How to make sense of a school's COA figures?

[Mdude]

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I'm trying to crunch the numbers of some different schools I'm considering, and I'm having trouble really comparing them because the only category that is uniform across schools is "Tuition." After that, some schools lump lots of other stuff into "Miscellaneous" (one school has ~$8,000 listed for miscellaneous, even though they have a separate category for room and board!). Whereas other schools try to spell it all out in detail.

What the heck is "miscellaneous"?
What are "fees"? Does that include or exclude health insurance? Does that include books and supplies?

Example: try to compare Brown (http://med.brown.edu/financialaid/cost/, click excel link on right) vs. UNC, out-of-state (http://www.med.unc.edu/md/financial-aid/cost-of-education).

UNC's tuition is cheaper, and living costs in CH are for sure cheaper than Prov, so how does UNC come up with a GREATER COA (by almost $3K!) than Brown?

I wish there was a simple way to compare the schools based on their tuition & fees, and then calculate everything else out myself which are based on more personal factors (ie, maybe I'd get a bigger place if I went to a cheaper school/city). Are there other people out there frustrated in their attempts to do a side-by-side analysis?

 

[AdmiralChz]

I believe schools try to estimate on the upper end of the cost spectrum so no one is caught off guard by the overall cost. Better to overestimate than underestimate!! Each school is different for financial aid and how they calculate it - call each of the schools and ask them!

 

[ChubbyChaser]

You can get IS tuition at UNC after one year. BUt I know that UNCs COA is grossly exaggerated, the only people I could see even coming close to those figures are those with families or those who decide to live in the country club.

 

[flip26]

COA will impact how much you can borrow.

If you can spend less than the COA, which may or may not be easy to do depending on the location of the school and the cost of living, you can always "pay back" the excess you took out in loans and reduce the principal.

 

[Transmogrifier]

I was pulling my hair out doing the exact same thing. I posted in the FinAid forum and maybe some of the allo class threads. What it came down to was to not bother with trying to compare all the weird budget categories. Figure out how much tuition is (fees and books won't be that much more). Find out the average cost for an apartment. Everything beyond that you control (food, insurance, transportation, clothing, etc.). Some schools really pad the COA so you can get as much as you need, others really clamp down and limit you so it's hard to compare apples to apples. Just look at tuition and rent costs.