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Health & Fitness

What YOU can expect to pay for college

Every year, many students choose colleges that ultimately prove too expensive, while many more bypass good-fit schools that they mistakenly presume are unaffordable.  Their bad choices are not always the result of poor planning; our higher education system is also to blame, as college costs can be deceiving.   While it easy to access an institution’s published prices—what you could pay—it is more difficult to determine what you will pay, particularly after accounting for any need-based or merit-based aid that you may receive.  Although institutions are obligated to report “net-price” information, they rarely tell applicants how to access such information or how to estimate the figure that will ultimately be posted to their college bill.  So where can students (and their parents) turn? 

In 2008, the U.S. Department of Education passed a mandate requiring all colleges to post a net price calculator on their respective websites.  Net price calculators enable families to input their financial information and receive an estimate of what they will pay for one year of college attendance (See an example here).  Visit College Abacus to access net-price calculators for literally thousands of colleges. 

Although net price calculators provide customized cost data, it’s important to realize that not all are accurate—some rely on old tuition/fee amounts (dating back nearly five years!) and/or fail to ask users the financial questions necessary to produce reliable price estimates.   Fortunately, there are others sources of information.

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In addition to net price calculators, families can also go directly to the Department of Education and College Board websites to pull data on net price costs and average financial aid awards.  Since some data can be hard to locate, we have developed our owndataverse, where users can easily access all of this information in one place.  In particular, our dataverse features net price information—what families can expect to pay at each of their prospective colleges, given their annual income—as well as average grant and merit-based awards per institution. 

Finally, if you decide to utilize the above resources, do so beforeyou apply to your prospective colleges. Estimating net costs early in the college search process (preferably this summer, rising seniors) will  enable you to avoid the poor choices and unnecessary debt that have prevented many others from maximizing returns on their postsecondary investment. 

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College Transitions is a team of college planning experts committed to guiding families through the college admissions process. As counselors and published higher education researchers, we aim to bring perspective (and some sanity) to college planning, and we strive to provide students with the support they need to enroll and succeed at a college that is right for them. Please visit our website—www.collegetransitions.com—to learn more.

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