To boost enrollment and meet workforce needs, many states are offering free community college programs. It’s a well-intentioned (and bipartisan) idea to help people get the credentials they need, and states build their supply of college-educated workers.

But does free really mean free? Do these programs effectively bring students back to college? And does saying something’s free diminish its value?

Research shows that free college has had some effect, but not as much as you might think.

It doesn’t mean that students still don’t have to pay for food, rent, books, supplies, transportation and other living costs, which at community colleges often cost more than taking classes. That can stop them from taking states up on the offer. And private colleges and universities vying for the same students quietly oppose having to compete with free.

We’ll tell you what you need to know about free college. You’ll also find a searchable database of free college programs at the end of this transcript.

“College Uncovered” is made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Listen to the whole series

Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about this topic, and for links to more information.

Kirk: Can we get a Guinness and a pint of Jack’s Abbey?

Bartender: You got it.

Kirk: Thanks.

Jon. What are we doing? I thought we were podcasting.

Kirk: We are, Jon, but we’re also grabbing a pint at a local bar — cheers! — and getting some free snacks.

Jon: I like free. Hey — wouldn’t it be great if college was free?

Jack Freer: Yeah, not everyone is born with the same economic opportunities.

Shane Garrity: Yeah, college is a time where you can make so many friends, so many connections that can carry you forward into your personal and professional life.

Lila Cardillo: I think making college, like, ridiculously expensive, just, you know, doesn’t qualify a lot of people for entering certain professions. And just so it makes the wealth divide greater.

Kirk: That’s Jack Freer, Shane Garrity, and Lila Cardillo.

I mean, politically speaking, Jon, when it comes to college, perhaps nothing is more popular than free. And, again, that’s politically speaking.

Jon: Yeah. Of course, political talk is also free, or at least cheap. And if you stand in front of a group of Americans at, say, a bar like this one and say, ‘Hey, maybe everybody doesn’t need a college degree,’ most of the bar will not their heads and probably agree with you.

Kirk: But then if you say, ‘Yo, we all have to agree that young people need more than a high school degree to get a good job’ — nowadays, everybody at the bar will also not their head in agreement.

Jon: That’s why a lot of states are ending up in the middle. They’re making community college free.

Kirk: So where do I sign up? I love free stuff — like these bar snacks. But is free college really free? You might be surprised to hear the answer.

Kirk: This is College Uncovered, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work.

And we should note here, Jon, that our little podcast is already free, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts.

Jon: Yeah, it is, but it’s also priceless, Kirk. I’m Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report …

Kirk: … and I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH. Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate. So GBH …

Jon: … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you.

Okay, so the number of people in the U.S. with some college credit, but no degree or certificate to show for it — that number keeps growing. It’s now north of 40 million, the highest that it’s ever been. And since the pandemic, hundreds of thousands more students have dropped out, most of them low income or the first in their families to go to college. That’s the idea behind free community college. It’s a chance to woo those students back.

Kirk: Right. More states are offering free community college. Two thirds of states now have some form of free, from Michigan to New Mexico, Rhode Island to Oregon. The details differ from state to state, but free college has widespread support.

Community colleges like it because they’re facing an enrollment plunge. Businesses like it to meet their need for skilled workers. And it’s just plain good for students, who see their lifetime earnings rise. Or that’s the thinking. But it’s not quite so simple.

So do these new programs help students graduate on time and with less debt? You might be surprised to learn that free college isn’t as effective at helping students finish college as you’d think.

Today on the show: ‘The Real Cost of Free.’

I went over to Bunker Hill Community College here in Boston to meet Magno Garcia. Since he graduated from high school, Garcia has enrolled in Bunker Hill three times off and on, commuting from his home in nearby Chelsea. Back then, Garcia worked long hours in retail and as an air-conditioner technician so he could avoid student loan debt. He wanted a degree in accounting so he could move up to management at the HVAC company. But the first two times he enrolled, he ran out of cash, time and energy.

