How College Pricing Is Like Holiday Retail Sales

Marian Wang:

Higher education may seem like a different world, but universities in many ways have been working from the same playbook.
Savvier college-bound consumers know that the so-called “sticker price” of tuition and fees at a given college or university isn’t what many – or even most – students pay.
Take American University, where 74 percent of full-time freshmen got a grant or scholarship – essentially, a discount off the list price – for the 2011-2012 school year. Or Drexel University, where that figure was 98 percent.
At nearly 200 schools, 100 percent of full-time freshmen got a scholarship, as DePaul University’s Jon Boeckenstedt points out.