A student's unmet financial need is the college's cost minus the student's expected family contribution, or EFC, as determined on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. More than 50 colleges and universities provide work study, loans and grants to cover the entire unmet need for lower and middle income students. For example, if your EFC to attend a $50,000-per-year university is $20,000, then the school would offer a $30,000 grant and likely a work study job. The most generous universities cover the cost through work study and grants alone, eliminating the burden of student loans to repay after graduation, reports Lynn O'Shaughnessy of CBS Money Watch.
All eight Ivy League universities meet lower income students' financial need with grants rather than loans, O'Shaughnessy writes. Princeton University changed all loans for low-income students to grants in 1998 and expanded the program to all financial aid students in 2001. Ten years later, Princeton states on its website that it has been "able to enroll growing numbers of students from low- and middle-income backgrounds with the grant aid they need to make our costs affordable." Harvard University covers the entire college cost for any student whose family income is less than $60,000 as of 2011. Brown, Columbia, Cornell and Yale universities, the University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth College all have similar policies.
When the University of North Carolina announced in 2003 that it would cover nearly the full college costs of students whose family earned less than 150 percent of the poverty level, the University of Virginia quickly responded with its own even more generous policy, reports David Leonhardt the "Economic Scene" columnist for "The New York Times." North Carolina then expanded the limits of its program to 200 percent of the poverty level, Leonhardt writes.
Among the other public universities that meet 100 percent of unmet financial aid are Arizona State University, the College of William & Mary, Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia. Indiana University, Michigan State and the University of Michigan, North Carolina State University, Texas A&M and state universities in Illinois, Florida and Maryland also have such financial aid policies.
More than 20 selective private colleges and universities also have policies to meet 100 percent of the unmet financial aid of admitted students. Many of these universities fund these policies with earnings from their endowments, according to Leonhardt. As of 2010, the majority of these schools are in the Northeast, including MIT, Amherst College, Bowdoin College, Vassar, Tufts, Colby College, Wesleyan University and Williams, Haverford, Swarthmore and Wellesley.
In the South, Duke, Emory, Davidson College, Rice University and Vanderbilt have polices to fund 100 percent of unmet need. The University of Chicago, Northwestern University and Washington University in the Midwest also have generous financial aid policies, as do Stanford, Pomona College, Cal Tech and Claremont McKenna College in California.