<p>I will read that X college offers the best financial aid, while Y college offers way less. Then, I use the financial aid calculators and find the opposite.</p>
<p>Because I will need financial aid, this information is extremely important to me. What should I trust? Help!</p>
<p>I always take news articles with a grain of salt because they tend to speak in generalities, which may not hold for specific situations.</p>
<p>More details would be helpful, like the names of schools or links to the articles. Are you applying OOS for public colleges?</p>
<p>My parents have 6 children total. They have taken in foster kids in the past, but not right now. My mom stays home. One of my little brothers has a disability. My dad makes just over $100K. I know $100K in a family with 1 child leads to little financial aid, but we are a family with 6 kids.</p>
<p>I am not really looking at any OOS public schools. I would be open to them though, if they had good financial aid.</p>
<p>Sorry, I was asking about OOS publics because I thought that might be why you’re getting low FA estimates using the NPCs.</p>
<p>The calculators will give you an estimate more specific to your situation than a general situation the news article may be referring to.</p>
<p>Use the NPCs…and ignore news articles. They are talking in generalities. The NPC has YOUR information.</p>
<p>Thumper is absolutely right on. There are schools that are notorious for giving inadequate financial aid, and gapping a lot of students for large amounts, but even they give SOME students great packages. The ones they want most. It doesn’t matter a whit to those students getting those great awards that the school doesn’t do this for any number of others. It also doesn’t help you any, in fact, probably gives you a slow burn, to find out that a school that is reputed to be so generous is not so generous to you.</p>
<p>On average means that if you have your back side in the fire and your head in the icebox, you are a good temperature , on average. </p>
<p>Even after doing all of the calculators, what really matters is that final award package. If your family has its own businees, owns rental property or has any other situation that the estimators which are just that, estimators, don’t pick up, your actual award might be quite different. There have been students on this board, who applied to schools that guarantee to meet full need, have generous need policies by every news article, rating system and stats, and they got a lot less than the estimators showed because of some individual situation. </p>
<p>it doesn’t matter what anyone else gets. It’s what YOU get that matters to YOU.</p>