But they don’t necessarily give it out. Few if any full boat scholarships at the Ivys.
Yet Yale’s and Harvard’s endowments have reached critical mass where they can cover tuition at current enrollment levels.
No one - but no one - declines an Ivy League school for lack of cash.
Not Harvard or Yale, anyway, and probably not many of the others.
Jack Hammer's point about Harvard, Yale, Princeton financial aid is largely true. These three schools don't give merit scholarships, but the financial aid at them is better than pretty much any other schools.
And most families pay little or even nothing to send their children to these schools.
The financial aid package each family receives revolves around the total cost of attendance (TCA) and comprises three parts: the EFC (expected family contribution), the self-help portion, and the grant. The EFC is what the parents are expected to pay toward tuition, room, board, other expenses. Students are usually expected to generate, separately from their family, their own portion of the costs - that's called the self-help portion. Students earn this through jobs on campus and summer employment. In the cases of really poor families, the self-help portion may be partially or completely waived. What is left, after the parent contribution and the self-help portion is the amount of money the school makes sure the student gets. This is the grant. It's usually school money, but can include scholarship money from outside sources.
To make a long story short, the EFC is $0 for families with $65K in income or less, and average household assets. For such families, there will still usually be a student self-help portion of about $4.5K per year. The rest of the TCA is paid by the school in grants. These grants of financial aid include no loans.
As income goes up, so does the EFC, until one’s income gets high enough to no longer be eligible for any financial aid. That happens at about $200K - $250K of household income. From $65K to about $150K, the rule of thumb is that these schools are looking to parents for about 10% of their gross income for their EFC. Beyond $150K, aid phases out quickly. But what that means is that there is a subset of families sending their children to these schools that are paying a very high percentage of their income in college costs, as much as 25% of gross income.
Some students don't feel they can work while going to school, and thus will borrow money to pay their self-help portion. A lot of incoming freshmen decide not to work the first semester or the first year, and prefer to borrow the money for that year. These schools make low-interest loans available to students who wish to do that.
Some parents don't feel they can meet the EFC. These schools will lend parents the money to pay the EFC. This is especially true of folks who fall into the "doughnut hole" of about $180K - $250K in income. Relatively speaking, this subset of folks is getting soaked. Obviously, as income moves beyond that quarter million dollar amount, costs decline as a percentage of income, and thus, at least in theory, become more bearable.
So, I know nothing about the specifics of this young man's family's finances, but if attendance at an Ivy is truly a matter of affordability, it means his family is fairly well off.
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