These features are most useful once you have entered at least two award letters. If you haven't entered any award letters yet, check out this article for help entering award letters.
First, navigate to your award letters from your profile by going to APPLICATIONS and selecting Financial Aid
There are multiple factors that impact the way you consider the cost of attending college. We explain each of the settings in the article linked above. Here are the settings we used to analyze our award letters:
Once you're entered your award letters, you can view the key components of each of the financial aid award letters in a simple table, allowing you to quickly compare values in one award letter to values in another.
This table automatically calculates your Net Cost, Out of Pocket Cost, and Unmet Need based on the information you enter with your award letter, and in the settings, specifically if you enter your Student Aid Index (SAI) from your FAFSA submission or your MAX family contribution. This view allows you to compare the total amount for each of these categories, for each award letter you enter.
You can continue to scroll down on your Financial Aid Awards page to see your award letters compared to one another using a bar graph to show How you're paying:
The legend at the top shows you what each color within the bar represents. Overgrad uses the information you entered for your award letters to generate this bar graph. This bar graph allows you to review total cost (the top most line of the bar graph) and see how grants and scholarships, work study, loans, and/or unmet need are distributed for the total cost of attendance for each school.
If you continue scrolling, you'll see a chart that can help you consider net cost compared to graduation rates, a metric of return on investment
Overgrad plots these points to help you compare the cost with student success at each college from which you've received a financial aid award letter. While graduation rates aren't the only important metric in your college choice, this plot can help you consider the cost associated with each college compared to student outcomes.
If you click on the blue dot for each school to see more details about the net cost and graduation rate:
You can also change the axes of the plot by choosing from the drop down menu at the top:
Each of these tools will help you compare your financial aid award letters in slightly different ways, to help give you the clearest understanding of the costs associated with each college to which you've been admitted.