<p>greenwitch - I don’t think Haverford practices preferential packaging. More likely you have some asset or unusual income situation that HC’s formula treats differently than the others. I would encourage you to appeal, since you have received vastly different need-based offers from comparable peer schools.</p>
<p>FAFSA EFC is almost useless for privates, IMO. Better to run an institutional calculator (Amherst and Williams both have them on their websites), which gives you federal methodology AND the institutional methodology of a top/generous private. Princeton’s calculator is not good because P’s formula is usually more generous than any schools other than HYS (though obviously there are exceptions).</p>
<p>It all depends on your individual situation. I’ve yet to hear of a wide FA range at full-need no-/capped-loans schools where parents are married to each other and earn fixed salaried incomes with no assets other than 10-20k in cash savings, and where the only child (college-bound) has no assets and no income. Once you start adding on other factors–home equity, significant assets, multiple children–it becomes ever more complicated and difficult to predict.</p>