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%.
The average annual returns over the past five and 10 years are 9.8 per cent and 7 per cent respectively, against a typical fund's long-term target of between 6.5 per cent and 7 per cent.