The article is based on averages across the full US – not just the people you know in the Bay Area. According to CollegeNavigator, 73% of students attending Northeastern received grant or scholarship aid in 2022, with the average grant being $47k/year (see College Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics ). The person you know is not a good representative of the typical student at Northeastern. Similarly at UCLA/UCB, half of freshmen receive grant/scholarship aid, and the majority of undergrad students receive FA (transfers have higher rate of FA than freshmen). At less selective public colleges, numbers are generally higher. For example, 93% of freshmen at Cal State LA receive grant/scholarship aid.
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Your sample of people you know may be skewed toward those with higher income and/or wealth, so their kids would not get need-based financial aid.
Student financial support data tables | University of California says that, for 2023-2024, 49.1% of UC undergraduates got grants (the vast majority need-based) of an average value of $22,812.
https://www.calstate.edu/impact-of-the-csu/government/Advocacy-and-State-Relations/legislativereports1/Institutional-Financial-Aid-Programs-Report-2024.pdf says that, for 2022-2023, 76% of CSU students received financial aid.
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I disagree. It reminds me of the common wisdom about low income teens and pregnancy-- that more user friendly forms of birth control would never lower the pregnancy rate because taking birth control pills was already so easy that these girls must actually WANT to be pregnant.
Be we doctors were like, I promise you the current options for birth control are not that easy to figure out. I really think if you develop some methods that are more user friendly that they will work. And thank goodness the researchers listened to us and developed user friendly methods such as Nexplanon and Mirena…and the teen pregnancy rate plummeted.
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Not to get too far off track here, but I don’t really think this is apples to apples.
For one thing, the percentage of teens who are even HAVING sex has declined steadily over the last few decades. Doubtless this factors in to the drop in teen pregnancy as much as anything. Add the ease of Plan B and other emergency contraceptives has also curbed teen pregnancy (at least in those places where it is still available, but that is a conversation for a different thread).
I think @blossom’s point is one of interest. Sex is something kids are inherently interested in.
If kids aren’t interested in college costs likely there’s no good way to get them to pay attention, easy or not.
The factors behind the decrease in the teen pregnancy rate, and their relative contributions to the drop, have been quantified and reported in the relevant public health literature. ( And I will NOT assume that people who aren’t familiar with this research just don’t want to know.)
In my book, not knowing something should not be assumed to be due to laziness or lack of interest in the knowledge. People often just don’t know what they don’t know, even if it seems obvious to me. And that includes how to find and use an NPC.
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Thanks for the gift link. Two parts of this article struck me:
" In recent years, public confidence in higher education has fallen sharply; researchers attribute much of the decline to perceptions of college costs. More and more Americans are saying that a degree isn’t worth the investment"
This is the downside of the “Chivas Regal” pricing tactic where schools jack up their sticker prices to give the appearance of exclusivity and luxury. Sure, the vast majority of these schools give deep discounts later, but many people either don’t know that, or can’t predict how much the discount will be (despite the NPC.)
“Schools set a staggering official price that only a subset of the wealthiest students pay in full. Universities rely on that money to offer financial aid to low-income students; in effect, rich families subsidize the cost of attendance for everyone else.”
And a lot of these families resent this. Perhaps especially when they are on the lower end of “rich” i.e. donut hole incomes.
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Some schools do increase merit/discount as gross tuition or total COA increases, it’s definitely something students/parents should research during the admissions process.
Regardless, the net tuition/COA data are the data…the Atlantic article is high level and doesn’t really do the issue justice.
CollegeBoard’s annual college pricing report is the standard in terms of measuring pricing trends.
Net COA (adjusted for inflation) peaked in 2016-17 at both public 4 year colleges and private 4 year colleges.
I do understand full pay families might process this information differently. The reality is though, if one is willing to go beyond the typical set of relatively prestigious/selective schools, most students can find many less costly college options. The net COA numbers in the charts above include all the full pay families, and costs are still decreasing. The CollegeBoard report linked above does have data on pricing by selectivity and family income on pages 20-21.
