And suspiciously similar to what I got when I googled “best sheet colors to hide stains”.
As always it would be nice to get more details, but I looked at Davidson’s latest CDS to see what it reported about need aid.
Overall they had about a $60M budget for need aid. That strikes me as pretty normal for a college like Davidson. Like just to give an example, they are currently tied with Hamilton in the US News rankings (not that this means a lot, but I wanted an independent source for my comparator to avoid cherry-picking) and are a similar size. And Hamilton reported a $65M budget for need aid.
OK, then apparently their average need grant (so not including self-help, just stuff that would come out of their operating budget in the form of reducing net tuition) was about $61K (Hamilton was about $60K, so again pretty normal I would suggest). Of course we don’t know the actual distribution, but this is only among people actually getting need grants, so if some people were getting bigger need grants, others were getting smaller need grants to offset.
That average was then not quite enough to pay for tuition alone (over $68K), and other costs would then add quite a bit more–about $19000 for other direct costs (fees, housing, and dining) alone.
Overall there were 979/1867 getting any form of need aid (about 52%–Hamilton was virtually identical, as you would expect given all the input numbers are almost the same). A few more were getting non-institutional need aid, and at Davidson a few are also getting merit aid, but the budget for that is much smaller. There are also athletic scholarship at Davidson not included in any of this.
But basically, I agree this is largely all pretty standard for colleges like this.
As an observation, true full pay scholarships (covering not just tuition but also other costs of attendance) are not necessarily as common as some people hope/expect. Even full tuition is materially above the average, and generally I would suspect there was a pretty robust distribution of people getting even farther below full tuition (to offset people getting anything between full tuition and full pay grants).
One of the lessons here is people really need to check their NPCs–there are a decent number of middle-middle-class or even upper-middle-class families who seem to assume they will not qualify for any need aid at colleges like Davidson, and they might be pleasantly surprised.
But still, it is true that like half the students (give or take when you adjust for merit and/or athletic scholarships) at these colleges are just full pay. And actually when you realize what those need formulas look like–this is usually families way high up the household income and/or asset percentiles, even among the households with college-bound students.
But that doesn’t mean if you are such a family (meaning the type of family even a generous college would conclude has no need), you necessarily can comfortably afford such a college. It depends on how you have structured your finances and savings, your plans for retirement, possible other kids, whether you are trying to conserve resources, and so on. And even if you COULD comfortably afford it, you might still conclude it isn’t worth it over less expensive options.
But obviously colleges like Davidson are currently not struggling to find enough families like that who are willing to be full pay, and more who do get aid but even so are willing to pay more than what their in-state options likely cost.