Amid debates about how to help families see past high sticker prices, 22 institutions are adopting a resource to instantly estimate costs based just on household income.
This week, 22 selective, private colleges launched a new net cost estimator that has a key difference from the standard net price calculators required by federal law. The tool, developed by Phil Levine, an economist and college cost transparency advocate, uses just one data point—household income—to predict how much it will cost for a student to attend that college.
The estimate aligns a prospective student’s family income with the incomes of current students. Based on what those students pay, it then provides a range of possible tuition prices, as well as the tool’s “best estimate” of what the cost will actually be. It also takes into account whether the student has any siblings currently in college.
For example, at Washington University in St. Louis, which has been piloting the resource since late last year, a student whose family makes $130,000 annually and who has no siblings attending college would see that the highest annual cost they’d likely pay would be $33,000, the lowest would be $14,300, and the best estimate would be $23,600. The estimator notes that 90 percent of students with that family income will pay somewhere between $14,300 and $33,000 a year.