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The Top Colleges That Cost The Least For Needy Students

This article is more than 8 years old.

If you’re a high school student whose parents make a combined $40,000 a year, you may think you don’t have even a remote chance of being able to afford an elite, ultra-high-priced college like Harvard, Princeton or Stanford. But those schools have such large endowments ($36 billion, in Harvard’s case), coupled with a commitment to making college affordable for any applicant who can overcome their challenging admissions requirements, that students from low-income households can expect to pay a fraction of the schools’ sticker price of around $60,000.

Harvard is the most affordable, according to federal government data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics for the years 2012-13. While Harvard’s all-in cost that year was $57,950, a student whose family income totaled between $30,000 and $45,000, paid an average of just $3,000 after federal, state and institutional aid were tallied. Though culled by the federal government, even that low figure represents more than needy students actually paid. The financial commitment required of low-income families has been zero since Harvard instituted a program called the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative in 2004. Since 2012, the income threshold has been $65,000.

NCES’s statistics don’t include dollars from non-government scholarships like the Gates Millennium Scholars or Coca-Cola Scholars programs. NCES’s numbers also don’t count the work-study pay students are expected to contribute from campus jobs that Harvard requires those on financial aid to hold. Aside from Harvard’s huge endowment, the largest of any school in America, it helps that alumni keep giving to the school and that many direct their contributions to financial aid, like billionaire alumnus Kenneth Griffin, founder of the Citadel hedge fund, who gave the school $150 million in February 2014, the largest gift Harvard College has ever received, and asked that most of it be used for financial aid.

A few caveats for families with low incomes: Schools do take into account assets other than primary residences or retirement funds (and some look at primary homes). If a family has a low household income but it has managed to sock away $100,000 in a 529 college savings plan, for instance, has received a windfall inheritance of, say, $300,000, or owns multiple homes, it won’t get the same generous financial aid package as families scraping by with no financial cushion. Also families who are supporting multiple offspring at home or in college, get more financial aid than those with just one child in college. For divorced families, the calculations differ from school to school. Some look only at the custodial parent and others take both mother and father into account, says Herm Davis, who runs a financial aid counseling service in Rockville, MD.

I took a selection of 25 schools from Forbes’ list of top colleges and looked at the price students pay to attend those schools. I used the NCES statistics I mentioned earlier. As I noted above, those figures don’t take into account scholarships that come from sources outside the schools or the government. Those scholarships can help discount the cost substantially and in many cases where schools charge less than $10,000, bring the cost down to zero.

Here are the net prices students paid in three different income brackets, broken down by school. Note: The figures come from NCES. The net prices are for the 2012-2013 academic year, the latest year for which figures are available and the college cost figures are for the year 2013-14.

This is an update of a story that appeared previously.