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%.
According to Yahoo! Finance, the average return for common stocks since 1926 has been 10.5 percent. This amount includes both stock price growth and dividends earned. Keep in mind, however, that performance has varied radically from one decade to the next. In the 1950s and 60s, for example, the average return was around 15 percent, but the 1970s provided investors less than a 5 percent average rate of return. Stocks have historically offered a better rate of return than other major investments.