Two Colleges, Same Price Tag, $82,000 Apart

Vanderbilt's total cost of attendance last year was $94,142.

NYU's was $92,062.

Two thousand dollars apart. Same ballpark, same tier, both schools your kiddo would be thrilled to get into. If you were building a list off the numbers on the websites, you'd treat them as the same purchase.

Now here's what a family earning between $75,000 and $110,000 actually paid.

At Vanderbilt: $12,153 a year.

At NYU: $32,766 a year.

Twenty thousand six hundred dollars a year apart. $82,452 over four years — for the same kid, the same family, the same income, at two schools whose price tags were $2,080 apart.

That's not a rumor and it's not my estimate. It's federal data. Both schools report it to the Department of Education, and you can pull it up yourself on College Navigator in about ninety seconds. I'll show you how at the end.

Gosh, when I first started running these numbers side by side, I was angry about it for a solid week.

This is not a story about good schools and bad schools

Let me get out in front of something, because it's the wrong lesson and it's the easy one to take.

NYU is not ripping anybody off. Vanderbilt is not a charity.

They're two businesses running two different models. Vanderbilt has an enormous endowment and has made a deliberate decision to spend it bringing in students whose families can't write a six-figure check. NYU is in Manhattan, has a much thinner cushion per student, and prices accordingly.

Look at what each one charges a family earning over $110,000: Vanderbilt, $45,145. NYU, $66,876. NYU isn't hiding who it's built for. It's right there in the data.

So the question is never "is this a generous school?" Generous isn't a thing a college is. It's a relationship between one specific college and one specific family. A school can be extraordinary to a family at $80,000 of income and brutal to a family at $140,000. Same school, same year, same brochure.

Which means the number on the website — the one that makes your stomach drop — tells you almost nothing about what that school will charge you.

Why this is happening right now, and why it's about to matter more

Here's the part almost nobody explains to parents, and it's the engine underneath everything else in this post.

Colleges are discounting harder than they ever have.

In the most recent national study, private nonprofit colleges discounted their published tuition by an average of 57.1% for first-time undergraduates. Fifty-seven cents on the dollar. That's the highest it's been in at least a decade. About 90% of first-time undergraduates at those schools got some institutional grant money.

Ninety percent. That "$78,000 a year" school is charging almost nobody $78,000 a year.

And here's the tell that this isn't generosity in the warm-and-fuzzy sense: net tuition revenue at those same schools fell 1.9% after inflation. They're discounting more and collecting less per student.

Why would they do that?

Because the customers are running out. The number of American high school graduates peaked in 2025 — last year — and declines about 13% from here through 2041. Same number of seats. Fewer eighteen-year-olds. At least sixteen nonprofit colleges announced closures in 2025 alone.

Boy, that's a rough business to be in. But if you're a parent, understand what it means: colleges are bidding for your kiddo. Not every college, and not for every kiddo. But the bidding is real, it's getting more aggressive, and families who don't know it's happening never show up to the auction.

Three ways a school lands inside your number

I get this question more than any other, usually about ten minutes into a first conversation.

"How can I plan for college if I don't know where my kiddo is going to go?"

Fair question. And the answer is that you don't have to plan for all the possibilities. You never did.

The "cost of college" you're planning for isn't the cost of every college. It's the cost of colleges in a range your family can actually pay. Same as a house. Same as a car. Nobody tours every home in the county — you decide what you can carry, and then you go look at what's in that range.

And there's a lot in that range. More than most parents expect.

So the useful question isn't where your kiddo is going to end up. It's how a school gets into your range in the first place.

Three ways. Most families build a list made entirely of one kind.

Route one: the school meets your need generously.

This is Vanderbilt. Big endowment, deliberate policy, and a family in the donut hole gets a real number. These schools exist and there aren't many of them. If your Student Aid Index is low enough to generate need at a school's price, this route is open to you.

If you don't know what your SAI is yet, that's the piece to go get — I wrote the whole thing up last week and I won't repeat it here.

Route two: the school discounts you on merit.

Merit money has nothing to do with your income. It has to do with whether your kiddo is the kind of student a particular school is trying to attract this year. And if your SAI came back high — if need-based aid isn't your lane — this is your lane. For most of the families I work with, this is where the money actually is.

