“Financial aid awards can be compromised by flawed student surveys of cost of living” …
http://hechingerreport.org/underestimating-the-true-cost-of-college/
COA’s are often flawed. Estimated transportation and personal expense costs are often too low.
The article is mainly about the cost of room and board for students not living in the college-owned dorms (where the colleges know the prices because they set the prices). The article claims that colleges’ estimates, even in the same city, vary by a large amount.
However, this is not necessarily an easy thing to estimate. Even within the same city, different neighborhoods can have very different levels of cost of housing. Also, individual students may make very different choices with respect to the price of housing that they are willing to live in. The article assumes that commuter students are being subsidized by their parents, but the cost of such subsidy can vary significantly as well.
It is true that personal and transportation cost estimates vary considerably between colleges, but at least that is obvious due to being separate line items, and most students and families can estimate their own costs in these areas better than they can estimate off-campus housing costs in a place that they are not familiar with.
In case newbie parents are reading this, I wanted to mention that you have to break down the COA and see if what’s included is what you had in mind.
For instance, at ds2’s the meal plan included in the COA was for 14 meals. I didn’t think 14 meals were enough, but it really was plenty. Free food abounds at meetings, and he was fine. Additionally, I thought the travel estimate was incredibly low. Turns out they only budget for two round-trip flights – to get you there and home at semester breaks. Ds didn’t come home for T’giving, but we did plan for him to come home at spring break. The college says that’s on us then. And that’s OK, I guess. But understand what those numbers are based on and decide whether that is in line with your family’s plan. Like the EFC, what the college says you can afford to pay may not be what YOU think you can afford to pay.
Absolutely! My oldest is moving to a college town for her first job. Rental prices were all over the map. Students who didn’t need parking and were willing to live with a bunch of roommates in a converted older home with steam heat (included in the rent!) could get by fairly cheaply. Want parking? On site laundry? Fewer roommates? Place that doesn’t cater to undergrads? Starts adding up. I can definitely see why the range is so broad. And I don’t fault the college for that.
For those whose kids are living on-campus: Beware the dining plan. It may sound comprehensive, but it has pitfalls.
Colleges do not necessarily design their schedules of classes and activities so that students are guaranteed to be free at the times when meals are served in the dining halls. Your child may find that it’s impossible to eat lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, say, because he has classes at 11, 12, and 1, and impossible to eat dinner on Mondays because he has an afternoon lab followed by an evening orchestra rehearsal, with no time in between for dinner. Therefore, he will need to pay cash somewhere for food to make up for the missed meals.
Another issue involves the common “all you care to eat” dining halls, where students can get all the seconds (and thirds and fourths) they want but can’t take any food out of the building. This works great for people who can eat a great deal of food at one sitting, but not everyone can. People who can’t comfortably stuff themselves get hungry before the next dining hall meal and end up having to pay cash for food elsewhere to fill the gap.
How to deal with these challenges: Pick the smallest possible dining plan. Calculate the difference in cost between the largest and smallest plans. Give your kid the difference in cash.
Another food issue: If you plan to have your child spend some of the college breaks on campus to save on transportation costs, remember that the meal plan doesn’t include food served during those breaks. Dining facilities may or may not be open on campus, but even if they are, your child is going to have to pay cash for what he eats. So it’s necessary to give your child extra money so he won’t go hungry during these breaks. And if the only place where he can get food is restaurants, the amount of money he may need could be fairly large.
Based on our experience, take stated COA, then add 10% (15% if it’s high cost off campus housing area), then maybe you’re in right church, wrong pew, and then hope for no additional surprises.
An example of COA creep is when we as parents were told that dining plans were based on a $7 day budget. Considering school’s cafeteria costs, that was pretty much breakfast. Yeah right an 18 year old ravenous male not eating anything else but breakfast. Then there is problem that friends want to leave campus and get something to eat. They get tired of eating say a baked potato on Monday, french fries on Tuesday, mashed potatoes on Wednesday, etc
My son’s school requires students living on campus to buy a dining plan. It is not an all-you-can-eat plan; instead students are charged for each item and it is deducted from their available funds. I naively assumed that the required dining plan would get him through the school year. His first year in the dorms, we found that he and most of his male friends ran out of dining dollars around February or March. I would say he has a pretty typical appetite for a “growing boy” ha ha. He is a healthy eater and does not really eat junk food. He is a big eater,but no more so than his roommates. Most of his female friends seemed to get through the year with the original plan. The school does allow students to buy unused dining dollars from other students and he was usually able to buy them at about a 50% discount. He was in an on-campus apartment with a kitchen this year and supplemented the dining plan with meals at home but still had to buy some extra dining dollars at a discount. Either way, we did end up spending more on food than we had planned- just something to look at if you are trying to plan for extra expenses.
