Thanks in advance for your responses. Should I use Net Price Calculator to help make our list of schools? Is it even close to realistic? Grant aid is included in the calculations, but I have no idea what kind of grant or whether we’d qualify. I really want to avoid getting hopes up about schools that are out of reach financially or otherwise. Thanks.
Not enough information from you to answer.
Are you self employed? Do you own a business? Do you own any real estate other than your primary residence? Are the student’s parents married to each other now? Are you an international student?
If yes to any of these…the net price calculator could be less accurate.
Also, keep in mind that the NPCs are currently set for students enrolling fall 2016. These get updated late summer of your kiddos senior year in HS. And yes…some schools do change financial aid awarding policies.
Thanks, thumper1. Just curious, parents married to each other would make the NPC less accurate?
I had the same questions when my D (now college freshman) was looking at schools. I found them to be fairly accurate, and I am divorced so I had that wrinkle to contend with. For us, if a school’s NPC came within 10K of the budget, then we left it on the list. However, I made it VERY clear to D what the budget was, and if she was accepted without enough financial aid to make it doable, then she would have to decline the acceptance. It worked out well for us.
No, divorce would make it likely inaccurate.
Our situation was pretty straightforward and generally found the NPC’s to be accurate. However, I think it a varies by school. I think some do a better job than others.
Thanks, suzy100. I guess within 10k is as accurate as can be expected.
ClaremontMom, we are also straightforward, so hoping we’ll find the NPC as accurate as you did. Thanks for your input.
If you post school names here, folks will tell you whether their actual awards marched or came close to the Net Price Calculator. OR you could post that question on the college specific forums here and ask.
Some schools are pretty accurate, and others appear to be less so.
These are some of the things that make NPCs less reliable
both parents not in same household
remarried parents
parent owning a business
parent working in a career that takes business deductions (Realtor, for example)
parents own properties other than their home
parents own rental properties
income from rental properties
unearned income (gets hit harder with calculations)
single parent household (having only 1 parent in the home gets hit with a harsher calculation)
parents having lots of equity in their home (CSS Profile)
large annual retirement/401k type contributions
large assets (some NPCs don’t ask much about assets)
Also, if the school’s NPC is similar to this one http://www.nyu.edu/financial.aid/misc/npc/ , with just rough ranges of income and few other questions, it is less likely to be accurate.
Still, even in the cases where the NPCs are less likely to be accurate, they give more information than not using them. In the cases where they are less likely to be accurate, treat the NPC results as “best case” estimates – if the “best case” estimate is unaffordable, then you know not to bother with the school, or that the goal is a big enough merit scholarship (not just admission).
Large retirement contributions don’t make NPC less accurate but they must be entered correctly. There is a current thread by a HS senior who didn’t do so and is now dissapointed with aid offered.
There is a box in every NPC that I have used where you enter in tax deferred retirement contributions. ROTH payments don’t need to be entered because those earnings are reported in Box 1 of W-2.
In fact there is a catch all box that says something to the effect of “any other income not reported elsewhere.” This doesn’t resolve inaccuracies due to business income, rental property, etc. but it does factor in income from gifts, nontaxable sources, etc.
We have a straightforward situation (married parents, two income, no second home or business, some assets) and found the NPC to be depressingly accurate. I also took the estimate to be the “best case” scenario. In other words, if the NPC returned an estimate of something close to full-pay, I didn’t second guess them and think we would get a fantastic aid package.
Also some of the NPCs are updated for 2016-2017 - it tells you the year it’s designed for.
Also as with anything like this the data out is only as good as the data put in. The ones that go through Collegeboard at least allows you to save all the data and fix things as you find them and then re-run all the ones you did previously easier.
I’ve run the same information through the Collegeboard Net Price Calculator and am surprised at the wide range of responses. The numbers I’m putting in are identical, and yet the estimated net price ranges from $4200 to $32,800. The ones that are in the impossible to imagine making it work are being removed from any “colleges I’m considering” list. Anyone else find this? Ones that remain on the list of possibilities to explore further include Smith, Frank & Marshall, Reed, Dickinson, Haverford and Scripps which all had net prices within the range of possibilty.
I used to work at a university and when the regulation to have a Net Price Calculator first came up, I was involved in providing data to set ours up. Our school used the FAFSA only (no CSS) so it was fairly straight-forward, but we created ours for the worse case scenario. We had a lot of scholarships that had very specific requirements and the template we used didn’t allow for that many “if then” scenarios. So we set it up for the bare minimum/most likely scholarships because we didn’t want to mislead parents/students.
What @Dolemite said. In addition to having a pretty straightforward financial situation, you have to put in accurate numbers. When filing FAFSA, you pull over your income from you tax returns with the DRT. I believe with CSS, you actually send copies of the returns. Do not guesstimate your numbers when running NPCs. Do not low ball them by using taxable income instead of AGI.
I don’t know why they would vary that much since they all purport to meet need. Perhaps due to home equity?
@“Erin’s Dad” - @Atyraulove didn’t mention all the schools. Only the ones that remained on the list because the net prices seemed in a reasonable range.
I don’t know how likely it is, but perhaps the wide range is due to how generous the schools are and how accurate their NPCs are. We experienced some range in the NPC calculations but nothing like what @Atyraulove describes.
@Atyraulove - You need to distinguish between those colleges that meet full need, and those that don’t. You can use this list on Wikipedia to start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need-blind_admission
This list on U.S. News is another resource, although I don’t find it to be as useful as the Wikipedia list:
Finally, the [Princeton Review](College Search | The Princeton Review) website provides a financial aid ranking for each college in the country - just go to the college’s financial aid page and scroll to the bottom of the page. (The Princeton Review site used to be freely available. It now appears that one has to jump through various hoops to access it. There’s no cost, but I’m guessing it’s possible that signing up will result in you receiving a bunch of junk mail from them.) The schools that meet full need are the ones with FA rankings in the high 90s.
The NPC’s (net price calculators) of schools that meet full need should be reasonably reliable if your financial situation is fairly straightforward (employment income only, and no unusual assets). If your family owns a business, the calculators will not be so reliable.
For public schools that don’t meet full need, the calculators will also be fairly accurate, although not nearly so generous! And, for those private schools that don’t meet full need, the calculators are not so reliable, since need-based aid awards may be linked to GPA and SAT/ACT scores.