Interesting piece on how the lack of transparency in college prices affects our perception of the school:
Yes, it is.
One number you don’t see published is what the true average cost was for students attending a particular college or what percentage of students pay the full sticker price without either merit aid or financial aid. I’ve done a lot of research on colleges this past year and the total published cost of attending almost all private universities is within a few thousand dollars of $60,000/year. Once you add in housing, a meal plan and any required fees there is very little variation from this figure and this figure goes up each year (tuition anyway) by about 8%. What there is far less transparency on is what families actually end up paying.
Ask JC Penney how just lowering the prices worked for them…
Seems like the business model depends on a fair number of families paying full sticker price, and making it easy to discover the true average cost of attendance might upset the apple cart? Plus it might devalue the “brand,” kind of like the Coach outlet stores…
what they could do is a la carte pricing. the more you pay the more you get.
barrack style housing for those paying less. full private apartments for those paying the top tier and other levels in between with other options. first dibs on classes for those who pay the most and those who pay the least for classes sign up last. etc…etc…
it will never happen but maybe it should.
Zobrow- a fun game- count the number of times on CC this season a parent posts that they didn’t like the landscaping at X college, or that they can’t believe Y university doesn’t serve sushi, or that Z college makes students bring their own towel when they work out.
We live in a consumer-driven society, and parents may pay lip service to a barracks style college experience, but what they really want is a Hyatt hotel with some books scattered around for show.
I recently heard from a parent who was appalled that the Freshman dorms at Yale are not air conditioned. I tried to explain that the Freshman quad- and its buildings- were constructed a hundred years (and some more than that) before the advent of a/c and that since all the windows opened, had screens for bugs, and it was easy enough to plug in a fan for the two weeks in September and one week in May when Connecticut gets hot… somehow her kid could deal.
But no. Yale is a “dump” according to her. Moving on… and the arms race continues.
'what they could do is a la carte pricing. the more you pay the more you get.
barrack style housing for those paying less. full private apartments for those paying the top tier and other levels in between with other options"
You won’t build community that way. The colleges which (IMO) do the best job of building community put everyone together in buildings of more-or-less-the-same-quality, instead of having the poor people’s dorms and the rich people’s dorms.
Common data sets reveal more than you think, including number of students receiving both need-based and merit aid and the average amounts. If there are only 15 academic scholarships, that is very different than 200, and if they average 5000 or 25000 also is a big difference. Athletic scholarships are also listed in both number and amount.
These aren’t huge documents, and they are standard format, so if you understand one, you will understand as many as you care to look at.
Also, some net price calculators do predict merit aid.
Getting into these schools and for merit, being tagged as top 1 or even 25% student, is a whole other issue.
Dorms are definitely below the standards of most middle-class or higher students and their families. Basically, the McMansion era, including even middle-class homes at 2000 ft2 with a separate bedroom and often bath for each child, are really different from the shared 10x15 concrete bunkers with no A/C that are the reality for many freshmen and probably correlated better with the big families in small houses of the 60s. Is this a real issue, or a community bonding experience, or something that we taxpayers need to fix (federal financial aid for room and board) I don’t really know.
Although housing is typically a separate financial investment, in other words, room and board charges usually pay all the housing bills, including some nicer options if you can charge more money and have them occupied.
If you have a good local college near you, it sure makes commuting attractive.
And, since many kids still have a room at home and this is sort of a vacation home, maybe think of it as a space in a run-down vacation cabin or something.
It’s not “all one big marketing scheme”. It’s a collection of little, uncoordinated marketing schemes.
I think parents worry more about housing then the kids. I believed that my daughter’s freshmen room was a complete dump. Do not even want to mention the bathroom. She told me that her room was very good and everything is marvelous. They are very excited to live in an extended camp without parents in sight.
In my experience this exact system exists at many large public Us we looked at. Temple, for example, has basic doubles-triples for $x and fancy high rise apartment buildings for $xxxx and several options in between. Meal plans that cover just the dining hall, meal plans that cover all the a la carte restaurants on campus. etc.
We found this to be a turn off. I agree with PG that a more egalitarian housing system builds a better community.
That only works if the more affluent families (the “full-pays”) subsidize the rest, which is why it’s mainly limited to expensive private schools.
^ or the endowment subsidizes all…
Which pretty much translates into schools with admissions rates of less than 20%. Not really an option for the vast majority of kids.
I wonder how schools like Wooster (60%) and Denison (48%) and Wittenberg (73%) and such do it then?
I suppose you could say the full-pays subsidize all at those, though there is maybe more merit than need-based FA, or at least an even combo of both.
Denison has a pretty sizable endowment though Witt does not.
Full-pays subsidize.
In any case, that is why the a la carte plan isn’t embraced by the elite privates who have their choice of students.
Obviously, poor kids would not like it. The richer families want a community (of elite students) and thus do not like it either.
As @OHMomof2 mentioned, if a la carte is what @zobroward wants, he can find it at many publics.
People like to moan about prices, but evidently, enough people are willing to pay up for characteristics that they want.
I mean, heck, one parent on here recently said that a pretty campus matters to him, which is why you see some rich privates where seemingly every building on campus has been renovated in the past 15 years.
It is pretty well established that the high price/high discount model works better for colleges. The school is better able to achieve its new revenue per student (say $35k) by charging $60k and then offering scholarships and aid of $25k on average.
When it comes to college $35k “every day one low price” really doesn’t work.
But the key thing that high price/high discount allows is price discrimination. Like airline seats, everyone pays a different price for essentailly the same product. Some people get big discounts but other people pay full sticker.
That price discrimination allows the school to hit budget for total tuition revenue while also hitting budget for other objectives – like diversity and high academic stats of the enrolled class.
While every news article bemoans the soaring sticker price of college, the fact is that net revenue per student to the colleges has mostly gone sideways. So college costs on average have not increased much, although someone paying $60k full sticker could not believe that to be true.
@northwesty, I agree that very very good, attentative, strategic planning with well-thought out application targeting can land a good college price for almost any student who is willing to be not-so-picky about where he/she attends college.
The problem is that despite these best efforts, it remains very difficult to figure out in advance what price will be applied to YOU (any one particular student). NPCs and CDS and research - none of that worked for my family. Thankfully, we had high stats and got some merit/talent offers and were able to pay, but so many are not. College really is a unique product in that way, in the sense that you apply without really knowing what the price will be.
Almost every public school we looked at had expensive housing choices and bargain housing choices, and the expensive choices were pretty open (ie if you wanted it you could have it). None of the privates WE looked at allowed for that type of choice (there were definitely nicer vs not as nice housing options, but you couldn’t really directly choose which dorm you would get).
It never occurred to me that maybe this public v private housing choice distinction might have something to do with the pricing structures at such colleges.
Of course, I also don’t know it this observation holds true at every private/public. For example, I do know that at U Mich you could not choose your dorm, and that’s a public.