Making sense of the Net Price Calculator

By Karen Treon, Senior Editor & College Parent

As you and your student click around on university websites, you will find that every school has something called the Net Price Calculator - NPC for short. You can easily find them by googling <school name> + “net price calculator” and it should pop right up. The NPC is a very helpful and very important tool.

Before we start to talk about NPCs, let’s loop back to the Cost of Attendance (COA) and talk about how the NPC differs from the published COA. To put it simply, every school in the US publishes a COA. This is like a sticker price on a car. It’s a statement of price before any adjustments are made. The Net Price Calculator allows students and families to customize that COA based on their personal circumstances and get to a more accurate and personalized estimate of the school’s cost.

Using the Net Price Calculator is straightforward and mostly consistent across university websites. It asks for information from students, some of which needs to be provided by parents or guardians. The information requested includes grades, basic financial information (such as income), test scores, state of residency, and the like. It is quick and basic - it only takes a few minutes to fill it out.  The Net Price Calculator takes that input and calculates what the actual cost to your family is likely to be.  This means it is estimating any need-based financial aid your student might receive, as well as any merit aid money your student might receive. It is an estimate only, but if you and your student provide consistent inputs, the NPC calculations will give you a much better picture of what the actual cost to your family will likely be. Universities and colleges don’t retain or track this information.  The NPC is provided as a tool for families to use.

We suggest that students Just like the COA, your student should enter these NPC figures on their application tracking tool. (If you don’t have a tracker tool, feel free to copy and use our template.) We also suggest keeping printouts or screen shots of NPCs, especially if your student is considering applying to a school through a binding Early Decision program. Running the NPCs around the dining room table, with your student involved, is a great way to open the conversation about college costs, normalize talking about it, and create a lower stress application journey for your family.