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<p>I can actually appreciate this criticism. To rephrase in a simplistic way, with the same FA budget, a school can choose to give out either $30,000 per student to 50% of total students, or $15,000 per student for the entire student body. We would need more than % students on aid, such as mean or median grant amount, standard deviation, confidence interval, etc. These numbers are not readily available, since schools don’t publish them:-)</p>
<p>When I casually browsed FA amount for individual schools in the past, I was surprised to sense that there were no significant difference in FA amount between rich, well known schools and poorer, lesser known schools. boardingschoolreview.com do publish average grant amount, so you could calculate total $ figures individual schools spend on FA and how such an amount compared to its endowment size. Previously, I used % of students on aid because those figures could be easily retrieved and I was too lazy to transcribe them one school at a time. I still am not willing to do that, but here’s data for some of the schools:</p>
<p>School | Endowment Size | Enrollment | Percent Students on Financial Aid | Average Financial Aid Grant | Total FA amount | Total FA as % of Endowment
Exeter | $992M | 1085 | 45% | $38430 | $18763447.5 | 2%
Andover | $800M | 1141 | 47% | $38055 | $20407754.85 | 3%
SPS | $433M | 536 | 35% | $44275 | $8305990 | 2%
Deerfield | $398M | 630 | 35% | $39000 | $8599500 | 2%
Hotchkiss | $362M | 594 | 37% | $36960 | $8123068.8 | 2%
Choate | $283M | 864 | 33% | $38000 | $10834560 | 4%</p>
<p>Cranbrook School | $217M | 799 | 31% | $16338 | $4046759.22 | 2%
St. Andrew’s School-DE | $170M | 300 | 46% | $38000 | $5244000 | 3%
George School | $105M | 545 | 50% | $30164 | $8219690 | 8%
Emma Willard | $86M | 337 | 54% | $23450 | $4267431 | 5%
Salisbury School | $45M | 305 | 32% | $37000 | $3611200 | 8%
Dana Hall School | $33M | 467 | 20% | $35002 | $3269186.8 | 10%
Suffield Academy | $25M | 414 | 38% | $26500 | $4168980 | 17%
St. Andrew’s School-RI | $15M | 215 | 48% | $25305 | $2611476 | 17%
Saint Andrew’s School-FL | $13M | 575 | 19% | $15300 | $1671525 | 13%</p>
<p>The above schools are inversely sorted according to their endowment size, and the last figure in each line is total FA amount as a % of school endowment. As you can expect, HADES schools are ranked top in endowment size, but they are not necessarily giving more in FA. </p>
<p>In conclusion, this supports my previous conclusion that endowment size had no correlations with FA, even when I just used % of students on aid.</p>