"Not long after the calculator became standard, a service called College Abacus emerged, allowing families to compare multiple schools at once. That spared them the laborious task of plugging the same data into multiple calculators many times over.
And how did many colleges respond? By blocking College Abacus’s access to their calculators. Imagine if Expedia or Kayak could not search for tickets on some of the most desirable airlines, and you get the idea.
The results of the net price calculators, however, are there for all to see, if only because the federal government forced the schools’ hands. And those schools that deliberately make it harder for families to compare their net prices are sending their own telling signal to the marketplace of applicants."
I think this is REALLY important article and would LOVE to see CC parents start to call out ANY college that still make it difficult to compare their FA estimates to other colleges! The arrogance of the responses to the NYT’s reporters’ questions indicates to me that some college admissions administrators need a wake up call from those being asked to foot most of the bill for their children’s [ very expensive] college educations.
Not sure why Harvard would block access. However, Harvard’s NPC is one of the easiest ones to run “what if?” scenarios on, since it does not require going through several question and answer pages to change a few answers, like the College Board based NPCs do, but has everything on one page.
If you haven’t done so, I’d post this on the FA forum. Potentially important info for parents and students. (Disclaimer: I have only read the first few lines so far.)
I feel like there has to be more to the story. Princeton and Harvard fearing head-to-head matchups doesn’t make sense to me. They’ll blow most competition out of the water on numbers alone, and of course they have a whole lot of draw beyond price. I wonder if there are some angles the reporter didn’t dig up. Those schools are extremely protective of their brands; maybe College Abacus wanted to use their names in some way that they couldn’t control. There may not be any way to guess.
The article itself lists many of the reasons colleges have been wary of this service:
-College Abacus has not be clear about what they will do with users’ data. Currently it has decided not to sell it, but that doesn’t mean that will remain the case.
-There are concerns about the service’s accuracy - Hamilton College, for example, worked with College Abacus and found out one significant problem with the service’s estimation.
Personally, were I comparing net prices amongst different schools, I would want to get an estimate directly from the school itself rather than filtered through some third party service with questionable accuracy. It takes a few extra seconds to visit each school’s website but it’s really easy to find the NPC these days. The article is acting like it’s some gargantuan effort to copy the NPC data into a spreadsheet or document and do the comparisons yourself. If you were buying a car or a house you’d do that - a college education could be much more expensive than a car, and as much as a house in some locations, so why not take your time?
^^You left out the resolution of the problem that Hamilton found AND the fact that Hamilton no longer blocks Abacus.
"Hamilton decided to take her up on the challenge, and it did find one significant problem in the way the company had rephrased a question about the net value of any business owned by an applicant’s parents. Ms. Seldin said the company fixed the problem within 24 hours.
Cameron Feist, Hamilton’s director of financial aid, said that one of his top staff members spent about 15 hours testing College Abacus before the school decided to stop blocking access to its calculator for a yearlong trial period. Why so much time, given that College Abacus is just one college search site among many and that Mr. Feist’s employees are quite busy? “We don’t ever want there to be barriers in front of students who are considering Hamilton,” he said."
working parents who are trying to provide for their families and to put food on the table dont always HAVE the extra “time” to spend searching individual college websites , plugging in the same data over and over again . That’s one reason the Common App was developed- to save college applicants time. Why should those same college applicants , or their parents, have to re-enter the same financial information into individual college websites over and over and over again?
This third party website doesn’t have the precise algorithms the colleges use to determine EFC, so I can see why colleges would be concerned that this website might be misrepresenting them.
After all, determining EFC is not as simple as using buying airline tix, which only requires the date of departure plus the origination & destination airports.
It would seem easy enough for College Abacus to flag which schools use Federal Methodology or Institutional Methodology and let users know there can be some variance with results. Harvard’s NPC is simple but DePaul’s NPC takes ten minutes to complete.
