LEGAL ISSUES Sticker Prices Don’t Mean Much in Pittsburgh
At College Abacus, we focus on helping students and families identify schools that they can afford based on their net price calculator results, rather than sticker price.
To kick-off our blog’s City Series, we ran the numbers for a family of median income ($30,000 - $40,000, post-tax) and median size (two people) in Pittsburgh to determine which of three Pittsburgh private universities would offer them the best financial aid package – and therefore, the lowest cost of attendance. We looked at Carnegie Mellon, Duquesne University, and the University of Pittsburgh. Of the three schools we compared, University of Pittsburgh had the lowest sticker price, but would have ultimately been the most expensive school for a student with this profile to attend.
You can see the screenshots from our comparison test below – or start comparing colleges by estimated financial aid packages at
CollegeAbacus.com.
(To determine median income and household size in Pittsburgh, we used the information provided by the 2010 US Census:
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/ states/42/
4261000.html)
STUDENT FINANCE
are still not reliably easy for prospective college students and their families to find, use and compare.”6
Te TICAS
report offered insight into the relevant issues around using NPCs and comparing their results, noting that calculators vary widely in the number of questions they ask and the amount of information (or number of tax returns) users need to have available when using them.7 More than 2,500 colleges, universities and technical
schools are already integrated into College Abacus, allow- ing college-bound students and their families to compare and share financial aid estimates with ease – and without cost. College Abacus also offers a suite of functions beyond comparing the cost of different schools. Te site’s “Lifeline” feature allows students to send financial questions to their parents. Parents can mark their answers “confidential,” hid- ing the answers from children while still allowing them to search for schools that would offer them attractive financial aid packages. Users can email and save their favorite re-
sults, using accounts created with College Abacus, Google or Facebook, allowing them to search schools without re-entering their information each time they visit the site. We add several hundred schools each month, allowing students to easily compare more of their “dream schools” on one website. To help facilitate adoption, College Abacus now runs
regular blog posts featuring fictional characters and city- based student profiles. A recent post featured Bella Swan from the Twilight series and tested her assumption that Dartmouth would be more expensive for her to attend than the University of Alaska Southeast. (She was wrong.) Our blog also profiled a student from a median-income Pittsburgh family looking for attractive financial aid pack- ages at local universities (see sidebar).
Tough many institutions of higher education remain skeptical of net price calculators, we at College Abacus be- lieve that engagement with this new tool can help colleges
6 Cheng, D. (2012). Adding It All Up 2012: Are College Net Price Calculators Easy to Find, Use, and Compare? Oakland, CA: Te Institute for College Access and Success. Retrieved October 15, 2012 from
http://ticas.org/files/pub/Adding_It_All_Up_2012.pdf
7 Ibid. NOV/DEC 2012 •
TODAYSCAMPUS.COM 35
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