THROWBACK: COLLEGE PRICE TRANSPARENCY

Let's talk about the problem.

Can you share from your perspective, what is this problem? What does it look like? I think probably more for parents listening, maybe they may not have any idea of what the problem is if they've not ventured into this arena yet.

Yeah, there's probably some sort of stages of grief that parents go through, starting with denial.

But the headlines all talk about the high price of college and the college prices going up astronomically and everything.

And if you just look at the sticker price averages, yeah, it looks crazy.

But underneath that, what's happened over the past several decades is colleges have just been giving out more and more aid, mostly because family incomes haven't gone anywhere.

And as a function of that, the actual prices that people pay are on average much lower than the sticker prices.

The average discount now is about 50%.

But what that means for a family, for people on the ground is, It used to be that you could see a sticker price and you know your actual price was gonna be pretty close to that and so you could make some rational decisions about schools you could afford and schools you couldn't.

Well, the sticker prices went over the moon and now the actual price that a family can pay is somewhere essentially between Earth and the moon.

And you don't know what you don't know long until long after you've made decisions about what schools to apply to.

And it's a goofy system that anybody coming to from having bought a car or bought a house or gone through any other purchase where they, they know what price is and they can use that as a way to filter.

It's a crazy system to then say, well, you're supposed to eliminate most of your choices without knowing what your actual price is going to be.

by the decision to which schools to apply to.

This is where this whole process drives families crazy.

And we just want to know, just tell me what my price is going to be because I don't have the money to apply to every college out there.

Yeah, it certainly either prevents families or students from looking at schools that might be a fit that they aren't aware of.

Right.

So they dismiss schools categorically not knowing or unfortunately.

Right.

The unfortunate result is they include schools not realizing that they're going to have to shuffle that school off the list.

And that can be so devastating, you know, for kids, for families.

Right.

The emotional part of this piece is you can't understate it.

Right.