Magno Garcia: I wasn’t really motivated, so it was, like, the worst idea, because I paid for everything out of pocket.

Kirk: What do you think you needed at the time?

Magno Garcia: Guidance. I never felt like I had someone that was, like, ‘Hey, I’m here to help.’

Kirk: Overwhelmed, Garcia dropped out twice to put food on the table and pay rent. He kept working retail. He was also devoting time to a personal passion: producing his own music videos on YouTube. Now, at 34 years old, Garcia is back at Bunker Hill. And, Jon, guess what drew him back to college?

Jon: Let me guess. Was it because it was free?

Kirk: Indeed it was. Massachusetts recently began offering free community college for anyone over the age of 25 without a degree.

Magno Garcia: I’m taking advantage of that.

Kirk: Massachusetts education officials say returning students like Garcia are responsible for the first public college enrollment increase in nine years. Enrollment in public four-year colleges slowed, but community college enrollment in Massachusetts rose by 8 percent last year. All 15 community college campuses, including Bunker Hill, saw a spike. But that’s not necessarily the full story.

Davis Jenkins: It’s good news in that there’s been some stabilization, but, overall, you know, enrollment’s down.

Jon: Davis Jenkins studies community colleges at Columbia University. Despite the recent uptick, Jenkins points out that community college enrollment in Massachusetts is actually down nearly 40 percent since 2014. It’s also down nationwide. The number of community college students across the country dropped nearly 30 percent over the last 10 years.

Davis Jenkins: Community college enrollment was hit hardest during Covid, and it had been dropping for a decade before that.

Jon: To get more students back in classrooms, some political leaders want to expand free community college to all state residents, regardless of age.

But free doesn’t always work out for students. Because, while, yes, removing financial barriers is a good thing, many still can’t afford to stop working and focus on their studies. So they don’t graduate. While federal data doesn’t tell us the racial makeup of the 40 million Americans with some college and no degree, researchers say they’re likely to be more diverse, the first in their families to go to college and from low-income backgrounds, compared to their peers who did graduate.

Amanda Fernandez: We certainly have a long, long way to go — in particular, for Latino students who still to this day are experiencing the ramifications of an inequitable education, and in particular during the pandemic, when these issues were exacerbated.

Kirk: Amanda Fernandez is CEO of Latinos for Education. She says free community college signals progress. But a poll commissioned by Latinos for education and the nonprofit Mass., Inc. finds disparities in attitudes about going to college among people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. And Latino parents were the least likely to say their child participated in college prep programs. Another survey by The Chronicle of Higher Education finds Latinos with a high school degree are more likely to be unsure how to enroll and how to pay for college.

So I asked Amanda Fernandez: Is there an information gap?

Amanda Fernandez: It’s a communication gap and it’s a belief gap. And that’s where I think it’s actually lower-hanging fruit. Because our families want their children to go to college, but they don’t have the information about how to even get into an early college program, how to get into a vocational education program. And so, therefore, their students don’t believe or their children don’t believe that they can access higher education and therefore they lose interest.

Kirk: That interest is so important, right? Because in many Latino communities, this is often a family decision.

Amanda Fernandez: Our Latino families are having conversations with their kids about, ‘What are you going to do after high school?’ But they’re not confident in being able to say, ‘You will go to college because we know how to access financial aid, we know how to apply for it.’

Kirk: Does taxpayer support for free college programs help students access college, and — more importantly — graduate?

Amanda Fernandez: I do believe some of that scholarship money does go to other supports that are needed for persistence in the community college space. But, again, you have to think about the longer term and the realities of, you know, when the average age of our community college students is around 27 years old and they have lives and they have to support their own families and children and extended families, you have to support the continued persistence.

Kirk: Sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab agrees. Goldrick Rab is a senior fellow at Education Northwest, a nonprofit organization in Portland, Oregon. She’s author of “Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid and the Betrayal of the American Dream.” And she’s a longtime advocate for free community college programs.