But merit isn't one thing, and this is where parents get burned. Look at the shape of it across a few schools, from their own Common Data Set filings:

(Across 357 colleges that report this data for 2024-25. It skews toward selective schools, so treat it as a shape, not a national average.)

Read Duke and Case Western next to each other. Both are "schools that give merit aid." Duke hands enormous awards to almost nobody — one percent. Case Western gives about $30,000 to more than a third of its freshman class.

If your kiddo is a strong-but-not-legendary student, one of those schools is a lottery ticket and the other is a plan. A parent who doesn't know the difference spends an application fee finding out.

Route three — and this is the one nobody talks about: the sticker is simply low.

Some schools don't discount you at all. They just don't cost that much to begin with.

That sounds obvious written down. In practice, families skip right past it, because a low sticker price reads as "lesser school" and nobody wants to say that out loud at a dinner party.

I'm going to spend the rest of this post on that third route, because I watched it save a family about $72,000 last year — and because it's the one your list is most likely to be missing.

A list that was wrong twice

Last year I started working with a family in Texas.

Their older daughter had graduated and was living in New York. The parents had stretched hard to send her to NYU, and they were honest with me about it in the first conversation: they were still making parent loan payments and student loan payments on that degree. They didn't want to do it again.

Now the younger daughter was applying. She wanted three things, and she was clear about all three: a business school in the top 10%, a genuinely diverse student body, and to be in or near New York City.

The list they showed me: Georgetown. University of Chicago. Columbia. NYU.

Roughly $95,000 a year, each.

I ran their numbers. Their Student Aid Index came back at $109,200 — higher than the cost of attendance at every school on that list. In plain terms: zero need-based aid at all four. Not a little. None. The formula said they could pay more than those schools cost, so those schools would expect them to.

Their College Number — the most they could actually pay per year without wrecking their retirement — was $60,000.

So the list was $35,000 a year past what they could pay, with no aid coming.

That's the part I usually catch. Here's the part I want you to sit with.

She was a very good student. 3.9 unweighted. 4.3 weighted. 1330 on the SAT.

That is a wonderful record. It's the kind of record that makes a parent reasonably confident. And here is where a 1330 sits at the four schools on that list:

(Middle-50% SAT ranges for enrolled students, from each school's Common Data Set — the same filings College Navigator republishes, so you can check any of these yourself. Baruch's range carries one caveat: only about 12% of its enrolled students submitted a score at all, so read it as a signal rather than a bar.)

Below the bottom quarter at all four of the first ones. Comfortably inside the range at both of the ones she added.

Same kid. Same score. The results tracked her position in each pool almost perfectly.

That list was wrong twice. It was unaffordable, and it was unattainable, and the family had no idea about either one.

I pushed. I told them stories, I showed them data, and — I'll be honest — I don't win this argument most of the time. Senior-year lists are usually set. What made this family listen wasn't my charts. It was that they'd already lived the consequence once with their older daughter and were still writing checks for it.

She added two schools. Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. And Virginia Tech.

The results: waitlisted at Chicago and Georgetown. Denied at NYU and Columbia. Admitted at Baruch and Virginia Tech.

Read that again. If she hadn't widened that list, this family reaches April of senior year with two waitlists, two denials, and a daughter with nowhere to go.

What the two real offers looked like

Both schools sent an award letter. Here they are, side by side:

$17,974 a year apart. $71,896 over four years.

Baruch came in $12,006 under their College Number. Virginia Tech came in $5,968 over it.

And look at what Baruch gave her. Nothing. Zero grants, zero scholarships, not a dollar of discount. Baruch wasn't generous to this family. Baruch was just less expensive.

And look at why Virginia Tech couldn't get there. Virginia Tech awards non-need merit to about 15.7% of its students, averaging $3,169 — figures the school reports itself, in the same Common Data Set filing almost every college publishes. Her $4,000 was not a fluke and it was not a snub — it was almost exactly what that school gives, to the small share of students it gives it to. Nothing was going to close an $18,000 gap with a merit award at a school whose merit budget looks like that.

That is route two failing, in one line, for a completely knowable reason.

She's a freshman there now. Top-10% business school. Living in Manhattan, which is what she actually wanted. And on the diversity she cared about, Baruch's student body is 18% white against Virginia Tech's 57% — the cheaper school was also the better match for the thing she'd named as non-negotiable.

