Costs and Financial Aid. The cost of attendance is the total amount of tuition, fees, room and board, books, supplies, and other estimated school expenses. Financial aid is a combination of grants, loans, scholarships, and work-study employment designed to help offset the total cost of attendance.
One of the major problems for an investor looking at that 10% average return figure and mistakenly expecting to realize a nice yearly profit from investing in the S&P 500 is inflation. Adjusted for inflation, the historical average annual return is only around 7%.
One example of average return is the simple mathematical average. For example, suppose an investment returns the following annual returns over a period of five full years: 10%, 15%, 10%, 0% and 5%. To calculate the average return for the investment over this five-year period, the five annual returns are added together and then divided by 5.