Maybe it’s because your friend is wealthier. And, no, I’m not joking.
To be fair NEU provides a lot of full tuition scholarship, so kudos to them. But they also provide many partial scholarships as well. This tactic is called discounting among college admission and financial aid circle. It’s designed to attract affluent students to come to their school by giving them a slight discount on the tuition.
As one famous article a few years puts it: “*f a school offers a single low-income student a full scholarship of $20,000, the school may feel good about itself, but it’s out $20,000. But if it can attract four affluent students to its campus instead, by offering them each a $5,000 discount off full tuition, it can collect the balance in revenue and come out way ahead financially…These colleges are, in other words, providing affirmative action for the wealthy, and the scale has grown very large. During the 1995-96 school year, only 24 percent of first-time, full-time students at private colleges received merit aid; by the 2007-08 school year that number had risen to 44 percent.” [Source: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/september_october_2013/features/merit_aid_madness046453.php?page=all]
I don’t know the exact number, but today, the scale is much larger than just 44 percent of schools using this tactics to attract wealthy students.
Here are more fun readings on the topic:
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/03/14/174320752/colleges-are-offering-big-merit-scholarships-its-a-problem-if-you-dont-get-one
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/26/education/getting-out-of-discount-game-small-colleges-lower-the-price.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0