How Four Parents Hacked Together Their Own College Pricing Tools

MeritMore, created by Neeta Vallab, mother of three in New York

PRICE: Free.

PAIN POINT: Ms. Vallab’s household income is high enough that her children were not going to qualify for need-based aid. But the earnings aren’t high enough to comfortably pay full price for all of them, either, especially at private colleges.

“The colleges tell you, ‘Don’t worry, most people don’t pay the sticker price,’” she said. “But nobody tells you what price they actually pay.”

All colleges are required to offer so-called net price calculators on their websites. When they’re accurate — sometimes they are not, if colleges don’t use good ones or maintain them well — they can give families a rough sense of how much need-based aid they might get. Schools are not, however, required to estimate how much merit aid you might get.

So Ms. Vallab built a tool to do that. It begins with various averages that the colleges publish on a little-known government website and then uses an algorithm to evaluate a list of prospective schools — and suggest others that might discount more.

THERE OUGHTA BE A LAW: One problem with net price calculators is that you have to fill them out one by one, often with the same data. Ms. Vallab believes there should be a single universal one that would spit out estimates for any school.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/your-money/college-cost-data-tools.html