be said to meet full need if (for every student with determined need) the net price = EFC + ESC (where ESC is the sum of maximum Stafford + ~$3K from work/work study.)</p>
<p>However, the CDS guidelines indicate that “financial need” is determined by the institution using the federal methodology “and/or the institution’s own standards”. So the CDS gives institutions some leeway. They get leeway to define what a reasonable amount of work/work study is. More importantly, I think, is the leeway they get to determine EFC. It appears the CDS does not enforce consistency in how colleges treat non-custodial parent income, or business/farm income, in determining need.</p>
<p>Only about 50 schools claim to meet full need for U.S. applicants:
[Need-blind</a> admission - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need-blind_admission]Need-blind”>Need-blind admission - Wikipedia)<br>
At least two schools on this list (Beloit and Knox) appear not to belong there at all, however they determine “need” (because their CDS H2h numbers are way below their H2c numbers).
Of the remainder, it would be nice to know how much variation there really is in determining EFC and ESC.</p>
<p>Vanderbilt is on the “need blind meets full need” list, but when S2 was accepted, during a time when S1 was also a full time college student, their offered financial package was breathtakingly stingy (in our opinion).</p>
<p>^
Did Vanderbilt’s offer fail to cover your EFC (as determined by the federal methodology)?
Did it cover the EFC, but only by including a high amount of self-help aid?
Did other private schools, given identical information, offer significantly more n-b aid?</p>
<p>tk21769, do you mean “100% of the Expected Family Contribution, for every student determined to have need, is covered”?</p>
<p>My understanding is that “need” is defined as the difference between the cost of attendance (COA) and the Expected Family Contribution (EFC).</p>
<p>Since EFC may be calculated many different ways by various institutional methodologies, and the difference may be made up with grants, loans, work-study, etc., there is enormous variation in the out-of-pocket costs to families whose “full need” is met.</p>
<p>Moreover, it has often been stated here that there is an expectation that EFC is to be made up of past (savings) current (income) and future (loans) resources to begin with. So one might be expected to take out loans to meet the EFC, and then be offered additional loans to “meet need.”</p>
<p>In other words…“meets full need” may mean nothing at all.</p>
<p>This was several years ago. Applied OOS to UVA, UNC and Vanderbilt, all of which are on the same “need blind, meets full need” list.</p>
<p>UNC Tuition, room, board, fees full price was $34,000 Offered $7500 in loans and work study
UVA. " " " was $41,500. Offered $10,600 in workstudy and loans
Vanderbilt " " " was $55,976 offered $12,000 in grant and workstudy</p>
<p>While Vanderbilt offered the most, and a good chunk of it was grant money, it was still the most expensive by far. The price at Vanderbilt may read high because he was accepted into their engineering program, which has additional fees.</p>
<p>Even going without loans, (we accepted the work study, but did not use loans), Vanderbilt would have been $14,000 a year more than UNC.</p>