Hi,
I’m new to CC and just taking a look around for the first time. I was excited to see that a couple of colleges I’m considering looked to be more affordable than I first thought. Then I went to the university websites, and found that the tuition + room + board costs are all $17K-$20K higher than listed here.
Is this true across the board? What gives?
Where on CC are you seeing tuition figures that purport to be current? Always use the college’s website. Prices change annually. You can also find a Net Price Calculator on the college’s site to see how much financial aid you might expect.
Why do they provide these at all if they’re not kept current? It’s no service to CC users, is it, if you need to look it all up individually?
College Confidential is an anonymous message board for the exchange of general college information. It doesn’t pretend to be the official site for any particular college or set of colleges. Users need to check the official college websites to get accurate information about each school. You can run the Net Price Calculator on each website to get an estimate of costs.
They should not be providing that. I haven’t seen it, though. (This came up in a different context and my opinion is that it is futile and misleading to try to aggregate the type of info that is found on a college’s website and changes so frequently.)
In any event, the college is the only authority on its price. Always go to the authority, your internet lesson for the day 
Most figures on any source, even the school’s own web page, are for the current year or even the year before, so won’t be the amounts current high school seniors will pay when they start the next year.
My daughter was high school class of 2014, so we were looking in the fall of 2013. The school she ultimately chose didn’t set the tuition, room and board, or final fees until JULY, just a month before the bill was due. I was trying to get a copy of her bill for a scholarship she was given, and honestly that bill changed EVERY day for the entire month of July! Updating the website was not priority #1 for this school, so yes, the amounts we were looking at on the school’s website in October 2013 were for the 2012-13 year, and the tuition was raised every year by $1500-2000. By the time she started in Aug 2014, the tuition was almost $4000 more than when we were looking at those numbers in Oct 2103.
The net price calculator was also out of date. It was updated later in the spring of 2014, but by then she’d already committed and it still didn’t have the final tuition increase. The merit scholarships were also increased in the spring of 2014 (for the fall) and some of the merit increase covered the tuition increase.
The NPC are not going to be up to date for the costs and aid for the following fall because the schools often don’t set the costs until the next year’s budget is set. Many schools can’t tell you today, Jan. 21, what the tuition will be for fall 2021. Many state schools have to wait for the state budget to be set before final numbers can be posted. The NPC at daughter’s school also gave an estimate of some state grants but those were always just estimates as the grants had to be approved in the state budget (in the spring) and for two of the years my daughter was in school, those grants went up went the state approved extra funds.
I’ve never even seen that data on CC, as it wouldn’t be where I would go for official data.
Check each school’s web site.
As pointed out above, at best cost estimates are just that, estimates based on old data. Still, a 2 year tuition cost difference isn’t likely to be $17-20k. Perhaps the posts you were reading were more than 2 years old? Posts have a date (mo/year or elapsed time 1 hr/1 day old) stamp in the upper right corner. If it was a current post perhaps it was discussing tuition rather than cost of attendance which is usually $17-20k more.
Note this article below discusses tuition changes over the past 20 years rather than the cost of attendance (tuition, room, board, etc).
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2017-09-20/see-20-years-of-tuition-growth-at-national-universities
Whatever list price is doesn’t matter for the vast majority of students. The net price which varies by student is what needs to be within their budget.
College Navigator has average net price paid by income group (less than $30k, $30-48k, $48-75k, $75-110k, $110k+) with data from prior school year (today that’s 2018-2019). Note that for state schools the information is based on in state students. Ex. Ohio State
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=ohio+state&s=all&id=204796#netprc
Year over year % change is under tuition, fees, and estimated student expenses drop down which lists 2019-2020 sticker price.
Also be aware that some schools list out tuition by the semester vs the year. Others only show tuition and not the total cost of attendance (COA).
I’ve not seen on CC where they list tuition costs?
On the College Confidential “Schools Find Your Best Fit” tab at the top of the webpage there are tuition and other costs listed by school.
Looking at the figures for Ohio State, it looks like the estimated housing is quite a bit below the 2019-2020 on campus housing cost estimates. Perhaps they weighted on/off campus and off campus with family estimates for the figure.
Ragging @CC_Jon
Original poster here. Thanks for telling people where to find the tuition info that CC provides. I was beginning to think I imagining it!
Yes, I do think the data is more than 2 years off. For most private schools I’ve compared, it’s $17K or more off.
Which tells me that they should remove or update the tuition information because it is so misleading. Of course, we should check each school’s website. Can’t imagine not doing that before applying.
I think I see where at least some of the confusion comes from. Under the financial aid data on a school page, we have this text:
Data provided by IPEDs and Peterson’s Databases, © 2018 Peterson’s LLC. All rights reserved.
In fact this data was updated from the Peterson’s Database last October. I don’t know if the copyright date can be changed, but I’ll check with the team to see if we can indicate the date we imported the data somehow.
We do offer schools an opportunity to update their profile, including tuition figures. For the most part, however, we do rely on our data sources. If there’s a specific school that seems out of date, we’d appreciate knowing about it.
On their financial aid page, I see on-campus housing quoted at $12,748, off-campus is $11,700 and living with family at $4,780. Our data says $8,503. So it seems the data we get is somehow a blend of the different housing costs. Truth is, your cost will vary depending on many factors. Even the number on the university’s financial aid page is an estimate. Many universities offer a range of housing options with different costs.
I’ll see if we can get more clarity into how the number is calculated. We do want to provide accurate information, but we also depend on other sources.
Dear CCadmin,
Thanks for replying to this. You asked to identify any schools that seemed particularly out of date.
The reason I decided to post about this is that costs for the first four colleges I looked at were really far off. I stopped after that as the information seemed so unreliable. Here are examples for costs including tuition, room, board, books.
According to CC, Colgate is $58K. According to the school website, it’s $75K.
According to CC, Middlebury is 53K. According to the school website is 74K.
According to CC, Vanderbilt is $58K. According to the school website, it’s $72K.
According to CC, Sewanee is $47K. According to the school website, it’s $62K.
Again, I just think the information is so misleading that you might want to omit it altogether.
Cheers
Thanks for letting us know. We’ll investigate.