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%.
During the 20th century the stock market returned an average of 10.4% a year. Just $1,000 invested in 1900 would be worth over $19.8 million by the end of 1999. At 15% average return per year, it only takes 30 years to turn $15,000 to $1 million. Over the stock market history corporate earnings have gone up an average of 7% per year and the inflation history of the markets shows that inflation has averaged around 4% per year.