If Wake Forest meets 99% of a student's need, that means that the student is only paying 1% of the cost. That is a ridiculous thing to say.
I'm assuming what you meant was that WF finds a way for the student to pay for 99% of the cost thru scholarships, loans & money that they may already be able to pay. In this case, you have a legitimate case in factoring out scholarships from the cost. I don't know what percentage of that total $49K for all WF students is covered by scholarships, but if you could get those numbers I think it would be fair to subtract that from the $49K/year cost to get an overall average out-of-pocket cost for WF students. Then you could do the same thing in-state UNC students and you would have an apples-to-apples comparison of the cost. I don't doubt that WF has more scholarship money available per student than does UNC.
So, you would have $49K - average scholarship/student for WF and $9K - average scholarship/student at UNC. At that point we could have a basis to compare costs.
On the other hand, loan money available...at either school....should not be factored into this, because that doesn't lower your cost of going to the school. As a matter of fact, it greatly increases the cost with interest charges.
(Also, so you won't feel as badly toward me about those American Funds charges, if I had to break down the dollar volume of my total sales in my 22-year career in this business, it would look something like this: Life Insurance products - 5%, American Funds - 5%, Fixed-Rate Annuities - 90%. And there is no sales charge on any of those annuities. These were not variable annuities, which do have substantial sales charges...which is why I never liked them & have never sold one in my life.)
