More Competition For College Admissions Means Room To Haggle On Tuition
A college fair. Photo by COD Newsroom, Flickr, Creative Commons
You may not realize this, but when you get that financial aid letter from a college, nothing is set in stone.
“There’s more haggling going on here in this industry,” says Nick Ducoff, who adds that the overwhelming majority of colleges spend a fortune on recruiting students.
“Ultimately, they’re trying to hit their enrollment goals, and so if they end up being off by some amount and they want that student to matriculate, they’re often willing to engage with that student and their family to kind of close the gap,” Ducoff says.
Ducoff co-founded Edmit, a Boston startup that tells students and parents how big a discount a particular college might be willing to offer. Edmit appears to have no competitors.
Mandy Fisher’s daughter is starting college this fall. She says for $99, the Edmit app and the company’s advice helped her — a schoolteacher and single parent — write letters appealing three colleges’ initial offers of financial aid.
“One of the schools, the exact amount we asked for, they gave me,” Fisher says. “It was almost $10,000 a year. And another school came back with an extra $4,500 a year. And the other school: zero.”
Fisher’s daughter chose the school that gave her the most financial aid: Ithaca College. Fisher says Ithaca is now charging her $20,000 a year, a third of the sticker price.
Ducoff estimates that his model enables customers to obtain, on average, an additional $5,000 in financial aid after a college makes its initial offer.