<p>Boston University vs. University of Michigan-Anne Arbor</p>
<p>You can evaluate this yourself for any colleges. From a recent blog post…</p>
<p>First of all, you need to estimate your expected family contribution (EFC). There is a calculator at Collegeboard.com that works fairly well.</p>
<p>Now we need the cost of attendance (COA) from the schools you are interested in. Each school will have a different cost of attendance. This can be found at the colleges websites, Collegeboard.com, Kiplinger, or a dozen or more other websites.</p>
<p>Subtract the EFC from the COA to find out what your financial need (FN) is at each of the schools. The formula looks like this </p>
<p>COA - EFC = FN</p>
<p>Now multiply the financial need at each school by the schools financial track records: % of need met; % of gift aid; % of self help. This will provide you with how much money the school is likely going to give you, and consequently, how much you are likely to pay at that college.</p>
<p>And Voila! You now have a fairly accurate estimation of your out of pocket costs and at each of the colleges. You can now see which schools are generous and which are not. Youll be surprised. You are proabably going to find out that some of the schools that look cheaper in the beginning will actually wind up costing the most in the end.</p>
<p>Are you an instate resident of Michigan? If so, the costs there will be much better than at BU which is private. I don’t believe either school guarantees to meet full need. Both, I believe, do give merit aid to top students…top…in addition to need based aid.</p>
<p>Go to this page:</p>
<p>[Boston</a> University - Office of Financial Assistance - Applying for Financial Aid](<a href=“http://www.bu.edu/finaid/apply/incoming.html]Boston”>http://www.bu.edu/finaid/apply/incoming.html)</p>
<p>And click “Probability of Receiving University Scholarships and Need-Based Grants”.</p>
<p>Where do you land? Wherever you are on that chart, you can get an idea of what you will get from BU. Obviously, it’s no guarantee, but it’s as transparent as any non-guarantee school is going to be (even more transparent than some…). For example, I am first row, first column. Averaging the 25th and 75th percentile tells me that the average GIFT (no loans or work study) aid for students like me is $39,355. The COA is $50,288.</p>
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<p>This will not work for BU or any other college that bases their financial aid packages on student stats. Average aid given is a meaningless number, if you’re at the top of their pool and they really want you they’ll give you 90%, if you just squeaked in you many get zero.</p>
<p>The only schools you can accurately predict are those that meet 100% of need and those that have numbers based scholarships.</p>
<p>Meaningless? No.</p>
<p>Stats are important. Average students get average awards. Above average get above average awards. Below average get below average awards.</p>
<p>Don’t assume that information doesn’t mean anything. I’ve used those stats to project awards for nine years. They work better than anything else.</p>
<p>With enrollment management techniques, it’s much more complex than that. With this year’s endowment issues schools will handle aid in different ways. You can certainly try to guess, but counting on the guess is a different matter.</p>
<p>The endowment issues of the past year have had an impact. We’ve certainly seen that. But on the whole, this process has worked year after year and will typically hit within 5% of the actual award.</p>
<p>Averages alone mean very little. But when you combine that information with specifics from the student, statistics take over. Enrollment management techniques can be very complicated on the micro level, but there is no getting past statistics on a macro scale.</p>