Can I Afford a Top-Ranked School?

If you went to the website of Stanford’s financial aid office, you’d see that tuition for the coming school year is $36,000. If you add on the costs of room and board, books, supplies, and other incidental expenses (hopefully none of you are coffee addicts!), you might need to budget up to $50,000 per year. If you stopped reading there, you might think that Stanford (or any other highly selective private college or university) isn’t affordable to you (or most families in America, for that matter). But if you dig a little deeper into the financial aid policies available at top-caliber private schools, you’ll see there’s more to it. For example, take a look at this graph from the New York Times detailing the financial aid policies of some of the nation’s most selective colleges:

As you can see, these colleges offer a wide variety of financial packages that can include sizable grants that you will not have to repay, eliminating the expectation that your parents will have to contribute financial to your college expenses, and waiving tuition. Often, these packages are so generous that they make a highly-selective college more affordable than a state university, or sometimes even a community college!

If you are interested, here is a link to the original in which the chart cited above appeared.