I Just Want to Figure Out How Much College Costs ...

You want your kid to go to college.  Attending college requires paying the college for services.  How are you supposed to figure out how much money that requires?  Who can you believe?

Seems like when you want a simple answer to a complicated question, you have to accept that the answer will not be entirely simple.  But each part is not too complicated, so I’ll spend a few posts answering this question.

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What could be simpler than determining if you can afford to pay for four years of college?  ​

Maybe learning to ride a bike, solve a Rubik's Cube, or launching a satellite?

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Many players can be involved with paying for college (in addition to mom and dad and the student): the federal government, the state government, the college, and various scholarship providers (really nice people and organizations who are looking for students to help out through college).
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Now, whenever governments are involved, legislation and governmental agencies get involved.  And things that cost a lot of money tend to attract the attention of regulators looking to protect consumers from predatory practices.  So in this posting, I focus on federal legislation regarding Higher Education in a section of law entitled “Transparency in college tuition fees for consumers.”  (CFR title 20:Education, § 28: Higher Education Resources and Student Assistance-Sec 1015a.

It is important for you to be able to make informed decisions about college.  After the questions of how well the college fits your student academically and culturally, the next important question is how you will pay for college.  The “Transparency in college tuition fees for consumers” law helps by requiring every college to provide the following information for inclusion on the government’s College Navigator website:
1. The institutional mission statement.
2. Academic information about students accepted by the institution.
3. Student demographics, including where students come from; diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, and disability.
4. Rates of successful degree completion by incoming freshmen; faculty and academic statistics.
5. Cost of attendance; average net price by income brackets after deducting average grant and loan awards.
6. Campus safety reports.
7. Link to the institutional website where students can additionally find information about student activities, disabilities services, placement services, transfer credit policies, and alternate tuition payment plans if available.
8. Link to reports if the institution has unusually large increases in tuition and fee or in the total cost of attendance.

Why does all this matter?  It matters because you need to know what information you can use to help guide your college search and decision=making.  It helps because college is incredibly expensive, and most consumers don't know that much about what goes into running a college and what makes a college the right one for them.  How to understand the information will be the subjects of future posts.

But back to what will college cost.  Most students don't pay the college "sticker price," by accessing grants and loans offered by the federal and state governments, as well as from private parties.  Accessing federal grants and requires filing a FAFSA.  What’s a FAFSA and how does it work?  That’s the subject of my next post.