Hmmm-- well, my question is first and foremost-- what exactly does that figure REALLY represent?
My guess is that it represents all the $$ that was OFFERED to students as grants/scholarships/tuition discounting/monetary awards. In other words, everything but loans or family contribution, or "unmet need."
From ALL schools, including those that the student opted not to attend.
If you look at that figure for even a single student like my DD (who isn't an extreme example by any means, since she applied to so few schools, and we have apparently got about "zero" family financial need)-- that figure is easily into the six-figure range.
If you look at the dollar amount that she is actually going to use, however, it's much more modest, but still more than most students going ANYWHERE are offered-- ~50K.
My DD's class was awarded several hundred thousand. There were 280 of them, and maybe 2/3rds of them are actually going to colleges where such awards would be made. Now, I know for a fact that some of the students in that class who are middle-class were offered very little in the way of merit aid, in spite of being, well-- pretty darned meritorious, IMO. These are kids that any TigerParent would be pleased by, basically-- and they were most certainly not offered tons of $$-- other than at private colleges, where the formula seems to roughly be that the award amount for super-rock-star academics is A = d(T), where T is the base tuition rate, and d is any value between 0.05 and 0.40, depending upon the institution.
Now, you can see that A is a pretty large value as X approaches infinity, no matter what value d possesses (in light of the stated range). Yes, I'm being cheeky, but you get the idea.
So that's why I'm saying that I strongly suspect that the figure mentioned is rolling together all of the $ that seniors were OFFERED. Big difference. Kids apply to plenty of "reach" institutions that there is NO way that they can actually afford, and they often hope that the institution will kick in a large award as a pleasant surprise. Not-so-much, though.
For example, here-- UVA (fine school, right?) has out-of-state tuition at about 40K right now. Average award based on non-need-based MERIT? 10K. Now, realize that the 40K figure is only TUITION-- cost of 1yr is actually estimated at 53K for an out-of-state student.
That's pretty typical, in our (recent) experience.
