<p>There have been several posts recently about dissatisfaction with Georgia Tech financial aid. While I do not mean to demean the individual experiences of these posters, I do think it is great that when compared to other universities across the nation, Georgia Tech stands out as among the most generous.</p>
<p>For about a year, I was bitter at not even making it to the semifinalist stage of the PS. If I look at it from a mature standpoint, however, I can’t complain about the financial aid I received at Georgia Tech. By my calculations, my parents have paid less than $20,000 for my entire undergraduate education. (I summed up all their web check payments on OSCAR and added in my first year’s allowance.) My parents would have had to pay more than that for one year had I been mean to them and whined about how attending a private institution would have done wonders for my life.</p>
<p>Whatever. I credit Tech with helping me get into a Top 15 business school for my PhD, and in the end, I got a nice award from my College for academic performance. If I amortize the sum over my duration of enrollment, it all worked out :D</p>
<p>The reference is to the Tech promise, my financial aid counselor confirmed it. I am an OOS, finalist for PS and was offered only a small non resident grant and 32000 in loans. For all the millions of dollars available through this school, this hardly seems generous or close to meeting need.</p>
<p>If you read the article referenced here, the author states “the 51 colleges and universities on this list promise to meet a students demonstrated financial need with grants not loans”.</p>
<p>They did not misread anything. Besides the Tech Promise Program, Georgia Tech awards hundreds of millions in grants and scholarships each year. While not all need is always met without loans (it isn’t at most of the others school on that list either) Georgia Tech certainly has one of the most generous scholarship offices among public universities in the nation, which plays a large factor in our ability to attract freshman classes with 40+% coming from OOS. In fact, OOS grants (not loans) often exceed 10K/yr. Georgia Tech was also recently ranked by Smart Money as the number three best value school in the nation. Georgia Tech is certainly deserving of its place on that list, and there is nothing unfortunate about it.</p>
<p>I think the authors of the study were trying to figure out which schools had “no loan” policies for low-income students, not which schools do not include loans in their financial aid awards. Lynn O’Shaughnessy misinterpreted the study and unintentionally misled her audience into thinking that the fifty-one schools on that list were “no loans, no questions asked.”</p>
<p>As I and other users have mentioned, the Tech Promise is indeed a “no loan” program, but it comes with questions asked–namely, does your family earn below a certain amount income-wise?</p>
<p>Basically, the list as Lynn O’Shaughnessy describes it is misleading. Those schools all have “no loan” programs, but most of them attach strings to their “no loan” programs.</p>