Tiering Colleges Based on Cost

Paying for College
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I thought I’d share some research I completed. Looking at lots of colleges, it started to be clear that there were some specific rough tiers. My question (which started with Purdue) is whether there are outliers that families should be specifically investigating. This is based on the 2023-2024 Common Data Set. Public schools are listed with OOS values. Below the 65K threshold (private) and 45K (public), I list the national universities and liberal arts colleges as listed by USNWR, leaving off schools in the regional university tier.

95K Northwestern, Pepperdine, USC
94K U of Miami, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest
93K Boston College, Brown, Duke, Georgetown, Harvey Mudd, Washington University, Wesleyan
#90K Expensive Privates
82K UVA
#70K Expensive Publics; Cheaper Privates

65K Elon (#117)
61K Hanover College (#115 liberal arts)
61K Mercer University (#169)
58K Howard University (#88)
58K Soka University (#37 liberal arts)
57K Hendrix College (#96 liberal arts)
55K St Johns (MD) (#84 liberal arts)
55K St Johns (NM) (#96 liberal arts)
54K Hope College (#84 liberal arts)
50K Hillsdale College (#50 liberal arts)

#50K Cheaper Publics

48K Morehouse College (#96 liberal arts)
46K Thomas Aquinas (#146 liberal arts)
46K University of Mary Washington (#131 liberal arts)
46K University of Florida (#30)
46K University of Nevada-Reno (#192)
45K University of Houston (#132)
45K West Virginia University (#222)
44K Florida Atlantic (#183)
44K Kansas State (#158)
44K Cal State-Fullerton (#139)
44K UNLV (#232)
44K UNC-Wilmington (#198)
43K Iowa State (#117)
43K Ohio University (#198)
43K University of Louisville (#158)
42K Purdue (#46)
42K SUNY College Env Science and Forestry (#158)
41K Florida State (#51)
41K Texas Tech (#198)
41K Cal State Long Beach (#127)
40K East Carolina (#192)
40K SUNY Purchase (#131 liberal arts)
40K University of Central Florida (#117)
40K UNC-Asheville (#135 liberal arts)
40K UNC-Charlotte (#143)
37K Florida International (#97)
37K UNC-Greensboro (#198)
36K University South Florida (#88)
30K Cal State Fresno (#183)
30K University Minnesota Morris (#115 liberal arts)
22K BYU (#110)
12K Berea (#45 liberal arts, requires financial aid)

Observations:

There’s very little competition on total cost outside of the larger tiers. For most families, list price is meaningless for private universities. However, there are full-pay families that are cost-aware. There are also lots of affordability issues at some state flagships, many of their students would be better off financially at a full-need private. This is all very well known.

Purdue, University of Florida, and Florida State are clearly very good deals. Purdue OOS is only 5K more than my flagship and significantly better in ranking. Which is why it seems to be a hot school among my son’s peers. Howard, Soka, and UM-Morris look intriguing and I have never heard them discussed. Hillsdale is unique. BYU is a much better deal than I expected, but a unique environment for non-LDS. Berea is unique.

Conclusion:

Parents I know in the full-pay category are really starting to get sticker fatigue at 90K/year for T100-level schools. Anecdotally, cheaper publics (especially in the southeast and southwest) are beginning to look more attractive. T20 students who can get high merit at T100s are looking at bigger and bigger piles of money on the other side of the scale with 250-300K differences vs. 75K back in my day.

At some point, I believe a T100 private will back off of the current financial aid arms race, and focus on price competition. T50+ are not moving the needle with “175K or less, 200K or less, etc.” as students are easily swayed by a matching offer from a higher ranked school. Rice used to have a significantly lower cost than its peers – I know people who went there for that reason during the 90s. What school will take advantage of this gap? (Olin gave it a try).

If there are schools you think I’m missing, please let me know and I’ll update the list.

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For the powerhouse that it is, Georgia Tech OOS cost is an outlier similar to Purdue (in terms of having a surprisingly low cost for what it offers).

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There are many schools full pay and / or with merit that are good deals.

Ranking isn’t necessarily relevant - to each their own.

But you can go to well respected flagships in the 20s, in the 30s, etc.

I don’t really see the relevance of studying this - because with auto merit, you are missing many schools - but that would be based on each specific student, which you can’t capture.

And every person’s budget is different.

Just my opinion.

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@tamagotchi Georgia Tech’s CDS OOS Cost of Attendance is 55K. Great bang for buck, but not an outlier in this data set. I didn’t want to get into making judgments about “best value”, though Tech definitely qualifies for me.

@tsbna44 I agree auto merit is another layer on top of this. EDITED: I forgot that some like U Alabama have very significant auto programs — 25% of the class based on SATs should be getting at least 24K OOS/full tuition IS. Not sure how to deal with this issue in the context of this data set.

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Would disagree at many of the publics…much higher percentage.

In essence, some schools know they have to be competitive cost wise regardless of the list or they wouldn’t be in business.

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This is very true.

Most of the full pay families that I know have two parents who are professionals (software engineers, nurses, a few doctors, …) who between the two of them make enough to be full pay, but don’t earn enough to be comfortable paying something close to $100,000 per year per child. This includes most of the people I happen to know. Also since the parents got professional careers by taking education very seriously and being very strong students, at least more often than not the kids are similar. Plus for some of these families the likely additional cost of graduate school is something that they need to keep in mind.

And there are a few families who had their children late, and have parents who are retired when the kids get to university age. When you are already retired and have been saving frugally for your entire life $500,000 sitting in a mutual fund looks like retirement funds to you, even if it looks like a college fund to the universities.

And there are lots of very good lower cost options, whether this involves in-state public universities or schools with good merit based aid or for a few of us universities outside the USA.

