This month, dozens of applicants from the Muhlenberg and Whitman Colleges received offers of admission. Perhaps they were a pleasant surprise to students who had slept through their first year.
But what shouldn’t come as a surprise to most is the price the schools charge them – or discounts that are available, even for wealthy families.
That’s because Muhlenberg and Whitman are at the forefront of a move toward transparency about the university’s price and the process of lowering it. Many others, such as Northeastern University, are stragglers on purpose. Others don’t seem to have paid much attention to the need for clarity beforehand.
That is a problem.
“If variable finance is put off to the end, it’s not transparent and it’s really frustrating,” said Adam Miller, Whitman’s interim vice president for admissions and financial aid. “And it can lead to really terrible results when families have excruciating conversations where a student has fallen in love with a university and it won’t be financially affordable.”
Schools have two primary ways to determine any price discount. First-time needs-based financial aid is a process in which the federal government and the schools themselves assess your income — and a portion of your assets — to determine what they think you should be able to afford, even if their expectations aren’t. to do. t matches yours. The second, earning aid, is much less predictable and describes everything from highly competitive scholarships to discounts a school offers everyone.
If you can’t get real clarity on either one ahead of time, you’re shopping and applying in the dark. And an unfortunate truth underscores the need for clearer explanations: Only a small number of schools are wealthy enough to accept any student they want and then give them all enough scholarships to make attending affordable.
The rest face difficult choices. Some schools admit any student they want without regard to their ability to pay — a process called blind admission — but without giving all of them enough discounts to make it affordable.
Others focus their aid budget on a smaller group and reject some otherwise worthy applicants because their need will be too great. That process is commonly known as need-aware. Some need-aware schools meet the full needs of everyone they accept, while many others do not.
Few colleges will explain this to you in plain English or explain their own process in detail. But Muhlenberg, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, stands out for a little-known, mandatory reading essay called “The Real Deal on Financial Aid” on his website. The school has decided that it is a virtue to simply tell it as it is.
“Money has become a means of enrolling the specific students an institution wants most,” explains the Muhlenberg essay. “This phenomenon is called ‘preferential packaging’.”
The essay points to an unfortunate consequence: “Some students who are closer to the lower end of the admitted student group have a ‘gap’, meaning they have a financial aid package, but it does not meet their full need.”
That means Muhlenberg (and a host of other institutions like it) will almost certainly disappoint some of his accepted students with priceless quotes. However, given the refreshing, heartfelt talk in the essay, it shouldn’t surprise them that such an outcome is possible.
As useful as Muhlenberg’s words are in describing how colleges quote prices, other schools just go ahead and tell applicants how their particular grades and scores can affect their discounts.
At the University of Alabama, out-of-state freshmen have nine (nine!) scholarship levels of qualification, depending on test scores and grade average. The University of South Carolina offers average test-and-grade levels for the many different amounts of merit help, and Wabash College has a clear guide as well.
(All colleges should offer a net pricing calculator that allows you to enter your financial data and estimate what the school may charge you, but the calculators should only consider help based on needs. Oberlin College & Conservatory is an exception to the more selective schools that include help for merit in the calculator.)
Whitman, in Walla Walla, Washington, goes even further to help prospective students weigh the costs. The Early Financial Aid Guarantee invites potential applicants to request a quote by submitting academic information for merit-based aid and financial data for need-based aid. Then it comes back with a number.
Whitman may give you a bigger discount than what it promises up front – once it reviews your entire application file more thoroughly – but no smaller. The College of Wooster, in Ohio, also offers a personal estimate and a comparable guarantee, as long as people provide accurate information.
For Whitman, the lack of upfront clarity on pricing was a fundamental inefficiencies of the market that could solve it. “Some colleges could benefit from a lack of financial transparency,” said Mr. Miller, Whitman’s interim vice president.
Indeed, far too many schools are keeping things opaque, and they have even doubled down on withholding useful information.
In a column on early decision applicants in January, I cited Northeastern as an example of a school that made it difficult for many students to figure out what the school might be asking of them if they made an offer of admission that was theoretically (but not actually) binding. .
Late last year, Northeastern’s site offered confusing language: “Students who are in the top 10-15% of our candidate pool are eligible for competitive earnings.”
I asked the school about this useless word salad and eventually Northeastern changed it. But it made a mistake – and then deleted the grade altogether. By the way, this is the correct one: in the 2020-21 intake class, 59 percent of the people who had no financial need received deserving help anyway.
Why don’t you just say that? “The university places a lot more emphasis on help that is needed these days,” Michael Armini, a university spokesperson, said in an email. “That’s what I want the focus of our messages to be.”
So how does Northeastern feel about an applicant’s need when deciding whether to let them in? Are the recordings need-blind or need-aware?
Northeastern caters to the entire need of students from the United States who manage to get in, a fact it rightly boasts on its site. But when I asked Mr Armini whether the ability to pay could play a role in accepting applicants, he refused to tell me.
So I did what any parent would do and contacted the admissions and financial aid agencies myself – and got conflicting answers at first. This exacerbates Northeastern’s clarity problem: If it wants to keep essential, basic information off its website, whoever answers their phones must be able to find the right answers to the resulting questions.
It wasn’t until I got an email back from a senior member of the admissions office that I knew for sure: Northeastern is aware of the need. (Mr. Armini later told me that they did the answer through him.)
“Different schools will choose to provide different levels of transparency regarding financial aid,” Mr Armini said in an email. “The overwhelming demand for an education in the Northeast continues as we are the global leader in experiential learning, a model that leads to superior outcomes for our students.”
But what if you value not being left in the dark?
Oberlin gives a humane explanation on his website about his ‘need sensitive’ policy. Tufts puts it all clearly in a blog post. Wesleyan does not mention on his webpage “Affording Wesleyan” that he is aware of his need, but the president wrote about it elsewhere – in 2013.
Improving your posts is quite easy. After I searched for the need-conscious explanation from American University and couldn’t find one, a spokeswoman told me that the “website is being updated to include that information.”
That’s a reminder that colleges have a choice here — even if some pick the wrong one. Take it from the person who first informed me that Northeastern had given me bad information: Debbie Schwartz, a satisfied customer who is a parent of one of his students.
“Just be more transparent,” said Ms. Schwartz, who leads the Facebook group Paying for College 101. “It instills confidence and confidence.”
If you’ve been dealing with a lack of transparency this admission season, it’s not too late to start asking for more money. I explained how in a 2014 column and updated the advice in the early months of the pandemic in 2020. Be polite and explain any change in circumstances – financial, negative, or academically, positively.
And if you’re afraid of having to do this dance in the future, go ahead and ask for help, up front, wherever you’re applying. Fill out the net pricing calculators and, if necessary, contact schools you are considering and request a merit pre-read. Call Whitman or Wooster by name, just in case the person you’re speaking to doesn’t believe other schools could possibly do something like this.
“It never hurts to ask,” said Megan Ryan, vice president of enrollment management at Muhlenberg, whose office will also do a reading of the award upon request. “The worst-case scenario is you’re right back where you started.”
