Can you afford a tertiary education?
Calculator helps determine price of colleges in US
WHEN his two sons were growing up, a US college professor named Phillip Levine found himself 10 years ago asking a question on the minds of parents perennially worried about the price of higher education: Would they qualify for financial aid?
Levine, a Wellesley College economist, was frustrated to learn there were no easy answers beyond the scary sticker prices and pledges from certain colleges that they would meet the needs of students they admit.
“How can you expect people to make educated decisions about the right thing to do when they have absolutely no idea what the cost is?” Levine said. “It’s crazy.”
So Levine set out to build a tool that would provide some quick and reliable answers.
Last week, Yale University and 15 other schools announced that they would use a version of his calculator, now known as MyinTuition, bringing the total involved in his non-profit initiative to 31, including Wellesley, which in 2013 became the first to use Levine’s calculator.
Levine is quick to point out that his calculators are meant to complement, not replace, the “net price calculators” that colleges have been required to post online since 2011. But the net price calculators are often cumbersome, and many people, facing a slew of complicated questions about tax returns, assets and home equity, fail to take advantage of them.
Levine’s tool aims to give families a fast and effective answer to the question of whether they could afford a given school at a time when the listed prices for private colleges can top $70 000 (about R854 000) a year.
It asks users a series of easy-to-follow questions and also asks whether any siblings are in college. Then, using the college’s aid policies, the calculator produces an instant estimate of what the student and family might expect to pay out of pocket and what might be provided as grants, loans and work-study. The whole exercise is meant to take about three minutes.
The calculator cautions consumers that a detailed analysis of family finances could produce a considerably different result. It points them to the net price calculator to get more information. Levine said financial circumstances can be especially tricky for students from divorced families.
Misperceptions about price matter hugely, Levine said. “This whole issue is about social mobility,” he said. “Here you have opportunities where kids are qualified to go to high-level institutions, and don’t because they don’t understand the price.”
Mark Dunn, associate director of admissions at Yale, said the university hoped the MyinTuition calculator would fill an information gap about college expenses and plans to promote its use prominently in coming weeks. – Washington Post