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%.
As another example, a two-year return of 10% converts to an annualized rate of return of 4.88% = ((1+0.1) (12/24) - 1), assuming reinvestment at the end of the first year. In other words, the geometric average return per year is 4.88%. In the cash flow example below, the dollar returns for the four years add up to $265.