Do NOT pay full price for college - secret discounting goes on "behind closed doors"
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Anonymous
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Your Money
As tuition soars, so has ‘behind-the-scenes’ discounting, ‘The Price You Pay for College’ author says Key Points College price tags are daunting, but most families don’t pay the sticker cost. Hefty discounting “goes on behind the scenes” often in the form of merit aid, The New York Times columnist Ron Lieber said Friday at a summit in New York. Still, every school calculates aid differently, according to Robert Franek, editor-in-chief of The Princeton Review, “leaving families desperate for transparency and predictability.” The sticker price is shocking: The cost of attendance at some schools nears six figures a year, after factoring in tuition, fees, room and board, books, transportation and other expenses. But most people don’t pay that much, or even close. Over time, there has been a slow shift to a “high-tuition, high-aid” model, where colleges both raise tuition and increase grant aid, according to Emily Cook, an assistant professor of economics at Texas A&M University. Now, about two-thirds of all full-time students receive some sort of financial assistance, which can bring college costs significantly down. “The list price is not the actual price,” Lieber said at Friday’s event, which was co-sponsored by the National Endowment for Financial Education. “There’s a lot of money flowing around, a lot of discounts,” The New York Times columnist and author Ron Lieber said Friday at the 2025 Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing’s Personal Finance Summit in New York. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/13/college-costs-discounting.html |
Anonymous
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This is not new news. Like car shopping. No one pays sticker.
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Anonymous
| Half the kids in the Ivy League pay full price. |
Anonymous
+1, this talking point is complete bs. Yes a "majority" of students may get some form of aid, but that doesn't mean we ignore the 40%+ paying full COA. Plus, just because you got aid, it doesn't mean it is always substantial. Someone getting 20k off a year when COA is $95,000+/year is not a deal. |
Anonymous
Most kids don't go to ivy league schools. So the fact that half of those students pay full price doesn't change the fact that an overwhelming majority of college students don't. |
Anonymous
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It's always important to remind families that there is the potential for significant merit aid offered by schools second-tier and below (first tier only offer financial aid). Individual scholarships, however, are very hard to chase, and usually they're for small amounts of money.
We are not eligible for financial aid, but our oldest did get merit, which was nice. |
Anonymous
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Yes, but we would happily pay full pay premium for kid to attend dream school where they are in range but barely.
Some of us want to be full pay (-and donate more) if it means our kid is going to their top choice school. |
Anonymous
+1 You can look up the discount rate for colleges. That's the % of people who have some sort of merit aid. The report from the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators: https://www.nacubo.org/Press-Releases/2023/Tuition-Discount-Rates-at-Private-Colleges-and-Universities-Top-50-Percent Many of the less selective colleges have been using merit money to entice people to enroll for decades. I was in an honors program at a SLAC and we were all on some form of merit scholarship, some a few thousand, some full tuition. |
Anonymous
The high tuition-high aid model is a model for top schools. No one is paying 96k for the local christian liberal arts college. |
Anonymous
That's exactly the point of the article. Many schools have high list price, but then discounts it for almost everyone. |
Anonymous
| I read somewhere, maybe from Selingo, that only 11% are paying full price. |
Anonymous
Exactly, we are one of those. |
Anonymous
+++1 |
Anonymous
Suckers for anything below top Ivies or MIT. |
Anonymous
Everyone knows that. why is OP piling on more. |