From personal experiences, are the online net price calculator for universities generally true? I’ve been trying to narrow down my list and I don’t know if I should or should not trust the online net price calculators that universities have. Any help or personal experiences?
Many, but not all, schools keep their NPCs up to date, and their estimates often are in the ball park of FA offers.
Right now, NPCs are set to 2019-2020 COA, not 2020-21, so one should adjust for that.
Also NPCs may not be accurate if parents are divorced, own a business, or own real estate beyond a primary home.
It is reasonable to contact college AOs and ask if the NPC is accurate, whether it includes merit aid (if the college offers merit), and when it will be updated with 2020-21 COA information.
The two NPCs for the schools my kids attended were spot on, but the merit at those schools was based on gpa/scores, and for the first year my kids received no need based FA.
You have to know what kind of aid you are expecting (usually the NPC are pretty good for Pell grants) and whether all the info you are putting in is correct.
If applicable to your schools of interest, you may want to compare your NPC results with those from this resource: https://myintuition.org/.
There are caveats as mentioned above; divorce situation, owning a business, unusual assets and situations. But for financial aid, they give a good indicator. I always suggest running several like schools’ NPCs to get a better idea of what to expect from certain categories of schools.
They will not take into account merit awards that are possible unless they are distributed on a guaranteed Gpa and test score basis and the calculator asks for that info. Even then, other factors could change that result.
If your parents are divorced, see http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/2083835-faq-divorced-parents-financial-aid-and-net-price-calculators.html .
If your parents have self employment, rental, or small business, and they take substantial deductions applicable to those situations, some colleges add back some types of deductions applicable to that type of income. If this is the case, then you may want to run the net price calculators twice, once with income, and a second time with all deductions added back to income to get a worst case.
The 6 schools we applied to last year ended up with final offers very close to the NPC number…a couple were almost to the dollar. I wouldn’t trust them 100% and we were on pins and needles waiting for the FA letters to come out, but it’s a good place to start.
They were accurate for us. Some included accurate predictions of merit based financial aid, some did not. At least two schools surprised us with a bit of merit aid that was not predicted by the NPC – but these were schools that were going to be affordable anyway.
If your parents own a small business then reality is likely to be worse than the NPCs predict. I know a few people who own farms and of course their neighbors are farmers also – the NPCs are not accurate for them either.
My kids applied to more than 20 schools between them, and the NPC estimates were close (within a few thousand bucks) for the vast majority of them and often much closer. That was enough precision for us; however, I know that for many folks, an estimate that is off by “a few thousand bucks” would be more problematic.
If your parents have an uncomplicated financial picture, the NPCs tend to be a better estimate than if they are more complicated. The following can render the NPCs less than reliable:
- Self employed parents
- Parents who own a business
- Parents who own real estate in addition to their primary residence
- Parents who are divorced.
- International students
- Transfer students (although some NPCs do ask your enrollment status)
Even with that, keep in mind that the results of the NPCs and actual aid awards can vary by thousands of dollars from one college to the next…as each college calculates institutional need based aid awards using their own formula.
Good to know. I just completed the NPC for one school of interest and it came back north of $60k. I don’t care if you’re a T10 LAC, I’m not paying a quarter of a million dollars for a piece of paper from your school. I’m just not. Period. Full Stop.
As small business owners - we did as @ucbalumnus said and added back in deductions when we ran the NPC… and it was always way more than we could afford. So we limited D to merit only (some automatic, some competitive) and allowed her one financial lottery application to Princeton which is the most generous with need based aid. She was rejected so we will never know about the $!
I would think any FAFSA only schools that have a NPC that allows you to enter your actual EFC would be the most accurate (unless they’re out of date). The ones I worry about are the ones that just ask for an estimate of your AGI because FAFSA adds a lot of things onto that AGI and schools that use CSS profile and don’t have a lot of in-depth questions in the NPC.
Well, if you’re going to reduce the college undergraduate experience to the one tangible benefit of having a piece of paper to put in a frame and hang on your wall, then you might as well just take whatever path leads to the absolute lowest cost for you to get a degree and spend the money you save on a more impressive frame.
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Note that two (USN) top-10 LACs appear in this Forbes article, “10 Expensive Colleges Worth Every Penny”: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliesportelli/2017/04/26/10-expensive-colleges-worth-every-penny-2017/.
Well, seeing as I don’t believe a school or piece of paper defines a person and their abilities, there’s no need to spend any money on a frame either 
But hey, if you have an impressive frame for your paper - good for you.
A college that uses only FAFSA information may still have its own institutional methodology using that information to calculate financial aid, rather than just relying on the FAFSA EFC calculation as the basis for financial aid calculations.
The least accurate net price calculators would be those that ask far fewer relevant questions than the real financial aid forms (FAFSA and (if applicable) CSS Profile). For colleges that use CSS Profile, those whose net price calculators use the College Board template are probably better, since it has relatively detailed questioning and the College Board provides the CSS Profile form.
Students with divorced parents often encounter issues for colleges that require both parents’ finances, because many divorced parents are uncooperative about financial information (because they do not want their ex-spouses to know). So doing such a college’s net price calculator can become a GIGO situation.
Full disclosure - my undergraduate degree (the actual diploma) is still in the cover provided by the college on the day I graduated (more than three decades ago), gathering dust on a shelf somewhere.
My point, in case you didn’t get it, was that unless you’re doing it wrong, the money you spend for your college education is for other stuff besides that piece of paper. And the price charged by the school can sometimes (not always) be a reflection of the quality of the education received. As always, caveat emptor.