How good is the financial aid at Duke?

bluedog
Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:52:44 +0000

Penn’s FA however, is very good, definitely better than Duke’s.



Question: is there actually data out there showing which schools have better FA? Or is this all from anecdotal evidence? Or are we looking at total financial aid given/average grants and loans per student? I don’t know if that’s a fair comparison as there’s not a perfect overlap between student bodies…although seeing such a comparison is probably the best we’ve got, so it would be interesting to see how Duke fares on that.

I’m honestly curious because it would be awesome so be able to plug in numbers and see which schools give better aid. I think Princeton has a calculator or something. Perhaps certain schools are better for low-income while others are better for middle-income. Anecdotally, I know at least three people at Duke who chose Duke over UPenn because of better aid. Admittedly, this was a few years ago. And probably others chose UPenn over Duke but I just didn’t know since I didn’t go to UPenn. So, it’s conceivable those three were anomalies. Duke, for me, was quite generous with FA and I’m from a middle-class family. It was considerably cheaper than Michigan was even with Michigan’s $10,000 merit scholarship offer…Hey, and Michigan has a $6B endowment! I realize it has many more students…