Financial Aid at Top Colleges

The New York Times has published a helpful financial aid chart for those students looking at some of the top colleges in the country. For each college the chart lists the cost of the college, the average need based grant, the average self help aid and the average non-need grant.

This is a helpful way to compare the average financial aid packages for a variety of colleges. Most helpful may be the comparison of the self help portion at each college. Self help includes loan as well as work study. The Ivy League schools range from $1,700 average self help at Princeton up to $7,900 at Cornell University. It is interesting to note that Cornell College in Iowa, a small liberal arts college, had an average self help aid of $3,900.

Of course we will again warn about relying only on such information because it does involve averages which can be misleading without further information. But this provides one more piece of information that students can use to evaluate likely financial aid packages before applying to college.