Even for on-campus housing, the costs can vary greatly. At my daughter’s college, the upper class housing is 2K a year more than the freshman housing, and you don’t even get a full kitchen or a single room. If you can live in a place with a full kitchen, the cost savings in cooking for yourself can make up for higher rent.
In expensive cities with very limited on-campus housing, that is a whole different matter. Also, in large cities, the cost of mass transit can rapidly add up if need to use it on a daily basis.
Only if you either (1) own a car or (2) have a supermarket within walking distance of your room/apartment.
Both of my kids lived off-campus during the second half of college, and neither of them had cars or supermarkets within walking distance. When they moved off-campus, their food costs actually increased because they had to rely on on-campus cash dining facilities that cost as much as restaurants, expensive convenience stores, and restaurants that deliver.
One of my daughter’s had a meal plan that cost $2660/sem. No way would she have spent that at a grocery store. Hers was an all you could eat AT the dining hall (nothing could be taken out) and it was open from 7 am to about 8 pm, always open but several of the stations would close down. She could do all the swipes she wanted (in and out) M-F, but she chose the plan where she got $500 dining dollars so if she went on weekends she’d be charged the price of the meal for that time of day (I think it was $9, $11, $13). The dining dollars also worked for smoothies, subs at the deli, even pizza delivery through the school, and for some grocery items. The first semester she did fine and had some dining dollars roll over, but the second semester she was out of funds by April, mostly because they were sick of the dining hall and just would order pizza or get a smoothie.
Next year, sophomores ‘only’ have to pay $1800/sem for a meal plan, and it can be all dining dollars. Why do they think freshmen need to eat more than sophomores? Most freshmen (like 80%) live in a freshman village with all suites, each with a fridge and kitchenette but no stove, so much better than a traditional dorm for eating at home. Sophs also are required to live on campus, like freshmen. I think it’s because freshmen don’t know any better and don’t bitch as much about the cost, not because freshmen eat $1000 more than sophomores.
Room and board are rip-offs.
On the flip side, room and board can be substantially cheaper for some students than the listed cost of attendance. For example, Berkeley students who live in the Berkeley Student Cooperative will spend about $3,000 less over the year than the listed off-campus cost for room and board.
I’m not so sure I’d go so far as to call them rip offs. Prices are high, but food service shouldn’t be compared to buying groceries. Somebody else shops, cooks, cleans up, and in the residence halls, there’s probably an on-site director, someone who does programming, security making regular rounds, etc. We found living off (12 months) to be a wash with living on (9 months) with the extra 3 months rent, and our kid didn’t end up saving thousands on food as when there was no time to shop and cook, restaurants got as pricey as the dining hall. Kraft Mac and cheese gets old, too.
DD’s suite rooms were all singles with shared bathrooms and were $1000 more per semester than the traditional doubles in dorms. There were some singles in dorm that were about the same. But the dorms got free toilet paper and cleaning! I thought that was unfair pricing because her school is not in a high rent area. Other daughter’s R&B costs (traditional double dorm) were $5000 cheaper, and next year in the sorority house will be cheaper still, with food available 24/7.
On the other hand, nephew will live in Boulder and pay much more for his 1/2 apartment than I paid for my family to rent an entire townhouse for the last few years. I think he’s planning on a meal plan at school too.
We bought my D the basic meal plan that allowed her 10 “swipes” per week and included $750 “dining bucks” per semester. I agree with @Marian in that their schedules often times don’t sync with dining hall hours etc. My D always had swipes left over and it’s “use it or lose it”. She used her dining bucks on the fly or on the weekends. And dining bucks left over at the end of the semester doesn’t roll over, so that’s when kids go to the campus commissary at the end of the semester and buy cases of water/gatorade, granola bars etc to use up the balance.
Also, be wary of academic programs that have higher tuition and fees. There may also be lab fees for some classes. Often the higher tuition kicks in for the last 2 years, and does not appear with the initial published tuition number for incoming freshman. In particular, nursing, engineering and business majors may get charged a few thousand dollars a year in extra costs, depending upon the college.
My older daughter had to buy several hundred dollars in her junior and senior years for art class supplies.
Also, what I didn’t realize is that many colleges raise their rates in the summer AFTER you have already committed. DS’s just went up, and we can absorb the costs, but still, it was a surprise. I had read to expect rates will probably rise each year, I just didn’t expect that to happen after acceptance but before he actually attended.
Also, travel expenses are going to be much higher than I anticipated. Again, something I realized, but now planning trips, it really hits home just how expensive that can get.
Next child will be within a reasonable driving distance.
Freshman orientation of $500 not mentioned elsewhere can be a surprise. As far as room and board, can this really be considered a “college cost”? Wouldn’t the kid be eating if he went to college or not? At first I thought $3K for food was a lot, then I realized that’s probably what I’ve been paying for the past 5 years. Same with board, they have to live somewhere whether they are going to college or not. You can conceivably downsize your own living expense if you are sure they are not coming back;)