I see a lot of very strong students who avoid the highest cost highly ranked private schools because the cost has just gotten too high. This probably includes most of the families that we know. At least in our experience this does not seem to have harmed the student’s ability to do very well in life and optionally (if they want to do it) get into and attend highly ranked graduate programs.

This all seems like a high stakes game to me. Universities try to get these full pay families to pay the BIG bucks, and the families try to find a very good affordable alternative. At least in our experience the very good affordable alternatives are numerous. I expect that the highly ranked schools could say that the students who are willing to be full pay are numerous.

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This is such a difficult task with privates. Comparing sticker prices is only half the battle. So often, sticker price is discounted in various ways that it’s not a realistic indicator of what the school actually costs. - except for those who can afford sticker price. And they often don’t bat an eye at that price tag.

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I don’t think “not bat an eye” is entirely accurate.

We were full pay. We knew we were full pay. There was a long and robust list of schools suggested by the guidance counselor that we vetoed- not paying full freight for a private college when there were public alternatives (both our own state flagship and a neighboring one) that had equal or better resources, academic rigor, etc. And a shorter list of schools we felt were “worth it”. We predicted that we’d pay more, kid would “get more”. And that seemed worth it.

But our tiers were based on academic rigor, intellectual prowess, resources available to undergrads, etc. and not sticker price which is a slippery concept.

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I know that there have been schools that have tried to “reset” their prices back to more “normal” levels, but it seems that strategy does not always produce success. Many people are lured in by sticker price and the lure of “value.” Meaning the thought process of…tuition is “worth” $50,000, but they’re giving me a $20,000 merit award, so I’m really getting an education at 40% off by paying $30,000. This is for the schools where 97% (or more) of their students are receiving large merit awards). They’d rather pay $30k for a school with a higher sticker price for tuition than to attend a school that just admits that tuition costs $30k, because it’s “worth” more.

All of that to say, sticker prices don’t mean diddly at schools where more than 50% of students are receiving merit aid.

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When I worked in consumer products, virtually every brand had its own regression analysis showing the various options of sticker price, promotional price delivered by a temporary price cut vs. a coupon, other “special deals” and the impact on volume and profitability.

There was an entire category of products where the single most profitable option was “Buy two get one free”. Even when just lowering the price- permanently- meant that the product’s unit price was lower. Sometimes significantly lower. That just didn’t move the needle for a huge chunk of consumers. They’d rather pay more but gaze fondly at their “free” tube of toothpaste or gallon of floor cleaner.

Of course there was always the newbie employee who explained that the “buy two get one” crowd were clearly innumerate. And if someone actually showed them the unit price they’d retreat. Nope. Both the sales data and the market research findings showed that consumers didn’t care. The entire point was getting a deal– not paying less.

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Totally agree!

Not every high priced school is worth it.

Yes :slight_smile:

In behavioral economics this is called the price-quality inference, and businesses (including colleges) know how to leverage this.

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Most parents are not full pay at Ivy+ type colleges, but among the minority who are full pay, many are especially enthusiastic about attending. Children of full pay parents are tremendously more likely to apply to and attend the colleges that are most expensive for them than the general not full-pay population, even when limiting to just high achieving students who are well academically qualified.

IPEDS can be used to create a spreadsheet with this type of tier list for thousands of colleges, in a few clicks. Unfortunately info is out of date, as they have been slow to update this year. As an example stats are below for 2023-24 year. When ranked according to prices most students pay (I realize this list is not representative of average cost), the tier list often looks quite different.

<= $10k Average Cost for $75k to $110k Income (in state)
Texas A&M - $5k
Berea – $8k
Stanford – $8k
Williams – $9k
Washington and Lee – $9k
CSUs – ~$10k
CUNYS – ~$10k
Gallaudet – $10k
Ozarks – $10k

$10-$15k Average Cost for $75k to $110k Income (in state)
Wesleyan – $11k
Cooper Union – $12k
Johns Hopkins – $12k
Soka – $13k
Clarkson – $13k
Chicago – $13k
Dartmouth – $13k
U Florida – $13k
MIT – $14k
Princeton – $14k
Harvard – $14k
Northwestern – $14k
Kettering – $14k
Vanderbilt – $15k
Columbia – $15k
Pomona – $15k

…

>$40k Average Cost for $75k to $110k Income (in state)
New School – $57k
Howard – $51k
Landmark – $51k
Union – $45k
Emerson – $44k
Pepperdine – $42k
Chapman – $42k
Fordham – $42k

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And yet at Columbia, more than half are full pay. Northwestern too - and close at Pomona.

Many ore not on your list are heavily full pay regardless of their meet needs mantra (Tufts, Wake, Emory, Colgate, Colorado, as examples).

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The most recent federal database (IPEDS) year corresponding to net cost post above lists the following stats:

Columbia – 56% receive FA, 52% receive grant aid, average aid = $65k
Northwestern – 61% receive FA, 52% receive grant aid, average aid = $64k
Pomona – 64% receive FA, 56% receive grant aid, average aid = $64k

That said, I take your point. A good portion of students are full pay at all Ivy+ colleges. It’s a very wealthy population as a whole. In the Chetty survey (old), 41% of students at Northwestern came from top 5% income families, corresponding to >= $350k/year income in 2025. The majority came from top 10% income families. You mentioned Tufts. At Tufts, half of students came from top 5% income families.

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Too many databases :slight_smile: I used CDS 2024/25.

Columbia, as one example - in the most recent, 724 of 1483 first year got need aid. School wise 3234 of 6597.

NU 950 of 2105 and 3744 of 8914.

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We asked a school we visited why they gave everyone a “merit” aid award rather than just lower the tuition price and the AO told us just that, people like the merit aid for all better than lower sticker price.

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And they might show up on less lists.

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Yes. This is what I found when working in financial aid.