Colleges That Cap Tuition at a Percentage of Income & Kudos to Whitman

Paying for College Financial Aid (Need-Based, Merit Aid, Loans)
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I recently learned that Whitman has instituted a new policy whereby families pay no more than 10% of their income without considering assets.

This level of transparency is awesome on so many levels. It also makes it easier for families with academically prepared but not off-the-charts-stellar kids to consider schools that might be better fits for their students with the knowledge that the school will be affordable and not dependent on whether the student is lucky enough to get enough merit aid to make the school affordable. It will also likely decrease the number of applications sent out, meaning that colleges will have a better idea of which students are actually seriously considering them vs. trying to develop a complicated yield strategy to handle students who are shotgunning colleges because they don’t know whether a preferred school will end up being affordable.

Colgate has also instituted a plan, but it is dependent on “typical assets.” And I have strong feelings about “typical assets” surrounding financial aid since the definition of “typical assets” can often lead to poor financial practices for families, especially those that are near the advertised limits for free tuition (see rant for more details).

Feel free to comment about the Whitman 10% Promise, and please share information on any other colleges that are instituting similarly transparent policies that do not consider assets or that set the level of typical assets at a financially advisable level (i.e. where there’s enough assets for a suitable emergency fund, equity in a median-priced home, etc.).

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As someone with a kid a few years from application season, who is less than 50k out from paying off our mortgage, and whose home value has basically doubled in the past 5 years, I have been spending A LOT of time this summer researching how colleges are handling assets in their financial aid formulas and how schools handle home equity is WILD (net price results have ranged from 12k to 78k and it’s the home equity that seems to really run up the price at some colleges because otherwise our assets are fairly low/typical).

So far, the colleges that have come in less than Whitman’s price with the 10 percent promise are Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard.

Williams and Oberlin are more or less the same net price as Whitman for our income/asset level. Amherst, Dartmouth, Pomona, and Wesleyan are about 2 or 3k higher.

Then, Swarthmore, Yale, Wellesley, Smith, Barnard, Hamilton, St. Olaf (not sure if this one is based on merit or fin aid though?), Bowdoin, Cornell, Bard, and Davidson are 4 to 10k higher (in that specific order).

The colleges that have come back 12k to 21k higher than Whitman’s price are Colby, Bates, Colgate, Penn, Dickinson, BU, Bryn Mawr, Macalester, Carnegie Mellon, Wake Forest, Brown, Haverford, Carleton, Bucknell, Duke, and Conn College.

The colleges that are coming in 24k+ over Whitman’s price and are seemingly hitting home equity hard (and thus out of our price range!) are Claremont McKenna, Middlebury, Emerson, Vassar, Mount Holyoke, Tufts, Kenyon, Emory, and NYU.

I’m still making my way through schools and making a spreadsheet of everything to compare, but thought I would share what I’ve found so far because in our case the high home equity makes a huge difference. I really appreciate Whitman’s approach and have been surprised to see it come in as one of our best net price results so far.

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We discussed briefly in another thread that it appears there will be families in roughly the top 1-5% range in terms of AGI percentiles (for the relevant age range) that will get aid from Whitman but can’t get it even from the likes of Harvard. Toward the bottom of that range, they could be getting up to like $34K or so from Whitman. And that is assuming no assets–”typical” assets (and above) would sweep in many more families in the top 5-10% range, with even higher amounts of aid.

As an early retiree couple with atypical assets relative to AGI, and a D30, this is pretty interesting news! And I certainly wouldn’t mind if there ended up being more price competition like this.

Of course whether aid for top 1-5% AGI families really counts as “need” aid is a bit fuzzy. But I think this is indirect confirmation that between the domestic “cliff” (more of a gentle strolling path, but still) and just more effective competition from various publics, US privates may need to engage in more such price competition in what used to be strictly full pay ranges (absent merit, of course).

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Another thing I really like about Whitman’s 10% Promise is that families with a fairly steady income year-over-year are protected from tuition increases.

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Cooper Union currently offers a 50% tuition scholarship to every student who is admitted. Starting in 2028-29, it will be tuition free for all students.

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