Net price versus sticker price

Two numbers, and only one of them is about you

Sticker price is the published total: tuition, fees, housing, food, books. It is the same number for everybody, which is what makes it useless for deciding anything.

Net price is what families in a given income range actually paid after grant and scholarship aid was subtracted. Grants only — loans are not aid in this sense, because you pay them back with interest.

The two are frequently tens of thousands of dollars apart, and the gap is widest at the colleges with the largest sticker prices. That is the whole trap: the schools that look least affordable on their own websites are often the ones that end up costing a low-income family least.

Compare the band you are in, never the sticker

A well-endowed private university can land below an in-state public for a family under $48,000, and land far above it for a family over $110,000. One college, two families, opposite answers. Ranking schools by sticker price gets both families the wrong list.

So pick your income band and read down that column. The real cost line puts all 800 colleges in one table with the bands side by side, and Explore colleges lets you filter the whole field by what a year costs at your income.

What the figure cannot tell you

It is an average across first-time, full-time undergraduates who received federal aid, in a cohort that has already graduated or moved on. It is a good guide to how a college behaves. It is not a quote.

Merit aid changes it. A sibling in college changes it. Home equity and self-employment income change it at the colleges that ask for more than the FAFSA. When a college matters enough to you, run its own net price calculator, which is built on that college’s own formula rather than a national average.

A handful of colleges show a figure at or near nothing in the lowest band. That is real: grant aid there covered the whole cost of attendance.