Chapter 6
Seeing How Traditional Colleges Decide What to Charge You
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding colleges’ extensive personal financial “data collection”
Pricing based upon ability to pay and how much a school wants your child
Making sense of athletic scholarships
Many people don’t know that colleges and universities set vastly different prices for different students. In this chapter, I explain how the process works for colleges and universities to set the price that they will charge your son or daughter to attend their school.
A number of years ago when I worked as a personal financial counselor, I was contacted by a divorced mother whose son was entering his first year of college, which she was paying for 100 percent herself. She had a relatively low-paying job but had a couple hundred thousand dollars in her name in regular nonretirement accounts. She never applied for “financial aid” because she felt that with her modest home and financial assets, she would never qualify.
After reading some articles that I had written and meeting with me, she realized that her son should apply ...
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