Colleges That Are the Most Generous to the Financially Neediest Students

Students from low-income families may assume the costs of attending four-year private nonprofit colleges are well beyond their reach, but that is not true at a number of elite, endowment-rich institutions. Among four-year private nonprofit colleges in 2017-18, Duke University appears to have made the greatest effort to cover the full costs of its financially neediest students. No parental contribution or loans were expected of students from families with annual incomes of less than $40,000 at Duke, and many students from such families received money to help cover additional out-of-pocket expenses, like travel. That policy accounts for Duke’s negative average-net-price numbers for students from families in the two lowest income categories. (Average net price is calculated by subtracting the average amount of federal, state, and local government aid, and institutional grant and scholarship aid, from the total cost of attendance.) Even though, at four-year private nonprofit colleges over all, students from the wealthiest families paid just 1.4 times what students from the lowest-income families did, at 11 colleges (excluding Duke), students from the wealthiest families paid, on average, more than 10 times as much as students from the lowest-income groups.