Yep. Many high school counselors are unaware of NPCs too, but the reality is most are social emotional counselors and have never had any education or training in college counseling. Disclosure, I am in a giant FB group that includes HS counselors (along with independent counselors and college admission peeps), and the questions and education gaps can be…surprising.
Families not knowing about NPCs is just another consequence of most high school students not having adequate college counseling. I agree with evergreen5 that colleges should put the NPCs on the admission pages too.
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This angers me. There are affordable options for students that are not being considered. Students don’t have to go away to school. It doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to go to community college. A state directional school isn’t inferior. Yes, there are a lot of students who don’t live close enough to a college to commute, and that complicates things for them - but they do have the option to do online classes. It’s not ideal, but it proves the point that options exist. The problem is that options other than the “best” schools get short shrift. That narrative needs to change.
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Yes, I think NPC buttons would be used more often if they were displayed prominently in multiple locations on the college website. For example on the home page, on the admissions page, on the school’s map, on the page that has the majors etc. In other words, so redundant as to be unavoidable. But instead, NPCs are often surprisingly hard to find, unless you know what you are looking for.
This is in contrast to something like reviews for local restaurants. When I look up “Pad Thai near me” what pops up automatically are about 10 different sites with reviews (Yelp, Trip Advisor, Google Reviews, Open Table etc.) Even if I just want to find out the hours or the address, it’s reviews that keep coming up. That’s why so many people do “research” on restaurants but not on college price.
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Yet even those who do research on college price often hold onto the mistaken belief that they will get more money than the NPC says they will get. So we have those who run their numbers through the NPC and mistakenly think college will be less expensive than the NPC indicates it will be … and those who mistakenly believe it will be more expensive than it actually will be for them because they didn’t run their numbers through the NPC. The variance in human beings makes it difficult to figure out how to help them understand reality.
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And am I the only one who sometimes started NPCs but abandoned ship half way? Some NPCs demanded very granular information. And no I don’t want to give you my contact information! I mean I understand there is a tradeoff where fewer details lead to less accuracy, but as it stands the NPC is pretty daunting, and I imagine much more so for a kid.
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Which may indeed be true depending on merit. The NPC of the college where my kid ended up quoted $30K/yr more than we ended up actually paying.
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Parents need to be involved with the NPCs…most kids don’t have access to their parents’ tax returns, home equity (FMV less loan amount), and bank/investment account statements. NPCs all require that info at a minimum, and it’s true some NPCs do require more…especially at CSS Profile schools. If you want the NPC to give an accurate estimate, you have to put in the same information the school requests via the CSS.
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I wonder if a 2-step NPC would be helpful. Step 1 would require as few data points as possible and would spit out a range instantly. Then the NPC would offer an optional Step 2 to obtain a tighter estimate for those willing to add a bunch more details.
ETA: on the other hand, would this backfire? For example if I were given the initial range $20K-$40K and then Step 2 said $39K, would I be more pissed off than I would have been had it just told me $39K upfront? Like who are these people who got the $20K, and why wasn’t it me?!
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In fact it would be nice if you could go to a single website, enter basic data once, and then get that first rough estimate for a whole bunch of colleges at once.
Ed has a site where you can get links to individual NPCs, but you still have to then go and use them individually:
https://collegecost.ed.gov/net-price
There are some third party sites sorta doing something similar, but the “full” versions can be expensive, and the tools they use are not necessarily all that reliable:
So it seems to me like there should be an official, free version of all that with actual participation by the colleges.
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Some schools do list two NPCs (often, the simpler but less accurate one is MyIntuition based). When such is mentioned, most posters recommend using the more detailed NPC for a better estimate.
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Once upon a time, there was a web site called College Abacus that collected information and then put it into the selected colleges’ NPCs and web-scraped the results. It was slow, and some colleges did not like web scrapers.
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That’s what MyIntuition does. IME when working with families, they hated the large ranges they received from that estimator.
If you sign in to your kid’s collegeboard account when doing an NPC, it should save all your info for the future NPCs.
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I’ve noticed very recently that it no longer does this. I’ve been having to reenter information for the past month or so.
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I can understand that. But if the NPC immediately offered you Step 2 with more details to fill in and a tighter estimate, would this have worked?