<p>A new federal law requires colleges to spell out their tuition and room and board costs, as well as the costs for estimates for student fees, books, and personal expenses. Does this mean choosing the right school will become easier for families?</p>
<p>[College</a> tuition: New law aims for more transparency in costs - CSMonitor.com](<a href=“http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/1005/College-tuition-New-law-aims-for-more-transparency-in-costs]College”>College tuition: New law aims for more transparency in costs - CSMonitor.com)</p>
<p>I think it will make little difference. I think most colleges can point to their web sites and show where that info already resides.</p>
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This will have a much bigger impact for us. DS saved over $100 on one textbook this year, but since the professor was so late posting the book he wasn’t get it until the 2nd week of class. Fortunately it didn’t matter, but he almost bought it from the bookstore instead.</p>
<p>I think all the schools we looked at had a reasonable estimate of costs on their web sites, with differences in estimates for books and personal expenses/travel. But we used our own numbers for those, anyway.</p>
<p>We did get hit with a couple of surprise fees that only freshman pay, which were not clearly listed on the web site, but these only came to a few hundred dollars. For us this was not significant.</p>
<p>The most useful thing is that the information will be standardized - sort of like nutritional labels on food packages. It isn’t clear to me if the institutions are also required to standardize where the information will be located on their websites. That would be a huge bonus. Just imagine a one-click link on the homepage!</p>
<p>and who do you think colleges will pass on the costs of overhauling their webpages and printing all of this additional info to? Don’t be surprised if this latest exercize of federal overreach leads to another fee added to the tuition bills of middle-class colleges students…</p>
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<p>In theory, yes, but in reality, no. As I pointed out in the CSM article, at the majority of colleges, merit aid is the great unknown. Most families cannot come close to predicting how much merit money–if any at all–an applicant will be awarded until the decision letters have arrived.</p>
<p>When I was growing up, the local Woolworth’s used to offer a special deal on banana splits at the soda fountain. Each time you ordered a banana split, you’d get to punch a balloon to see how much you’d have to pay for it. (There was a little price sticker in each balloon.) BUT … you had to order the sundae first; you couldn’t punch the balloon, see $1.00 on the card (which was full freight), and then say, “Never mind.” Well, merit aid works a lot the same way. In a perfect world, students and their parents would know how much their tuition would be discounted due to merit grants before applying. But this is rarely the case … and it sure can make transparency awfully opaque.</p>
<p>I wonder how many families will be delighted when they see how little they think the have to pay for a certain college, then are surprised after acceptance when their FA package requires them to pay thousands of dollars more than their institutional EFC.</p>
<p>thanks, already easy enough to figure out that info</p>
<p>I’d rather have them report much more obscure yet telling facts like these:
- % of endowment spent on financial aid, year-by-year
- GPA and SAT scores for full pay, need-based and merit scholarship recipients
- same for legacies
- standardized average time to graduation
- standardized % students in grad school 3 years and 5 years after graduation</p>
<p>OK - While were at it, how about reporting average debt as the difference between all costs - Scholarships / Grants. It’s a joke to report it as just the amount of Stanford Loans (as it is now reported). Most Parents and Freshmen/Sophomore HS students don’t understand that Parents Plus / private loans are not reported.</p>
<p>Sally - applying first is not the same as paying the bill and hoping for a discount.</p>
<p>Many colleges do have SAT/GPA calculators on their websites for merit aid and many more make the merit aid offer at the time of the acceptance. Of course the big unknown is still how the need based grants will play out - and this varies widely.
In any case - knowing the base sticker price up front; in a standardized form will be very helpful for families.</p>
<p>I am not big on reporting debt of students - to me this means nothing as it is easily skewed.
Kei - those stats are nice but have nothing to do with an individual applicant; or whether or not one can afford the college.</p>
<p>My personal pet peeve - seeing PLUS loans as part of the financial aid package and them telling you they are ‘meeting your need’. lies.</p>
<p>One more thing - I would like to see college post the history of tuition/fees rates over the last 5-10 years. This is one area parents forget about - if the tuition goes up 10% each year, what will it look like in the final year?</p>
<p>Even if all we can find out easily is the sticker price, that will be a huge improvement over the current situation. Whether by neglect, or by intent, all too often the websites make it difficult to find this basic information. When one considers that nationwide, most families will end up paying something very close to the sticker price (either in cash or with loans), it is critical that we have access to this information. If CollegeX has a COA of Y, and reports that 40% of the students receive financial aid, then 60% of the students are paying sticker price.</p>
<p>JustaMom said “Kei - those stats are nice but have nothing to do with an individual applicant; or whether or not one can afford the college.”</p>
<p>You are right; but they are much more than just “nice”.</p>
<p>What they WOULD provide is systemic information that can be used to analyze, publicize and ultimately change college’s overall fiscal policies, the implementation of which affects every applicant.</p>
<p>As long as colleges can keep this discussion within the limits of “individual student consumer information”, you will know how their policies affect an individual but will not have the information needed to change their overall polices.</p>
<p>Besides, the consumer information they are providing is already available with a small amount of effort; it took maybe an hour or so for me to put on a spreadsheet the information from 8 schools so that I could compare costs “apples-to-apples.”</p>
<p>But having that information available with no effort would be . . . nice :-)</p>
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<p>True, of course. But students can only apply to a limited number of colleges, and bottom-line cost can play a big role in determining which schools will ultimately stay on the final list and which ones won’t. It is still very difficult–often impossible–to estimate in advance how much merit aid a student will receive when making those fine-tuning changes to the college list. The majority of colleges do not have calculators or even guidelines on their Web sites to help families predict merit scholarships. Often the language is very vague (“These scholarships, which range from $2,500 to half tuition, are awarded to students who have demonstrated a strong commitment to both academics and leadership …”)</p>
<p>Students end up applying to more colleges than they really want to because of the crap-shoot nature of this process, and the upshot is that this, in turn, creates longer waiting lists and more stress across the board.</p>
<p>the more transparency, the better</p>
<p>I’ve never had a problem finding the tuition, room, board and other estimated costs for the schools D is interested in. Every school we looked at has that information on its website. Some are a bit harder to find than others, but we found it without too much trouble.</p>
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<p>standardization would help a lot. I looked at NU’s calculator (which is SIMPLY a link to collegeboard’s EFC calculator; as we all know the EFC is not the RFC, the REAL family contribution) and the calculator for UIUC, two schools 2 hrs apart that an Illinoisian especially might want to compare, and found wildly different results from the same finanical inputs leaving me perplexed about having a valid estimate of the costs between the two.</p>