<p>Columbia is my top choice, so money isn't a factor here, but I was just wondering. I only made it to Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, and Cornell of levels that are even slightly comparable to columbia, but Columbia gave me more money than any of them. I know that CMU is stingy on financial aid, but I thought that the Ivy League's should be semi-consistent, and Columbia offered me DOUBLE the amount that Cornell did (don't want to list exact amounts, but both values are in the double thousands' digits)</p>
<p>Why is that? I'm certainly not complaining, in fact, I am estatic at this development, but why should Columbia offer so much more? Is it just the fact that Columbia is plain richer?</p>
<p>each school has their own institutional model, they value different things, and so you will get different assessments even on the same information. </p>
<p>but among finaid folks, columbia is probably the 5/6 most generous out there, so regularly will trump cornell and others.</p>
<p>Cornell is quite stingy with aid, and I don’t believe they guarantee 100% of need. You would have gotten as much if not more aid from Harvard or Yale. The Ivies are not as consistent as you’d think.</p>
<p>All schools are different with this. Its weird I’ve seen this happen all the time. A good friend of mine at Brown got better aid than at Rice, which I thought was weird since Rice is supposed to be really generous.</p>