Scholarship money at Stanford University

Sticker price is published tuition plus mandatory fees. Actual average paid applies the school’s reported grant percentiles to its student body, so it includes the students who receive no aid at all.

Students with no scholarship pay the full sticker price. Grant recipients are split into quartiles using the reported 25th, 50th and 75th percentile awards, and each quartile is credited with the average award across its range. That uses every percentile the ABA publishes rather than the median alone.

We use non-resident tuition throughout, so the estimate is deliberately conservative. An individual offer can land well above or well below this average.

The two halves of this estimate are not from the same year. Tuition and fees are the 2025 to 2026 figures; the grant percentiles behind the discount are the 2024 to 2025 awards, which is the most recent year the ABA reports. A school that raised tuition or changed its aid budget between the two will sit slightly off.

Your LSAT and GPA are compared with the quartiles this school reported for the students who enrolled, not for everyone it admitted. The ABA publishes three points per measure, the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile, and three points cannot pin down an exact rank. So each comparison is shown as a range, and landing exactly on a published quartile gives the widest range of all.

The two numbers are combined using the index formula LSAC publishes for this school, so the weighting between LSAT and GPA is usually the school’s own rather than one we chose. LSAC publishes no formula for about one school in eight; there we use the median weighting across the schools that do publish one, which is a model of ours and is labelled as such on the page. Tested against the schools that publish a formula, that median puts an applicant in the same band 94.5 percent of the time.

Placing you against a formula evaluated at the school’s quartiles is an approximation either way: the index at the median LSAT and median GPA is not the class median index, because the same student rarely holds both.

The award category is a modeling assumption of ours, not a rule the school has published. We assume awards are ordered by numerical strength, then read your position against the school’s own reported figures: the share of the class receiving no grant, and the headcount it places in each of the ABA’s four award bands, from less than half tuition to more than full tuition. Applied across a whole class that reproduces exactly what the school filed, which is the only check possible without knowing what real applicants were offered.

The result is a category relative to tuition rather than a dollar figure. The ABA also publishes award amounts at three points, the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile among recipients, and those are shown elsewhere on this page as the school reported them. They are not what the estimate reads: they stop at the 75th percentile, so every applicant above a school’s quartiles collapses onto the same number, and a dollar amount also depends on whether the student pays resident or non-resident tuition, which the data does not record. The band counts run the whole distribution and are already denominated in tuition coverage.

The ABA reports amounts and counts, never the basis of an award, and its grant figures can mix need-based and merit aid. Because the data cannot identify a basis, we model an award wherever a school has not said it awards on need alone. Harvard, Yale and Stanford publicly award on demonstrated need, so no score-based estimate is shown for them.

Above a school’s 75th percentiles the published quartiles stop resolving, so two applicants who both clear them get the same estimate however far apart their scores are. The estimate assumes you are admitted and says nothing about whether you would be.