Only when you apply and are admitted will you know exactly how much it will cost to study. Colleges provide tools to help you guess what type of financial aid they offer, if any, but the numbers are often off by many thousands of dollars.
The fact that this actual price is a mystery to most people at most schools is a shame. It also offers an opportunity.
A few weeks ago, Brandeis University quietly launched a new tool for college buyers called Faye. It asks questions like a human, digests school transcripts and tax returns, and then tells you “what your Brandeis costs will be” when you get in, including need-based and merit-based aid.
“Will” suggests certainty. And certainty is definitely not what colleges offer with the net price calculators that federal law requires them to provide to applicants. These calculators are the tools that result in sticker shock when an entry offer arrives with an actual price far higher than the calculators’ estimates.
I don’t know of any school that does what Brandeis is trying to do. It may not work, and it may backfire in a number of ways. But the fact that the school is even trying is something of a victory for anyone who’s ever been annoyed by how complex college pricing is and how pointless it is to figure it out.
The person who signed Faye (as in FA or financial aid) is Arthur Levine, the president of Brandeis. The son of a mailman from the South Bronx, he was only able to visit Brandeis himself in the late 1960s thanks to the help of a wealthy relative.
Dr. Levine didn’t make up Faye. He is long-time friends with John Katzman, whose name will be familiar to Gen-Xers who have taken his Princeton Review SAT courses. Mr. Katzman’s punk-rock approach to test prep over the years, which included attempting to trade his archrival’s Internet address for a case of beer, made him a folk hero to students and a nuisance to those in power.
I first met Mr. Katzman in the 1990s when Random House, under its Princeton Review imprint, republished an out-of-print book about gap years that I had co-written. But we hadn’t spoken in about 25 years until he emailed us about Brandeis. He is no longer affiliated with Princeton Review and founded a higher education company called Noodle in 2013.
He thought about the idea of upfront pricing for a while before bringing it to Dr. Levine tried. But it has been slow to catch on because real-world pricing, pre-application, is simply not common in the residential undergraduate education industry.
To receive a binding award under the current system, you will typically need to apply and get in. Then you may be able to get a better offer if the school can process your appeal in a timely manner. This year, Northeastern was unable to take place for some students.
And then more! Maybe another university will surprise you with an even better offer – even after the decision deadline has expired on May 1st.
To call it a goat rodeo is to engage in a kind of goatishness.
The Brandeis enrollment team was well aware of this mess. But its members were unsure there was an overarching solution given regulatory and other constraints, and greeted Mr. Katzman with raised eyebrows.
“We thought he was crazy,” said Sherri Avery, associate vice president for student financial services at Brandeis.
“If it were possible, someone would have done it, right?” said her boss, Jennifer Walker, vice president of enrollment management.
“And we wanted to do it,” Ms. Avery added.
Mr. Katzman’s premise was simple. Most need and benefit calculations are formulaic and algorithmic, even if they differ at least a little from each other. The ever-evolving technology should be able to handle it.
Faye is easy to use and the price quotes it produced in my testing were easy to understand. What concerned me was the fact that the word “guarantee” didn’t appear anywhere near the dollar figure. A recent test triggered an email that was supposed to confirm Faye’s “will pay” price, but which described the number as a “prediction.”
During my first meeting with the Noodle team, the G-word was mentioned repeatedly. Since then, however, the Brandeis and Noodle wordsmiths fought fiercely before settling on the “will pay” language.
Why no guarantee? Blame the lawyers who demanded asterisks the team found repugnant.
In fact, there will be situations—estranged parents not filing taxes, small business owners in various situations—that require human intervention. An “offer to pay” offer could still come, but later from people and not immediately from Faye.
Then there’s Faye’s garbage-in, garbage-out rule: If you make a mistake, it’s your fault. If you lie, Brandeis will not respect the quote. And if the software makes an error, Brandeis reserves the right to adjust the price of your offer.
There’s more. If your child is a sophomore or younger, the “will” does not apply as your finances may change and Brandeis’ list price will certainly change.
Brandeis also could change its merit aid formula if the school becomes more popular. This year, 40 percent more applications were received, potentially giving the school enough market power to offer fewer discounts on merit aid. (Performance aid for current students does not change from year to year as long as they maintain good grades and graduate within eight semesters.)
Finally, if your household income or assets change drastically while you are in school, your net income may also change when you receive need-based financial aid.
So much throat clearing. So many maybes. All these asterisks make the whole endeavor seem like an asterisk, and it is.
If you’re a school, any big change in the way you sell can impact who will enroll and what they can and will pay. Then when the net tuition per student goes down, you have a huge problem. Competitors will scrutinize Brandeis’ tool, and some of them may undercut prices.
And if enough people use the tool but don’t get meaningful offers, the university loses them before they even apply. The number of applications could fall just as quickly as they rose.
“It’s hard,” Mr. Katzman said. “But it’s just as hard as every airline, every hotel and everyone in the real world. I have to set a price and tell people what it costs.”
This is the other reason there is no “guarantee”. College awards nerds like me believe the word is a solution to the problem of higher education. But in Faye’s tests, the word elicited more questions than excitement from parents and students, and it risked sounding like a trick.
So if you’re a college buyer, test Faye mercilessly. If your finances seem broken, try to discourage Brandeis with your complex situation.
And save the price offer that pays for itself. When you apply and get in at Brandeis, send me a message and let me know if the price has changed.
But first, ask this when talking to other colleges: Why don’t you tell me what you’re going to charge before you apply? Hell, do it in the group information session in front of 100 other people. Maybe the school will surprise you.
Some institutions will make this happen at some point, even if it isn’t Brandeis. And hats off to Cornell College, Whitman College and the College of Wooster for having their own transparency initiatives.
Ms. Avery and Ms. Walker no longer think Mr. Katzman is crazy. And at lunch in March they talked about the danger that their price offers could scare people away.