Understand What the Cost of Attendance (COA) Means

Paying for College
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In one of our recent blogs, we looked at a term you’ll see often when you start planning for college: Cost of Attendance or COA.

The Cost of Attendance is your school’s estimate of what one full year of college may cost, including tuition, fees, housing, food, books, transportation, and personal expenses. Remember, COA is more than tuition!

What Does Cost of Attendance Include?

A helpful way to think about COA is that it covers two types of expenses:

1. Costs billed by the school:

  • Tuition: the cost of your classes and academic instruction.
  • Required fees: most schools also charge mandatory fees that support campus services. These can include things like technology access, student activity funds, lab usage, or program-specific fees.
  • On-campus housing and meal plans (if applicable): if you live in a dorm, your housing and meals are usually billed through the school. These costs can vary depending on the type of room and meal plan you choose.

2. Everyday living costs you manage on your own:

  • Books and course materials: this includes textbooks (print or digital), lab manuals, software, art supplies, or other course-specific materials.
  • Transportation: includes gas, parking, or car maintenance if you commute, public transportation passes, or travel costs if you go home during breaks or holidays
  • Off-campus housing and food (if you don’t live on campus): if you rent an apartment or live at home, schools estimate what you might spend on rent, groceries, and basic household needs.

How Cost of Attendance Affects Student Loan Borrowing

Cost of Attendance also affects how much aid and how much in student loans you may be able to receive. Once scholarships, grants, and other aid are applied, the remaining amount is the gap you still need to cover through savings, income, or borrowing.

That’s why understanding your COA can help you borrow more thoughtfully and avoid taking on more debt than you need. If you’re trying to estimate what borrowing could look like month to month, Ascent’s student loan calculator can be a useful planning tool, here.

Cost of Attendance brings all the major pieces of your college budget into one place. Once you understand it, financial aid offers feel less confusing and planning how to pay for school feels more manageable.

As you have sorted through your offers, how much of a factor was the Cost of Attendance in your college decision?

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Chance Me/Match Me-Motorsports engineering or MechE [PA resident, 3.85 UW GPA, 35 ACT, need merit for OOS or private]
Financial likelies and reaches for engineering
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It has been a number of years since my kids were in college, but we definitely considered the COA an extremely important part of weighing costs. Some of the factors that comprise the COA are estimates, and an individual student may actually spend less (or depending on circumstances, more) than the estimates.

We compared the tuition, fees and housing costs for each school. Then we looked carefully at the other COA components for the schools that appeared financially possible for us. After doing so, one school that looked as if it might be too expensive actually turned out to be affordable. We determined that my D would not be spending as much as the COA components estimated. She did attend that school, and she did spend significantly less than the estimates for books (she bought used when possible), travel (we were fortunate to have relatively low flight costs between the two cities), personal costs, etc.

When I worked in financial aid, I encouraged my students to carefully consider how much their non-tuition/fee/housing costs would actually be so that they could borrow as little as possible. They could always come in to request a loan increase if they hadn’t borrowed their annual loan limit.

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Thanks for providing users with more clarity on cost of attendance!

It’s one of the reasons why I wish that all Net Price Calculators (NPCs) would keep direct-billed costs separate from the other ones, because some families will see a higher (or lower) COA and have distinct thoughts about the school’s affordability, particularly in comparison with others, and may end up eliminating schools that are equally (or less) expensive than others in terms of those direct-billed costs.

A couple years ago I pulled some numbers on the COA for schools in the same metro areas that illustrates how differently schools can treat the non-direct-billed costs. That info is shared below.

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