Your child has done his part. Now it’s time to do yours.
He has worked hard to get where he is today. Don’t let him down.
The first thing to know: the price on a college’s website isn’t necessarily your Net price.
- One school that says it costs $103,000 could wind up costing your family $62,000.
- Or the school you’re counting on to be generous turns out to be the stingiest one on her list. And you don’t find out until the award letter arrives, after she’s already fallen in love with it.
The Problem
Figuring that out means hunting down each college’s Net Price Calculator. They’re buried deep on the financial aid pages of their websites, and ask different questions from each other. One wants your income. The next wants your home equity, your savings and the value of your business.
17 colleges on his list? That’s 17 calculators. 17 sets of questions. Multiple late nights at the kitchen table with your tax returns, bank statements and investment accounts spread all over, typing the same numbers in over and over again.
And when you’re finally done, the answers are scattered across 17 browser tabs, in 17 different formats. You still can’t line them up side by side and see which school is actually going to cost you the most.
