How to get a massive discount on college

Jeff Kaufman:

Have you been accepted to a top college, one that promises to meet 100% of demonstrated financial need? (see list)? If you’re planning on anything near the $60k/year sticker price you are dramatically overpaying. What if I told you that you could attend one of these top schools for free?

They all figure your financial aid the same way. First they collect information about your income and assets using the FAFSA form, then they give you aid (effectively a discount) to make up the gap between what they charge and what they think you can afford. This is absolutely wonderful price discrimination: every industry would love to look deeply into your finances to figure out exactly what you’d be able to pay and charge you that, but only with colleges do we let them.

As a high school senior, you probably don’t have much in terms of income or assets. So why doesn’t the college see you can only pay very little, and give you financial aid for most of the cost of college? Parents. The FAFSA doesn’t just ask about your finances, it also asks about theirs too.

But what if there were a simple way to exclude your parents’ finances from consideration by the college? Where you’d be granted aid based only on your own income and assets? What’s the catch?