How reliable are nces.ed.gov costs?

Paying for College
1

<p>This appeared to be a pretty good resource, but two recent threads made me wonder. Most recently, someone showed an actual UIUC FA form showing COA of roughly $47.5k, whereas the nces.ed.gov site shows about $40.5k (OOS, living off campus): <a href="http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=illinois+urbana&s=all&id=145637#expenses%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=illinois+urbana&s=all&id=145637#expenses&lt;/a>. That's a big enough difference to make me wonder if nces is reliable at all. (I'd be surprised if UIUC jumped 17% in year; that's a tad high even for colleges).</p>

<p>Anybody have an opinion/explanation?</p>

2

<p>You should look ON the college websites for the Cost of Attendance figures. Third parties are often reporting COA from at least one year ago and sometimes more than that.</p>

3

<p>The NCES site matches what the college advertises: [University</a> of Illinois Financial Aid: Undergraduate Non-Resident 2010-2011 Cost](<a href=“http://www.osfa.uiuc.edu/cost/undergrad/nonres_1011.html]University”>http://www.osfa.uiuc.edu/cost/undergrad/nonres_1011.html)</p>

4

<p>Thumper - Yes, for sure, but I had thought that nces would at least be a convenient first pass.</p>

<p>Dad - Here’s the thread, with an actual UIUC FA statement: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1133163-school-uiuc-umd.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1133163-school-uiuc-umd.html&lt;/a&gt; - I’ll take a look and see where it differs. </p>

<p>Edit: It looks like they don’t match at all … none of the three. Not sure what’s going on here.</p>

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<p>It can be really hard to figure out what the COA is likely to be because many public universities have different costs depending on the major, and some bill by the credit rather than by the semester. Housing and meals can be very different too!</p>

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<p>MisterK, That FA print out matches exactly what is on the website I quoted for 2011-12. I actually linked to the 2010-11 year before because the NCES site shows the costs from LAST year while the FA sheet is for NEXT year. Go to the UIUC site and click on the 2011-12 non-resident costs. The costs shown in the thread you linked are for Chem/Business/Engineering.</p>

7

<p>Yes, the 2010-11 UIUC site doesn’t match the NCES site, which you say is from the year before, and is what I assumed also. The numbers are quite different.</p>