I did the net price calculator to several colleges and they ranged for an EFC of 4k to 55k. All the colleges that I did were private universities that are said to give good FA.
Why are they so different from one another?
Are you sure that you entered the same information consistently with each entry? It is possible that you might have mis-typed something. You could re-do the most extreme colleges at each end and see if you still get the same result.
Also, do all of them claim to meet full need? Is merit aid included on any of them?
I have heard of differences between schools, but this is quite large.
WashU which claims to meet 100% of need was 55k but Haverford which does the same was 4k. I will try again to see if something was entered incorrectly
Any chance your parents are self employed? Do they own real estate other than their primary residence? Do they have equity in their primary residence?
Honestly…it sounds to me like you added an extra 0 someplace…or deleted it someplace else…or misplaced a decimal point.
If your parent income is in the $200,000 range…that $55,000 net cost would be about right.
Your family would need to be pretty low income for your net cost to be $4000.
Which is it?
@thumper1 I found out that too, for our family EFC for HYP is 10,000, EFC for stanford, MIT and other ivies is 18,000 and Harvey Mud and CMU is 25,000, both parents income is same and not much assets besides home
We are still paying around less than 5 k for prep school; I can see that she will be required to work in summer and work study, but differnce among similar need blind college is huge
The general answer is simple: schools that provide institutional need-based aid calculate their own EFC in their own way. Without knowing which schools are being considered and the specifics of the family’s financial situation, it’s impossible to provide any more detailed answer than that.