From what I understand, College Abacus tries to act as a web client to the colleges’ net price calculators and web scrape the results. So if College Abacus asks the correct questions and forwards the answers to the college’s net price calculator, and then returns back the net price from the college’s net price calculator, it should be accurate. Of course, the Hamilton situation indicates that the questions might not always match, so that a user might get different results due to that error.
The convenience of College Abacus is that some net price calculators require going through several pages of inputs, rather than putting all inputs on one page (like Harvard’s).
I’m having trouble,with the issue here. Once you have the info, it takes about 15 minutes to complete a school NPC. Why wouldn’t the students just complete each one? It’s not THAT much time!
"The convenience of College Abacus is that some net price calculators require going through several pages of inputs, rather than putting all inputs on one page (like Harvard’s). "
exactly!! And going through ALL THOSE PAGES for multiple schools takes time!!
Let’s remember people-
Seniors, who also are taking classes and doing EC’s and anything else to make their applications “Look Good” to colleges, only have a limited window of TIME to determine WHERE they are going to apply and then to decide WHERE they are going to go to college! And for most students who DONT have the stats to get into HYPS etc , or the $$ to be able to pay $200,000 + for a college education- having to act like a secretary instead of a student, means spending time on multiple college websites that could be better spent elsewhere.
The college selection process is NOT the same thing as deciding “what car to buy”, because of the pressure of TIME.
If I were a college I would be leery of a third party making errors and forwarding them to prospective students. I’d also be concerned that I’d become a line on a big results spreadsheet rather than being seen for all the things, besides cost, that I offer. That’s not that difficult to understand -
IMO it’s a much bigger problem that the NPCs themselves can’t handle the very common situation of divorced parents. Since Abacus is based on the NPCs, it’s also fairly useless to 50% of kids applying to college (or whatever the % of is for college bound students with divorced parents. Maybe less than 50%. But not inconsequential).
However, the Pell Abacus would be a nice starting point for very low income students, it’s nice that it doesn’t ask for income info but only if the student gets free/reduced lunch and some basic stuff like household size.
I just ran it as a free-lunch single parent for for Amherst, Williams and Midd.
Unfortunately, for Amherst I got “Amherst College: This school is integrated into College Abacus, but isn’t available right now. We’re working to get it back online as quickly as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Well thanks Abacus people. That’s not very helpful.
I did get estimates for the other two:
Middlebury College
Sticker Price
$63,656
Total Aid
$57,356
Your Net Price
$6,300
Williams College
Sticker Price
$66,190
Total Aid
$63,050
Your Net Price
$3,140
The IVY League schools were called on the carpet for cooperating with each other regarding financial aid. It could be that some schools are comparison shy as a result. I’m also wary of private outside enterprises gathering too much clout related to all any aspects of the process-including those that purport to be designed expressly to help students. What else does that link link to, for example.
From a New York Times article by Anthony DePepalma, May 23 1991:
"Facing Justice Department charges that they violated Federal antitrust laws, the eight colleges and universities in the Ivy League have agreed to stop sharing information on student financial aid and to avoid collaborating on tuition increases.
Under a consent agreement signed yesterday and announced in Washington by Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, the eight institutions – Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale – agreed to end their policy of jointly agreeing to base all financial aid awards solely on need, without considering a student’s merit or trying to compete with the others to get the choicest students by offering them more aid. Though the joint policy is ended, individual institutions can still offer aid strictly on need.
The universities also agreed to stop holding an annual meeting at which they and 15 other prestigious Northeastern institutions jointly discussed the financial aid applications of 10,000 students who had been accepted to more than one institution in the group. The purpose of this “overlap meeting” was to agree to uniform financial aid offers…"
"Seems they have bigger problems than schools that don’t want to participate. "
Their server was probably overwhelmed since the NYT article was published.
Sorry, I am not buying the “I don’t have time to fill out multiple NPCs” argument. It takes about 15 minutes to fill out most NPCs.
When I was a senior, I was working, doing ECs, and doing all the college stuff on my own. Still had the time to figure out FA stuff (I was in the infancy of NPCs).
If FA is important to you, you make time. It’s that simple.