What, if anything, have you learned from the application process that you would do differently?

[ItsJustSchool]

They gave $7.9 million in aid. - when doing the rough math, that means that they are giving the equivalent of full tuition to 168 kids spread out over 200 or so kids that enroll. So there is a lot of aid given to the >75K crowd averaging to about 85% aid. More math - when taking the 13% who get 100% aid, that works out to be about 80% for the remaining 34% getting FA yielding an Exeter education for 10K per year. not bad.

My math works through a tad different. It seems that Exeter has over 1,000 students. Unless you assume they go cold turkey, and refuse financial aid to all but new Preps, I would use that number in my calculations. At least include new upperclassmen, as well, even if you neglect returning students! Using 1,000 students, 13% would be 130 students.

So $50k for 130 students is $6.5M. Using the $7.9M number cited above leaves $1.4M for the other students on aid. There would be another 33.3% of the students on partial aid, or about 333 students (although Exeter claims “fewer than 300” on their website). $1.4M for 333 students comes to about $4,200 per student. Checking, $7.9M over 463 students averages to $17K per student on aid, less than the $41.5 that Exeter cites. I saw that in 2011 Exeter gave out $15.853M in financial aid, or twice the cited $7.9M.

http://www.exeter.edu/exeter_bulletin/12984_14541.aspx

Somewhere in all of these numbers lies the truth. If we say 433 students received an average of $41.5K, that works out to $17.8M in financial aid, which is more believable. Subtracting $6.5M for those on Full aid gives $12.3M for ~300 students, or about $41K (82%) on average for each of the partial aid recipients.

So, @Heartburner used very different numbers than I did, but ultimately arrived at a similar result: ~$10K residual COA for “partial scholarship” recipients.

If you leave out tuition remission (e.g. faculty kids) students and day students, Exeter claims from its website:

This year, 46.3 percent of our students (not including faculty and staff children) are receiving need-based financial aid. The average tuition grant for a boarding student is $40,559 plus $850 that all financial aid recipients receive toward the cost of books and supplies, for an effective average award of $41,409 (which covers more than 86 percent of tuition and fees). All newly enrolled financial aid recipients also receive a stipend toward the purchase of a computer and tablet. All aid is in the form of grants.