63 Colleges With the Best Financial Aid

What schools provide the best financial aid for college?
It's an excellent question to ask if you are going to need financial aid for school. Most families, by the way, fall into that category.

The most generous schools meet the full financial need of their students. Just a fraction of colleges and universities, however, can make that promise because it requires a huge student financial aid commitment.

In fact, according to a new U.S. News & World Report survey, only 63 schools out of 1,700 colleges and universities claim that they meet their students' full financial need. You can see the U.S. News story here:

Which College Claim to Meet Students' Full Financial Need?
When evaluating the generosity of schools, you will want to discover if schools include just grants (free money) and a work/study job in their financial aid packages. Nearly all schools also include loans in their packages so when researching schools, check the breakdown of loans versus grants. You can find that kind of information within profiles of individual schools on the websites of the College Board and COLLEGEdata.

Here are the schools on US News & World Report's list in alphabetical order:

63 Most Generous Colleges and Universities

1. Amherst College
2. Barnard College
3. Bates College
4. Boston College
5. Bowdoin College
6. Brown University
7. Bryn Mawr College
8. California Institute of Technology
9. Carleton College
10. Claremont McKenna College
11. Colby College
12. Colgate University
13. College of the Holy Cross
14. Columbia University
15. Connecticut College
16. Cornell University
17. Dartmouth College
18. Davidson College
19. Duke University
20. Emory University
21. Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
22. Georgetown University
23. Gettysburg College
24. Grinnell College
25. Hamilton College
26. Harvard University
27. Harvey Mudd College
28. Haverford College
29. Macalester College
30. MIT
31. Middlebury College
32. Mount Holyoke College
33. Northwestern University
34. Oberlin College
35. Occidental College
36. Pitzer College
37. Pomona College
38. Princeton University
39. Reed College
40. Rice University
41. Scripps College
42. Smith College
43. St. Olaf College
44. Stanford University
45. SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
46. Swarthmore College
47. Thomas Aquinas College
48. Trinity College
49. Tufts University
50. University of Chicago
51. University of Dayton
52. University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
53. University of Northern Colorado
54. University of Pennsylvania
55. University of Richmond
56. University of Virginia
57. Vassar College
58. Washington and Lee University
59. Washington University, St. Louis
60. Wellesley College
61. Wesleyan University
62. Williams College
63. Yale University

Lynn O'Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes for TheCollegeSolutionBlog.
Financial aid for college image by Nepowa. CC 2.0.

Lynn O'Shaughnessy

View all articles by Lynn O'Shaughnessy on CBS MoneyWatch»
Lynn O'Shaughnessy is a best-selling author, consultant and speaker on issues that parents with college-bound teenagers face. She explains how families can make college more affordable through her website TheCollegeSolution.com; her financial workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College; and the new second edition of her Amazon best-selling book, The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price.

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