I’m wondering what the average OOP cost is per year for an undergrad (excluding Ivies, but including all other schools). More specifically - schools ranked in the top 60 on USNWR. This can include merit aid, but not need based aid. I’m looking for the average total that families/students are paying/taking on in debt per year of undergrad education.
Thanks!
The National Center for Education Statistics has an answer to your question: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76
That website provides average annual costs for various types of institution: all, 4-yr, 2-yr, public, private.
You can look up average out of pocket costs, by income bracket, in each school’s College Scorecard entry.
Median US family income falls in the $48,001-$75,000 bracket. Here are average OOP costs for families in that bracket at some of the USNWR top 60 universities:
$6,310 Harvard
$7,576 Stanford
$11,409 Michigan - AA
$12,350 UChicago
$12,576 Dartmouth
$13,192 UC Berkeley
$14,502 UMd-CP
$15,290 Northwestern
YMMV.
Those figures reflect a lot of financial aid (based on income of $48,001- $75,000)
Well…those are old figures. Anyone who gets accepted to Stanford with income below $125,000 will now attend at no cost.
Below are a few examples of average OOP costs for the $75,001-$110,000 income bracket:
$18,251 Michigan - AA
$19,152 UMd-CP
$20,492 Ohio State
$20,722 UC Berkeley
$21,656 UConn
$21,958 Harvard
$23,674 UChicago
$24,260 Tufts
$24,625 UIUC
$25,085 Duke
$26,848 URochester
$31,239 Northeastern
$39,445 NYU
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/
Again, YMMV. Run the online net price calculators to get your own personalized estimates.
https://financialaid.stanford.edu/undergrad/how/parent.html says “Tuition Charges Covered for Parents with Income Below $125,000” (i.e. financial aid may not necessarily cover non-tuition costs). Under $65,000 would be needed to get “Zero Parent Contribution”.
Stanford’s net price calculator at https://financialaid.stanford.edu/undergrad/how/calculator/index.html indicates that the lowest net price it will offer is $5,000 (expected student work contribution after a $62,500 grant off a $67,500 list price).
Please do not exclude the Ivy League schools when considering costs. They are not necessarily in a league of their own for costs (or caliber based on major).
I asked posters to exclude Ivies because my D didn’t apply to any Ivies.
You can get all the averages you want, but it won’t tell you what YOU will pay.
For one child, I pay $0. Her COA is $58k
For other child, I pay about $10k. Her COA is $27k.
Neither goes to a top 100 school. If they would have gone to a top 100 instate school, the cost would have been about $10k, I think, after merit and living cheaply.
No, but in building a list of colleges to investigate, it may be interesting to see some averages first (or patterns in the averages.)
I still don’t see how that would help unless you also knew the income and asset levels for that family. My two kids from the same household pay different amount because of merit and scholarships, and the one at a private, more expensive school pays nothing while the one at a very inexpensive OOS school pays more.
Classmates headed off to UF with some paying nothing because of scholarships while others were full pay because they didn’t qualify for Bright Futures or other state aid. If the COA is $20k and you learn that the average most pay is $10k, you might assume everyone is getting a half scholarship, when half are full pay and half pay nothing (or most likely 1/4 are full pay, 1/4 pay nothing, and 1/2 get some FA that averages out to half pay, but you didn’t want to know about need based aid).
I set the budget at what I could pay.
Just like how colleges can have different admission buckets (e.g. admission by division or major), they can also have different cost, financial aid, and scholarship buckets. The most obvious example is the difference between in-state and out-of-state at public schools. The overall average may not reflect what you will pay if you are in a small population bucket at the school that contributes little to the overall average.
So relying on overall averages to estimate what you will pay may not make much sense when colleges have better estimates available through net price calculators (though some colleges’ net price calculators still are not very good).
Having average costs to attend colleges really won’t help YOU at all. The variables for determining net costs would have to be just about identical to yours to be at all helpful…oh…at each college.
Why don’t you use the Net Price Calculator…where you actually input YOUR financials?
To focus your search space, it may help to be aware of pricing patterns that affect different kinds of colleges for different income levels. Ivies for example tend to offer very competitive net prices for incomes below a certain level (see above). For much higher incomes, they don’t.
But I agree, averages and patterns are useful at best only up to a point. YMMV. Use the NPCs.
Our two kids went to the same expensive private University. S got great merit awards and paid less than 1/2 of what D did out of pocket. They were both attending at the same time for 3 semesters–things were pretty expensive.
We gave a friend whose S got a full merit tuition scholarship for the same U but his younger sister was also full pay at the same U.
When you hear enough anecdotal one-offs, it’s easy to conclude that financial aid is a crap shoot.
That can be an excuse to not have an application strategy. If you want to throw 20 application darts at the wall, chances are something will stick … but you at least ought to know which way the dart board is facing. Is it best to focus on sticker price, need-based aid, automatic merit, competitive merit, or some combination? To make that decision, I’d want to look at some numbers. Some averages. I’d certainly want to use the NPCs, but I’m not going to run 500 of them.
If you’re chasing competitive merit scholarships, then the overall net price averages, the income band averages, or even the NPC estimates, may not be good predictors. Even in that scenario I’d want to know how many students get scholarships, and in what average amounts, before pinning my hopes on a college I couldn’t otherwise afford.
The NPC will be much more valuable than the average amount of need met or the average scholarships awarded. Fact is…you could be at the bottom of that average. Or the top. No way of knowing by just looking at the averages.
This question was more “what are real families paying OOP for their kids to attend college”.
Our D is the oldest child amongst our friend group, so we don’t have anyone close to us that we can ask to see what is “normal” or “average”. Our EFC will make us full pay less merit everywhere.
What I was looking for is what families like ours are actually paying OOP per year for an undergrad degree. How much is too much? What is realistic? Averages or a range are fine, I just honestly don’t have anyone else to ask except fellow CC parents.
Thanks.
What are your family finances like? What kinds of colleges are your kids applying to?
We don’t know what your family is like…so it’s impossible to tell you what families like yours will be paying to attend college.
Real,families pay between $0 OOP and $75,000 a year OOP…but that isn’t what you want to know. You want to know what families like YOU are paying OOP. Think $0 to full pay…because that is the answer…depending on the college, merit aid, need based aid, college savings, grandparents contributing, etc.
Use the Net Price Calculator on a bunch of college websites for colleges of interest…to get an idea of what you might be looking at for a net cost…which is your OOP cost.