Harvard, with its generous financial aid, claims to be cheaper than an in-state public college for 90% of students.
photo by Glen Cooper/Stringer/getty images
A new Forbes tool will give you a quick read on what a specific college might cost your family. You may also want to use the school’s own net price calculator.
By Rina Torchinsky & Emma Whitford, Forbes Staff
Most families don’t pay the sticker price at private colleges. Knowing in advance how much a school might cost you is tricky–and essential. That’s because students, particularly those from families with low or moderate income, may start their search by ruling out fancy colleges that could actually cost them less.
Enter the net price calculator, a tool that the Department of Education requires all colleges that offer federal financial aid to include on their web sites. (It’s usually found on the schools’ financial aid or tuition pages.) These calculators ask users to enter a litany of family information beyond income–a list that can include everything from parents’ retirement account balances, to the purchase price, current value and amount owed on their home to medical and dental expenses that aren’t covered by insurance. The information required is based on a college’s own formula for granting need-based aid and sometimes merit aid too, in which case the calculator may ask for your high school GPA and standardized test scores.
“Expect to spend maybe twenty minutes or longer,” warns Paul Negrete, executive director for university financial aid services at Rice University in Houston. But, he adds, “It’s well worth it to go and get an idea of that school’s affordability because the sticker price isn’t always what you’re going to pay.”
Besides being time consuming, these calculators often aren’t as precise as they should be—and they don’t lock a school into providing the estimated aid.
We’ve got an alternative, at least for winnowing down your college search: a new tool that allows you to quickly see the average net cost of attendance for your income group at any of the 500 schools on our 2023 list of America’s Top Colleges.
That’s the cost of everything–tuition, fees, housing, food, books and supplies—minus the grant aid and discounts a student gets from the federal government, the school or the state. (In other words, we don’t count loans as reducing your net cost.) Our numbers are based on data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics for the 2021-2022 school year (the latest available) and the five income groupings available in the data. Find your target school and your family’s income bracket from the dropdowns below. Net costs for state universities are for in-state students. One limitation of the data: all families with income above $110,000 are grouped together, when in fact an upper middle class family earning $120,000 may well get substantial need-based aid at the most expensive private colleges, whereas rich families won’t.
The point of this tool is to get a quick feel for your likely costs, so that you don’t rule out (or in) schools on the basis of a mistaken view of price. Students from low- and middle-income families may discover, to their surprise, that some of the top private colleges will, on average, cost them less than their own state’s four-year public universities. The tool also shows you how deep the discounts are, presenting the net price as a percentage of the total cost of attendance. (We computed that cost of attendance using a weighted average for different student housing arrangements, including on-campus, off-campus and living at home with family.)
So, for example, in 2021-2022, a New Jersey resident who attended Rutgers, New Brunswick (the main campus of the state university) and had a family income of between $48,001 and $75,000, paid an average net price of $19,950, or 58% of the total cost of attendance. It’s a fine school, ranked 49th on our list. But if that same student won admission to private Princeton, Forbes’ #1 rated school, they would have paid an average of only $6,943, less than 10% of the total cost of attendance.
For each school, we’ve also provided a link to the net price calculator on its site. That will give you a more individualized estimate, but it’s not gospel. A 2019 study of 80 public and private four year colleges’ calculators found that 40% used data that was three or four years old and 8% did not specify the year of the data used. Twelve schools didn’t differentiate loans from scholarships and grants.
“Net price calculators are, hypothetically, one of the only mechanisms available for students to try to get that information early in the process to know whether a particular college is actually a realistic option in terms of whether they can afford to pay the cost,” say Laura Perna, who led the research at the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It was dismaying to find that not all institutions provide a net price calculator.” The study urged clear definitions for terms including “net price,” and “loans” as opposed to scholarships or grants. Institutions should also ensure that the net price calculators are easy-to-locate, the study recommended.
To meet the federal requirements, colleges can use a net price calculator template provided by the Department of Education. Or, they can turn to private vendors. College Board’s net price calculator, for example, is used by about 180 schools and families who fill out the calculator for one school can have their information carried over to other schools that operate College Board calculators. The company says there are an average of 2,000 net price calculator completions per day, or about 750,000 per year.
Some schools offer an additional calculator called “MyIntuition,” which is easier and quicker to fill out, but doesn’t meet federal calculator requirements. Phillip Levine, MyIntuition’s creator and a professor at Wellesley College, says he set out to design an accessible calculator that students and parents could fill out based on what they know “off the tops of their heads.” His aim, Levine says, is “to get people off of the sticker price” and “spit back a simple estimate … not to tell people exactly what they’re going to owe, but to give them a sense that they may be paying way less than the sticker price.”
Rice University offers both MyIntution and a government-required net price calculator and finds they both produce fairly consistent and accurate results, usually within a few thousand dollars of the school’s final aid offer, Negrete says. In cases where the calculators’ results diverge too much from with the actual financial aid offer a student later receives, Rice’s financial aid team will offer a second read of the file and will sit down with the family to explain the results. But the calculator outputs alone don’t lock the school in and aren’t enough for an appeal of the award, Negrete cautions.
Rice is another example of a highly rated private school (it ranks #22 on our list) that can be cheaper for students from moderate income families than their own flagship state universities. Our tool shows that a family with an income of $48,001 to $75,000 in 2021 paid an average net price of $6,905—just 9.6% of what was then the cost of attendance. The flagship University of Texas at Austin also rates high—#31 on our list. But it would have cost the same income family an average of $17,528, or 58% of its total cost of attendance.