Advice Please: Narrowing Colleges

calmom
Sat, 10 Mar 2007 22:30:53 +0000

I hate lists like the Kiplinger list because they are averages which tell nothing whatsoever about the individual case. So somehow Yale becomes a “better value” than Rice, despite its significantly higher tuition, because some other people’s kids get better financial aid.

What matters on an individual level, when it comes down to it, is their own financial aid package – and they may fare better or worse depending largely on the way they fit into the college’s financial aid policies. A given college (take your pick) may be the most generous on average to families with the most typical financial profiles – or they may not be particularly generous but have their overall numbers skewed down because they are well-endowed and have generous policies toward very low-income students, but are stingy with the middle class applicants. None of that matters to a multiple-step-parent, self-employed farm-owning family trying to navigate the financial aid process.

In other words, I could look at charts all day long: but for me and my own,there was no question that Barnard was far and above the best financial choice. Does Barnard even appear on the Kiplinger list? No. But U of Chicago and NYU show up as #32 & #33. (NYU showing up at all is a big joke – lets all have a hearty laugh over that one).

Interestingly enough, though – of the 3 colleges listed on the Kiplinger report that offered aid to my daughter (Fordham is the 3rd), I would have been paying LESS than the amount shown by Kiplinger in their cost-after-need-based aid column [though I note that there is obviously a data error with Chicago - they simply don’t have the aid figures shown]. In other words, I’m in a better-than-average category – but that doesn’t change the fact that the least expensive (to us) of the 3 still wanted $9K more annually than the non-listed college.

Those average cost figures don’t tell you anything about aid policies; what they reflect is that average overall wealth of the student body - the higher that average, the less need-based aid, so the higher the average payout per student. My experience with financial aid tells me that the only figure really worth looking at is average student debt – that tells you how each college is actually structuring its aid. Try using the arrows at the top of the page to re-order the Kiplinger report to first look at “average cost” and then look at “average indebtedness” and you will see what I mean. (That’s the one where Princeton comes out on top - not average costs).