Because the price of cars, houses, airline tickets are not priced according to the complexity of your income situation.
Are you aware of any car, home, airline that has different prices for divorced couples, or for self-employed people?
I didn’t read every post, but I have to tell you that the College Board has the net price calculator for over half the schools my kids applied to. I entered the data and saved it so I could use the same data for all the colleges. I took a screen shot of the data and use it to enter the other half. I have run 50+ colleges, some with multiple scenarios, and it isn’t all that big of deal even if not a college board NPC (though they should all use this).
Really? You can do it for cars and houses? I think of those things as being very sensitive to your (or your agent’s) negotiation skills, the time you are in the negotiation (end of the year, spring, whenever the seller is more or less interested in the sale), etc.
I think it’s actually easier to compare college costs.
Of course one can easily compare sticker price of all 3 but hardly anyone pays sticker for any of those 3 so that’s not useful, really.
To me, this is another case of bureaucracy inaction. They can’t get the smallest thing done unless there is something in it for them.
If you told colleges that they have 90 days to build a universal NPC or lose their endowments tax-exempt status, it would be done.
I ran the NPC for about 40 schools. I did it during my child’s junior year, so a bit early. It was tedious but it wasn’t particularly difficult nor time-consuming.
I’ve run NPCs at about 30 schools this year and they really have varied very little–perhaps 10%. The one offer we have in writing is within $300 of the NPC (but also plus unexpected merit). Even though some ask insufficient questions the numbers are still within that 10% range. But we are easy with married parents, income from w2s, etc.
Define “inaccurate”
Back in 2013, there were NPCs that used 1) Old Price Figures 2) Completely Ignored Merit Aid. See this blog post on “How to Spot a Lousy Net Price Calculator”. http://www.thecollegesolution.com/how-to-spot-a-lousy-net-price-calculator/
There are some people who will not be satisfied until a financial aid rep from each school shows up at their house to hand them a customized “here are your costs”.
We see posts from kids whose parents refuse to tell them how much money they earn. We see posts from kids whose mom is living with a BF who hasn’t paid taxes in five years, and they can’t just put “zero” in the income line because a financial aid officer is going to wonder how the family eats on zero income. We see posts from parents who don’t want their kids to know that they could comfortably afford to be full pay but still want the kids to take out loans to have “skin in the game”. And we see posts from kids whose parents own rental properties or a beach house or a ski lodge and claim they are getting “screwed” because some financial aid office asked about the value of the second or third home.
My take? Save your ire. If you are well organized and have your financial files updated and in one place, running the NPC’s is not akin to brain surgery.
There are bigger things to get aggravated over.
I just had a car dealer do this to me (virtually the same numbers).
If you are buying a car that nobody wants- your quote over the phone will be reasonably reliable. If you are buying a car that is suddenly in big demand then the phone quote will not be accurate. Until you drive up in your beater of a trade-in and sit down in front of the salesman… you won’t know what you’ll need to pay to get the car you want.
I never understand this. It seems illogical to require the kids to have skin in the game without showing them what the results of YOUR having skin in the game yield. Wow, it’s early, I phrased that terribly-I think I’m trying to say you can’t teach your kid the value of a dollar and the worth of shouldering debt or earning merit awards without showing them what you make. Otherwise it’s just all fuzzy.
Sounds like anti-trust material.
I agree, @MotherOfDragons. I would have a very hard time teaching my kids much about money while concealing how much I make. For us, explaining the ins and outs of our family expenses is the clearest way to approach it, because it’s relatable I think. This lifestyle you have, it requires this much money to support, and then you fill in the details.
I agree with several posters about school financials being presented accurately and with transparency. The Net Price Calculator required by the federal government (2011) has been helpful for families to get a general idea.
If College Abacus is accurate and it does make it easier for transparency, I imagine there will be a push to make it a requirement for schools to allow their information to be used in the College Abacus comparisons. Ron Lieber’s comments in the article I believe hit the nail on the head: "I have no doubt that colleges, especially those that do not have endowments big enough to meet the full financial needs of each accepted student, are worried about the consequences of “direct financial comparisons.” but to deliberately throw up roadblocks that prevent easy comparisons is to turn up an institution’s collective nose at anyone with even the mildest pecuniary concerns. Many of these schools would much prefer that prospective students spend far more time on their individual websites and use each of their calculators one by one. There, the colleges can surround the results with sunny explainers and Instagram-worthy pictures. They are selling an expensive product, after all, and have strict goals to meet for each class. They are increasingly focused on numbers, carefully calibrating their aid offers to make sure that the average amount paid by members of the freshman class hits a specific financial target. (Even if the schools are “so much more than that.”)
Boy, maybe Consumer Reports needs to uncover the ins and outs like they did with their Sept 2015 issue “The Truth About Car Insurance”. 3 states prohibit insurers from using credit scores to set prices. “Price optimization” practice is not allowed in 6 states - which essentially is an effort to measure how likely it is that someone will pay more than they are paying now.
Are some colleges trying to have ‘price optimization’ or hang on to it?
Most families have to think very carefully about the cost/benefit of a particular school. And just like JCPenney was unsuccessful in converting retailers to provide ‘true price’ w/o sales, discounts, etc that consumers are comfortable with for ‘value’, I don’t think colleges will be changing anytime soon the way they handle net cost of attendance information. Financial aid and merit are important variable schools utilize to obtain the students they want to attract, so the net price/cost for one is going to be much different than the net price/cost for another.
And there still are many families who do not understand finances enough to realize they should not be signing parent plus loans if they cannot afford to do so.
Just like healthcare and hospital bills.
Disagree. The ability to make cost/benefit determinations is not predicated on knowing one’s parents’ income.
I also disagree. If you are upfront with your kid about what you will contribute to their college costs, that seems to be the most important factor. Not sure they need to have all the details.
To be clear,I don’t think the parental contribution to college needs to be justified by income information.
However, I find that it is much easier to give kids a sense of money in general when I discuss it in the context of our family budget. Here in talking more about helping them understand what constitutes a “good income” and what it costs to maintain the lifestyle they are used to. We have a low six figure income–I don’t want my kids thinking that they can live like we do on a $30-40K job right out of school.
Sure, it’s possible to explain that in other ways. But it’s easy to me to use our situation as an example and I have no reason to hide the info from my kids. I also think it’s helpful for them to understand where our family fits in the big pucture–so that they aren’t like those one percenters who insist that they’re middle class.
Works for us.
But unless a kid is totally clueless, they should have some sense of what it takes to make a decent living and an idea of what their parents are doing for a living and what kind of lifestyle that might afford… You can get a “good income” in all sorts of ways-professional, entrepreneurship, plumbing for that matter. Some of that becomes a matter of who you may want your kids to rub noses with, but that is a different discussion.
You say clueless, I say normal, po-tay-to, po-tah-to, to-may-to, to-mah-to…