Not ALL HS students or [parents for that matter, especially newbies to the whole college application process ] have their "acts together "as well as you did roman…
But if someone knows enough to go to the abacus site, it seems pretty likely that they have their act together enough to go to the individual colleges’ NPC sites.
Neither will do much for the completely unaware people.
It seems to me the hard part is gathering the data. After that a student could plug in the numbers for a dozen schools in the time it would take to do one college visit.
Regardless of the details, this information should be made more transparent to students without rekeying and potentially inputting different information and getting different answers. If the colleges don’t want to use this application, they should be easily able to create their own.
Ideally, a student would be able to apply to all schools through one portal in a standardized way and receive information back from schools in a standardized way via the same portal. Schools can have different requirements but they should be able to all use basic information and then request additional items through one portal. Then a student should be able to see the status of all their applications, and FA offers in one location.
I would think that this would benefit the Ivies and other top schools overall, because they have very good FA, and if they lose an applicant because another school offers them big merit money, they have many great applicants ready to take that persons place.
It would certainly benefit the average student/family who is completely confused and trying to sort everything out. It may seem like another minor complexity to cc: regulars, but the masses are getting completely lost in the process.
^^^ the same thing could be said about filling in individual college applications BEFORE the days of the common app!! Whjch my DS had to do…
Anyone suggesting colleges stop using THAT software program ??
The difference is that the schools don’t have to depend on the CA to represent them accurately. The information essentially flows one way. I like the idea of students being able to fill out one form and get FA information from all their schools but I can see why some schools would be distrustful of Abacus.
Sometimes. More than half of the schools on my daughter’s initial (and thus longer than it is now) shortlist use the College Board’s NPC calculator, so it was just a matter of filling one of them out, and then being willing to log in with the same credentials (and maybe add a piece or two of easy-to-find information some particular school wanted) at the next school.
Also, there were a handful of schools that didn’t use that form where we realized that, once we’d filled in the information for one school, we’d just have to click in the box for, say, parent 1’s income, and a dropdown box would show up with the number we’d last entered in the same field before.
Very few schools required filling everything in anew. I really don’t get the idea that it sucks up massive amounts of time to fill them out, unless you’re doing something silly like trying to compare a couple hundred schools.
Colleges should be required to provide transparent, standardized, and easily comparable data on financial aid and also on student outcomes. This would allow students and families to make more informed decisions.
They can work together to do these things voluntarily, or wait for the gov’t to do it for them. it is their choice.
While we can dream, that is just not practical or realistic. Too many families have non-custodial parents, or are small business owners, or are in partnerships. Why should less wealthy, private colleges, with a larger % of Pell Grant students, have to follow the HYPS financial aid “standard”? Heck, even Cornell is less generous than the other Ivies.
“While we can dream, that is just not practical or realistic. Too many families have non-custodial parents, or are small business owners, or are in partnerships.”
I don’t see any reason why a computer program would be unable to accommodate non-custodial parents, small business owners or partnerships. There are rules and a process, so it can be coded.
“Why should less wealthy, private colleges, with a larger % of Pell Grant students, have to follow the HYPS financial aid “standard”? Heck, even Cornell is less generous than the other Ivies”
I have no doubt that there are lots of excuses. However, making this type of information transparent is important. I would think that colleges would rather cooperate to work out a solution rather than have the government do it for them.
where there is a problem finding, calculating or consolidating information that is available online, practical, real time software can easliy be created to solve the problem.
Really, the types of calculations necessary to calculate FA for " non-custodial parents, small business owners, or are in partnerships." are NOT rocket science level problems, especially these days…
Fer cryin out loud, the students have up to year (beginning the 2nd half of junior year) to research schools and try out their NPCs before they apply.
my, my, my …
arent some posters being a bit judgmental about issues that most of us now no longer need to worry about ? Or perhaps they never experienced the stress of wondering if they could afford to send their kids to the college’s they were accepted at…must be nice to have been in that position, especially if they were not self employed, had their own business or otherwise were not the “typical” applicant…
I hesitate to apply nefarious motives to the schools for pulling their data from this service, mostly because I’ve seen Disney do the same thing to web scrapers that let people know when dining availability pops up for in-demand restaurants at Disney, or when reservations pop up at in-demand WDW hotels.
Businesses like to control access to information.
Actually, these are the “typical” applicants. We have what, a 50% divorce rate in the US? Thus, the typical applicant is likely to have a NonCustodial Parent.
I would posit that its the untypical applicant that has W2 earnings only, and an “intact” family, particularly within the lower income group.
If an NPC doesn’t work in these “unusual” instances, there is no indication this service improves the estimate. It sounds like some schools tested the service and it had errors. Is it up to the schools to improve a service that a third party profits from? No. If the service builds up enough of a following that the public demands the school participate, they will but if the service doesn’t work? Nope.
Why would a school let a third party get in the middle of a direct relationship with the student at the risk of that third party giving bad information?
W-2 income is probably the most common type of income. However, only about 48% of children in lower income (lower than 2 times the federal poverty level) families live with married parents (although sometimes the parents may be one biological parent and one stepparent). See http://www.nccp.org/publications/pub_1074.html .
For families overall (not just low income), http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/22/less-than-half-of-u-s-kids-today-live-in-a-traditional-family/ says that 46% of children live with two parents in their first marriage. Another 15% live with two parents, but one or both remarried, and another 34% live with a single parent. So 61% live in two parent families, but both of the two parent categories could include kids living with both biological parents and kids living with one biological parent and one stepparent.
Of course, what it means is that CSS Profile with required non-custodial parent forms probably screen out many students from financial aid at colleges that require that, due to the probably common difficulty of getting cooperation from (or even finding) the divorced non-custodial parent.
Running net price calculators for 6-10 schools doesn’t sound like a lot of work. But, what I suspect a lot of parents would really like to know is what the net price would likely be across a much wider swath of colleges.
You can do it for cars, you can do it for houses…why not colleges? Some colleges might pop up that really hadn’t been under consideration…but should have been, and others (NYU, cough, cough) might more quickly drop from lists.
This isn’t what college abacus does exactly, but it is certainly what I’d like to see.
In 2014, there was talk of developing a “universal net price calculator”.
to give students a standard estimate of college costs before applying.
“The Net Price Calculator Improvement Act of 2014 would also
authorize the Department of Education to develop a “universal calculator”
that lets students answer a standard set of financial and academic
questions to get cost estimates from many schools so they can
better compare costs across institutions.”
A universal net price calculator would have a very large number of questions (the union of all possible questions asked by net price calculators), since colleges’ financial aid offices vary in what they consider when determining financial aid. Some questions are very school specific (e.g. division and major) while others may be state specific (state awards and state scholarship and financial aid eligibility).