Financial aid at Brown?

bjrwrh
Tue, 05 Jul 2005 21:56:29 +0000

I could be wrong, but I think Internationals DO get aid; it’s just on a need-aware basis. A lot of schools that are need-blind for domestic students are need-blind for internationals. (This is mainly because there can be a lot of additional costs associated with international students, such as airfare, and if someone literally has no money, the school has to pay for everything. Now, if it were up to me, Brown would be need-blind for internationals as well, but Brown’s policy is pretty normal.)

Princeton and Harvard, in theory, have the best financial aid policies in the country. And Brown is not the richest school (it’s not poor, but it doesn’t have a mega endowment). However, financial aid really varies a lot from person to person. There doesn’t seem to be a logic to how aid gets given out… in other words, some students get really good aid packages from certain schools and bad aid packages from other schools, while the schools are reversed for other students.
At admitted students weekends, I’d hear things like “I wanted to go to Yale, but they didn’t give me as much money as Brown,” and then “Really? Because I preferred Brown but Yale gave me more money.” I heard countless numbers of such conversations with the names of various schools.

So, in summary: you really couldn’t be sure whether Princeton or Brown would give you more money. I could be mistaken, but I think that some ED schools will give you estimates of your aid packages BEFORE you apply ED. I also think that you can back out of an ED agreement if the school gives you way too little aid.