Harvard ED vs UChicago ED

warblersrule
Wed, 13 Jan 2021 05:24:22 +0000

1NJParent:

Secondly, if you need financial aid, Havard is generally more generous.

I agree that this is generally the case, though obviously the situation for any given student could be quite different. Not only is the percentage of students graduating with debt from Chicago more than double that of Harvard, the average debt at Chicago is noticeably higher – $26,600 compared to around $6000 at Harvard according to CollegeBoard, which draws its data from the CDS. (Chicago does not make its CDS publicly available, which makes this difficult to verify, however.)

Chicago began improving its hit-or-miss financial aid and correspondingly low yield in the late 2000s with the Odyssey scholarship program, but it did so several years after colleges like Princeton and Davidson had already eliminated loans entirely, and it arguably still has not quite caught up with a couple of the wealthiest schools.

As has already been pointed out, any student deciding between colleges should always run an EFC calculator.