![]() ![]() No one is actually transferring funds to students to pay their tuition bills, but the aid does reduce a student’s bill from the published sticker price. ![]() The numbers combine both need-based and merit aid granted by colleges and universities. In addition to a published report of tables, additional data was released on the National Center for Education Statistics’s DataLab website, and that is where I retrieved the institutional aid data for this story. More than 80,000 undergraduates and 2,000 colleges and universities were surveyed. This institutional aid data comes from the 2019-20 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, which the Department of Education conducts every three to four years. Far less discounting occurs at two-year community colleges, where posted tuition prices are much lower. ![]() But the size of the average discount has grown from $2,750 to over $3,300 among students who got them. Tuition discounts help lure these students to attend.įewer students received tuition discounts at for-profit schools, down from 25% in 2015-16 to 21% of undergraduates in 2019-20. To offset the shortfall, public universities looked to out-of-state students, who pay higher tuition. Public universities have also been aggressively discounting since the 2008 recession, when states decreased public funding for higher education. “If another college is giving $35,000 per student, I’m going to have to go there too to compete.” “These are not-for-profit institutions, but like private businesses, they’re competing against each other on price,” Massa said. The less likely a student is to enroll in a college, the more discount the enrollment algorithm suggests to woo the student. Many other schools struggle to reach their enrollment goals. From a college’s perspective, collecting reduced tuition from an enrolled student is better than collecting nothing from an empty seat.įilling those seats is not a problem for the most selective institutions but those elite universities represent only a tiny portion of colleges. And a college can increase revenue when it discounts tuition because an enrolled student is still paying the remainder of a sticker price that keeps rising. “The percentage of students who are getting discounts, grants or scholarship aid from institutions has skyrocketed,” said Robert Massa, a retired college admissions and enrollment director who is now a research associate at the Center for Enrollment Research, Policy and Practice at the University of Southern California.Ĭolleges need to fill seats and maximize revenue. And the average discount grew to $5,200 from $4,900. At public four-year institutions, more than a third of all undergraduate students received institutional aid in 2019, up 3 percentage points from 30% in 2015. But the average tuition discount that each student received grew to $20,800 from $16,200 during this time period. White and Asian students were much more likely to receive this institutional aid than Black and Hispanic students, the data shows.Īt private, nonprofit colleges and universities, where discounting is most prevalent, a whopping 57% of undergraduates received institutional aid in 2019-20, unchanged from the previous financial aid survey data in 2015-16. At the same time, colleges are distributing these tuition discounts unequally. More students are getting even more money knocked off their college bills. Tuition discounts have been escalating in recent years, according to Department of Education data released in July 2023. That’s why college students on today’s campuses are paying different prices for their degrees, just like we pay different prices for our airplane seats. The discounts are tailored by commercial algorithms that use each prospective family’s circumstances to find the right number that will tempt a student to enroll. The college coupons are a lot larger than what you might get at Target – sometimes knocking off $30,000 or more from the published “sticker” price. Often masquerading as “merit aid” or “scholarships,” the discounts are aimed at persuading students to attend, much like online retailers dangle coupons to persuade you to purchase the items in your shopping cart. The bottom line on college tuition is that there is no bottom line.Īt most four-year institutions, admitted students are quoted all sorts of different prices. ![]()
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