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%.
Past market returns give you a great idea of the volatility to expect when you invest in the stock market. In the table at the bottom of this article, you can see historical stock market returns from 1986 through 2015, listed on a calendar year basis. Negative stock market returns occur, on average, one out of every four years. You will see the positive years far outweigh the negative years.