“… Most colleges and universities have managed to fill their classes each year by employing sophisticated discounting strategies that extended cut-rate tuition rates to just enough students to encourage them to enroll. In the past decade, those discounts not only got much bigger, but schools offered them to more students — including those who used to pay full price — to entice them to campus.” …
I was reading the article posted on Inside Higher Ed…very interesting. Does anyone have a link or know where to find discount rates for various colleges?
It would be nice to get a break in '17 when my son heads to school. Potentially looking at 65k per year.
A list of common discounted prices would be cool to see.
Each college’s net price calculator should tell you about need based aid at that college for your situation.
The colleges that tend to do this tend to be the colleges that families overlook, or don’t want to consider because they’re too hung up on “top” schools, etc. A similar thing happens where high stats kids often miss out on merit aid because their families are too focused on the Ivies et al
Agree with @CourtneyThurston . From advice given on another site, it seems logical that if you are a 1) top student who 2) does not meet the criteria for need-based aid; you should be 3) looking for a school where 4) you are in the top 20%-30% of applicants, not the lowest group. Bonus points if that school didn’t fill last year. (So look for the list on CC and cross reference them.)
You need to look down the USN&WR list a little further to the really decent schools like: Rhodes College, Temple, Sewanee, Muhlenberg, Juniata, Hendrix, Agnes Scott, Santa Clara, Gettysburg, Hampshire, Marist. Wells, Furman, Guilford
Basically those schools (and others), if you do your research right, tend to provide solid educations (and you can further refine that by looking for strengths in your Area of Interest). Why? Because it’s very very hard for a Ph.D. even from an Ivy to get a decent job. The market is incredibly competitive. Otherwise there wouldn’t be an army of adjuncts practically living out of their cars. They’d find another job, a steady job, with benefits, if the market weren’t so tough. You have a very fine chance of finding excellent professors at schools outside of the Ivies, and equivalents, while increasing your chances of getting close, personal academic attention and merit aid.
College prices are through the roof because they are subsidized perennially. Colleges are too expensive for their customers to buy.
But the colleges have a honey pot of federal aid (much of which is never repaid) to tap. Many schools have large endowments to tap for subsidizing tuition. Some schools take pride in being “need blind” which seems suicidal from a business standpoint. Eventually, accountants will inconvenience the fairy tale and bills must be paid. So the schools revert back to need aware admissions and purposely accept qualified students who also pay their bills independently. Providing a discount, often relatively small, to those “full pay” students makes more sense than blindly accepting students who are able to pay little or nothing independently.
The glut of PhD’s noted above is another sign of subsidies generating vast excesses of degrees for which there is no market.
I think it can hurt schools too. We never would have looked at the school D2 attends if she wasn’t recruited. The sticker price was too high and I never thought we’d get it down to affordable. Someone told me (mistake) that the Florida resident grant was $20k, when it was really $2500 (yep, big difference), but once I started grinding the numbers I found that there was enough merit and grant money to bring it in range.
I’m sure the sticker price of many schools has people not even looking at private schools.
Same here.
However, there’s a fine line: while many students won’t end up paying the sticker price, many students (and their families) have got it in their heads that sticker price is irrelevant and any school will magically become affordable for the student through “discounts”. Not always the case.