Princeton continues to enhance its groundbreaking financial aid program as it welcomes a first-year class with the largest-ever number of lower-income students.
The financial aid enhancements reflect Princeton’s national leadership in access and affordability, and they apply to eligible new and returning students. Most families with incomes up to $150,000 a year will now pay nothing for their student to attend Princeton, receiving aid to cover the total cost of attendance, including tuition, housing, food, books and personal expenses. Most undergraduate families with incomes up to $250,000 will pay no tuition.
In addition, many families living in the U.S. with incomes up to and even beyond $350,000 will receive grant aid, including those at higher income levels with multiple children in college.
We fall in the income bracket that we would not qualify for financial aid, but, the 90k + schools are just not in our budget. Princeton now might just have an application coming it’s way as a reach school for my D26 she was not planning on applying to any reach schools due to budget.
It’ll be interesting to see how this affects need-based aid at other Ivies and beyond. Princeton has been pushing aid packages up for a while now so this doesn’t strike me as a radical change. But I do think there’s a contingent of families above that $250k income range who have/had the impression they have no chance at need-based aid and who now might check out NPCs at HYPSM and a few others.
Worth noting that Ivies will typically match aid packages for those accepted to other schools in the conference, the idea being that cost should not determine choice of schools.
For where our income/assets sits – Princeton is now $3K (COA!). It’s more a fantasy that my daughter would get in --but 3K!!! Anyway appreciate that they are doing this. Net price calculator for Brown sits at $38K which is unaffordable. I don’t really understand why they are so different.
I just ran their net price calculator with various income ranges just to compare with a few other schools and for a $200k income with modest savings it came in under $13k vs those same figures at many other meets needs schools are showing between $40k-$60k (with most being in the 50s). I’m impressed!
Yes, that’s quite possible. It’s a tad more than they had budgeted as recently as April (although the FA was very generous under the prior policy also):
“In April, the University planned for an 8% increase in the financial aid budget to $306 million for the 2025-26 academic year. With the new policy, the University is projected to spend $327 million on financial aid, an approximately 15.5% increase.”
Yes, the timing is very interesting, adding something like $21 million above what was in the approved budget in the spring. Especially in a time when the university is cutting its general operating budget.