She didn't settle. She got all three things she asked for, for less than her parents had budgeted.

The line item that will surprise you

Pull apart that Baruch letter for a second, because there's something in it most families have never looked at.

• Out-of-state tuition: $14,880
• Activity and tech fee: $532
• Housing: $20,124
• Meals: $4,550
• Books, transportation, personal expenses: $7,908

Housing costs more than tuition. By $5,244.

She's paying out-of-state rates at a public college in New York City, and the classroom is the cheap part. And before you assume she should move off campus — in Manhattan, that's usually more expensive, not less. The dorm was the bargain.

I'm not telling you this to pick on Baruch. I'm telling you because "tuition" and "cost of attendance" are two different words, most families use them interchangeably, and the difference between them is where your actual budget lives. If you've been comparing schools on tuition, you've been comparing about a third of the bill.

It also points at a lever most families never consider at all: the same degree at the same school gets dramatically cheaper the moment you change the geography around it.

Why this matters more this year than last year

One more thing changed, and it's recent enough that a lot of families haven't caught up to it.

As of July 1, Parent PLUS borrowing is capped. $20,000 a year per student. $65,000 total. It used to be that a parent could borrow all the way up to the cost of attendance.

At a $90,000-a-year school, $20,000 covers 22% of one year.

For a long time, the gap between what a school charged and what a family could pay had an escape hatch, and the escape hatch was borrowing. That hatch is mostly closed now. Which means the question of which schools will be generous to a family like yours stopped being an optimization and started being the whole game.

What to actually do about this

Here's the honest version, including the parts where you don't need me.

Start with the net price calculator on each school's website — but treat the output as a rough floor, not a number to plan against. The College Board acknowledged in 2024 that "some institutions still rely on calculators that provide outdated, prior year averages." There's a bill in the Senate right now, the Net Price Calculator Improvement Act, aimed squarely at this. When Congress is legislating about a tool, that tells you something about the tool.

Then go to College Navigator, which is free, federal, and better than most of what's sold. Search a school, open the "Net Price" section, and find the table that breaks average net price down by family income band. That's the table I used at the top of this post. It's the closest thing to a straight answer about what a school charges families shaped like yours, and almost no one looks at it.

Two honest caveats so you read it correctly: those figures cover students who received federal aid, and the income-band data runs a year or two behind the cost figures. It's a strong signal, not a quote.

If you want to go past what's free, there's paid software built for exactly this. The category to look for is a net cost modeling tool — you enter your financial picture and your kiddo's academic profile once, and it projects a year-one number across a few hundred schools at a time, with merit money modeled in alongside need. That last part is what the free calculators mostly can't do. The good ones run about five dollars a month for a family, which is less than the application fee at one school.

I use one of these in my own practice, and I'd rather you go compare them yourself than take a brand name from me. Search "college net price modeling software" and you'll find the handful that exist inside of ten minutes.

And if the two free tools above get you what you need, they get you what you need. Plenty of families never go past College Navigator.

And run the second comparison, the one that has nothing to do with money. Look up the middle 50% test range and GPA profile for every school on your kiddo's list. Ask where your kid actually sits in that pool. Below the 25th percentile isn't a verdict — kids get in from there every year — but it should tell you what kind of list you're holding, and whether it needs more schools where your kiddo is near the top.

Two comparisons. Both free. Both available before you spend a dollar on an application:

1. What the school charges families like mine, against my College Number.
2. Where my kiddo sits in that school's pool, against the students they're admitting.

The Texas family's original list was wrong on both at once. A list that fails both isn't a list. It's a wish with four names on it.

Plenty of families do this work themselves, and do it well. If you've got a spreadsheet and a couple of free Saturdays, you don't need me for this part.

The part I most want you to hear

The reason that family got a good ending wasn't the strategy. It wasn't me.

It was that there was still time to change the list.

A junior-year list can be argued with. A senior-year list is a set of hopes with a kid attached to them, and by then the honest work left is decoding award letters and writing appeals — real work, much smaller ceiling.

If your kiddo is a junior right now, this is the pliable moment. Use it.

Control the controllables. This is one of them.

Don't walk this path alone.

— Michael