I have a kid at DePaul. DePaul’s music program does have some money to work with and was good to us. I still suspect 20K all in is a difficult number to hit for a popular instrument without financial need unless you’re pretty unique in the program or they have unusual holes to fill, short on grad students, etc. Housing is expensive at urban schools, so room/board alone is close to that. They aren’t uniformly giving full tuition, there may be a few of those. Probably more common for harder to fill instruments. I would also say, acceptance rate for my kid’s area was 8% this year post pre-screen. So as always, very little is safe when we are talking auditioned programs. (we didn’t look at roosevelt, so I can’t comment on that program)
I agree you will often see students from a range of programs at excellent grad programs. I’ve seen that true at both the schools my kids attend. But I will also say at the 20+ UG schools we looked at (which were all set in a college/university setting, we did not look at standalone conservatories), there were also a range of musicians at a lot of schools. We saw some very high level musicians at low profile schools and were surprised by some less prepared musicians at more competitive schools. And maybe this also somewhat reflects that many schools have a set budget and need to hit a bottom line and they may make a range of financial offers to fill their programs.
I will also say we were sometimes surprised of the quality of music faculty at more off beat schools if there were in/near a major city/metro. And less impressed by some faculty at very popular, competitive programs. So in general, dig deep when you are learning about programs. There can be surprises out there that don’t always reflect the typical “apply to these music programs” lists that circulate.