college cost

Many times — maybe too many — high school seniors are just so happy to be accepted to their dream school that they don’t give a second thought to the financial implications of their college choice. Then reality sinks in when they start digging into the details of college award letters. At College Parents of America, […]

What does the conversion chart say about the new SAT? This past week the CollegeBoard released several tables detailing student’s performance on the new SAT compared to the old SAT. The official conversion tables show that the new SAT has higher scores than expected across the entire score range (about a 60-80 point increase in scores […]

We are frequent advocates of better consumer information for students and their families. As a result we were pleased to read today's article by fellow parent and New York Times columnist Ron Lieber. His article Concealing the Calculus of Higher Education is a powerful reminder of the difficulty families have in understanding the actual cost of college.

  pic on cc license from flickr user 401(k)2013 U.S. News and World Report has a list out of the schools that meet full financial need. The quality of schools available to students may surprise you.

  image by flickr user FutUndBeidl (cc license) The Dispatch has reported that college tuitions at eleven of the thirteen public universities in Ohio will increase this fall. The increases are capped at the larger of 2% of tuition or $188. However, other uncapped increases are coming, too... in the form of new and increased fees.

  "arrow" by flickr user alan berning, cc license  In today's Chronicle of Higher Education, there was a substantive discussion about how costs of books and 'other' college expenses (laundry, entertainment, transportation) are reportedly falling. But who is providing the data behind this reporting? Colleges and universities.  

  screenshot of heading graphic on http://collegecost.ed.gov/catc/ The U.S. Department of Education updated its most expensive and least expensive colleges list. This now marks the fourh year in a row that such data has been released.

  image by flickr user FutUndBeidl (cc license) As we covered last summer, Congress passed into law student loan reforms that temporarily reduced student loan interest rates. However, as part of those reforms, the federal student loan interest rate, based on auction levels of Treasury 10-year notes, is allowed to float up to a capped percentage. This week, it appears that the first such increase is set to take effect on July 1, affecting all federal loans disbursed for the 2014-2015 academic year.

   image by flickr user FutUndBeidl (cc license) Our senior researcher recently got a request to look into the prevalence of schools with a total cost of attendance listed at $40,000 per year or above. The jump over the last 10 years of federal data is nothing short of shocking.

 image by flickr user davepearson, cc license If you were to google "why is college so expensive," you surely wouldn't be at a loss for links to click. A confluence of known changes in higher education (including public funding cuts, new facility and technology costs, administrative 'bloat'), possibly some disputed changes (most notably financial aid and federal student loans), and surely some other factors (like the continued belief that, despite rising costs, college is worth the investment) have worked together to make college 1,120% more expensive than it was 30 years ago. However, is it possible that certain expensive schools are worth far more than their sticker price? That's the investigation of this piece by NPR's Planet Money.