Does anyone know of a website where you can fine one Net Price Calculator that pulls data from a number of schools - instead of having to enter the same information over and over again in different school’s websites?
The reason the net price calculators are on each college website is that the formulas the colleges use to compute need based aid vary wildly from college to college.
The net price calculators don’t have that many questions. Just do each one.
Many schools use the college board where you can save most of the data.
College Abacus used to exist. It took your inputs and fed them to several colleges’ NPCs. But it is no longer in operation.
However, as noted above, many colleges use the College Board template, which allows you to save your inputs to use in NPC runs at other colleges that also use the College Board template (which will give different results based on differing FA formulas).
Try going to College Navigator. It’s a government site. You can find the average price for your income bracket there. That will help you narrow things down a bit. Then you should run the NPCs.
Here it is https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/
Locate your school of interest. Then click the tab and find your income bracket.
it’s very handy!
At public schools assume that apart from merit, state aid and Pell Grant you will only be offered loans and maybe work study.
Private schools are more likely to give institutional grants, but the price tag is also usually higher.
The net price can be comparable at both though depending on the aid offered.
@ucbalumnus It sounds like College Abacus is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. Too bad that it is no longer around.
What about https://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ ? They have a tool where one enters your location preferences, academic and financial stats and it generates a list of recommended colleges with estimated net prices.
Here’s another resource: https://myintuition.org/.
@nypapa and @merc81 These are what I was looking for! The My Intuition is little limited, but is definitely helpful. I wonder what College Raptor uses to determine their estimated net price?
I’d only really trust the ones through the college websites. Sounds like you are hoping to get thousands in grants — putting in a little elbow grease is worthwhile.
@time4adventure See below for an except from College Raptor FAQ about where they are sourcing their data. Should be a pretty interesting data mining exercise to predict net costs based on academic and financial statistics. Seems like a nice tool at least to get a first idea about the college landscape. As for your own privacy, its nice that they do not require users to sign in just to try out the tool:
https://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/Home/FAQ
In addition to the data we obtain from our users’ financial aid reports, much of our data comes directly from the U.S. Department of Education’s “Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System” known as IPEDS. This is the same data used by many college-related websites and national college ranking lists. IPEDS collects many types of data such as overall institutional characteristics, information about a school’s financial aid grants, endowment, enrollment, degrees granted, faculty salaries, and demographic data. The U.S. Department of Education also provides a College Scorecard that assists in evaluating the loan default rate and average debt upon graduation for most colleges. For computing financial aid estimates, we also consider data from other sources such as U.S. census, tax/income, and housing valuation data by geographic location.
www.savingforcollege.com used to have a good one, meaning you could enter all your information in once and just change the college to get the different numbers. I don’t know how accurate it is for each college. We’ve used their calculators a lot over our years of saving, though.
It really doesn’t take that much time to run the NPC at each college you are interested in. The results will be the more accurate than any of the sites that estimate net prices. After running more than one hundred, it takes me at most a couple of minutes to complete one. There are usually a number of questions you can skip that don’t effect the net price- they are identified as optional. Skipping them saves time.