(Sometimes they're buried, so the easiest way to find them is to Google the school's name and "net price calculator.") But it's hard to compare multiple colleges at once. The way the system is set up now, families can use the net price calculators on each college's web site to get an idea of what a college might cost them before they apply. “We can’t possibly make better choices about payoff without clear pricing,” says Mark Salisbury, founder of TuitionFit, which launched in 2019 to help families compare financial aid letters and get more transparent information about college costs. It also makes it difficult to consider a personalized return on investment before you apply. It may inhibit some students, particularly lower-income ones who don’t have access to college planning resources, from applying to colleges that would actually be affordable for them. That reality - where families are trying to pick colleges without a final price tag - creates problems. And you won't know until after acceptance letters come. How much less you’ll ultimately be on the hook for depends on a college's financial aid policies, your family’s financial situation, and the student’s qualifications. Yet at private colleges, more than 8 out of 10 students pay less than the sticker price. Researchers have found that families routinely overestimate college costs, and nearly half of prospective students in one survey said they were looking primarily at sticker prices. It’s going to be crucial for schools to be able to help families understand what it actually costs.” “It’s not like it wasn’t a problem before the recession,” he says. It will take a long time for families to recover financially from the pandemic-damaged economy, says Phillip Levine, founder of MyinTuition. And while none of the tools are brand new, they'll be especially relevant in the coming years. In doing so, the tools aim to provide some clarity into an opaque college pricing system that makes comparison shopping for a degree more difficult than it is for other major goods and services. They use a variety of approaches and data sources to estimate a family's true, individual cost of college before the financial aid letters arrive in the mail, or to tell families what families similar to theirs paid at a school. That riddle has prompted the creation of a handful of private consumer tools that aim to help families get a better answer, including start-ups like TuitionFit and Edmit, and the non-profit MyinTuition. Hawaii Alaska Florida South Carolina Georgia Alabama North Carolina Tennessee RI Rhode Island CT Connecticut MA Massachusetts Maine NH New Hampshire VT Vermont New York NJ New Jersey DE Delaware MD Maryland West Virginia Ohio Michigan Arizona Nevada Utah Colorado New Mexico South Dakota Iowa Indiana Illinois Minnesota Wisconsin Missouri Louisiana Virginia DC Washington DC Idaho California North Dakota Washington Oregon Montana Wyoming Nebraska Kansas Oklahoma Pennsylvania Kentucky Mississippi Arkansas Texas Get StartedĪs many of the country's 3.7 million high school seniors are working on their college applications this fall, families are facing a perennial question: What will this actually cost me? And just like with Scarlett, the answer will be: You’ll have to wait until you’re admitted to really see.
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