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%.
Historical returns related to stock market investing outperform many other types of investments. According to Vanguard, the historical average return for stocks from 1926 to 2011 is 9.9 percent. In contrast, the average return for bonds during the same period is 5.6 percent.