Sara Goldrick-Rab: For 20 years, my research has suggested that this is a very viable part of the solution, and that’s what I’d call it. I’d call it part of the solution.

Kirk: She says free community college will help close some of these gaps, but it’s not a panacea.

Sara Goldrick-Rab: It’s not meant to be all things. It’s not meant to solve every problem around college affordability, but it’s very clear that it’s targeted to the people who most need college to be affordable. Those are the people who right now are not going at all.

Jon: Goldrick-Rab says making college tuition free is not enough, because going to college costs much more than just tuition. Even if politicians do promote free college as the answer.

Sara Goldrick-Rab: They’re not accounting for the full range of costs. The number one college affordability issue in this country is housing. That’s what people are grappling with. And we’re not talking about that because most people don’t live on campus, for example.

Jon: Kirk, that’s one of the issues with these free programs. It’s not always clear what’s covered. For example, some provide funding for living expenses, but most of them do not.

The total cost of attending college includes food, housing, books, supplies, health care, transportation and a bunch of other costs. In fact, non-tuition expenses are the majority of the cost in public higher education. And if you want to find the true cost of attendance from a college, good luck, because that’s based on numbers provided by the colleges. They report them to the federal government. But they’re just estimates for everything except tuition and fees. And those estimates — they’re often grossly incorrect.

So for all of these reasons, supporters of free college say funneling everyone into a system where you’re supposed to graduate within two or four years is the wrong approach. It will only make educational inequities worse.

Kirk: And they say free community college changes who’s going to college. And it helps colleges reach students who will get the biggest return on investment.

Not everyone agrees with that logic, though, Jon. I went to Nashville, Tennessee, to check out the free college program there firsthand. Former Gov. Bill Haslam told me he had made the successful push for free community college because Tennessee employers need well-trained workers.

Bill Haslam: We had looked out at the state and realized that of all the jobs are going to exist in Tennessee in 2025, 55 percent of them would require a degree or certificate beyond high school.

Kirk: It was all about churning out more qualified workers and attracting companies to locate or relocate there. At the time Haslam said this, only a third of Tennessee’s population held a degree or certificate, so Haslam said he wanted to do something that would shock the system and then get people to think:

Bill Haslam: ‘Hey, I never thought that I would go to school, but maybe I will.’ If you haven’t grown up with the thought that college is a real possibility for you, then it’s not something talked about at the dinner table. It’s not on the radar screen.

Kirk: And it worked. At first.

Community college enrollments spiked 5 percent the first year, with thousands of low-income students taking up the offer. Students like Eric Bihembo, who immigrated from Uganda as a teen, signed up.

Eric Bihembo: College wasn’t on my radar.

Kirk: Did you think it was too good to be true?

Eric Bihembo: It was too good to be true. I mean, free money where I could go and get a free education. It was overwhelming. At the same time, I just wanted to check it out.

Kirk: Going from Uganda to Nashville, was there a bit of a culture shock?

Eric Bihembo: We don’t have these big buildings where you can stand and compare yourself and see how small you are.

[‘Pomp and Circumstance,’ from the Tennessee State commencement ceremony]

Kirk: In the end, Bihembo graduated from community college in Nashville and then completed a Tennessee Highway Patrol cadet program.

Where do you see yourself in 10 or 20 years?

Eric Bihembo: My dream job is one day to work with the FBI doing cybersecurity. But I want to start as a police officer to pick up all the experience and be able to apply it in the in the bigger world.

Kirk: Researchers say Bihembo, who graduated in two years, is the exception. Because while more students enrolled in Tennessee’s community colleges, it didn’t mean a higher percentage graduated.

Jennifer Freeman: It boosts enrollments at first, but those people don’t necessarily stay in school.

Jon: Jennifer Freeman is with the nonprofit Jobs for the Future. Turns out, even though most community college students say their goal is to earn a degree, they usually don’t.

Only one in five adults who re-enrolled in Tennessee’s free college program graduated after three years.

To retain students, Freeman suggests improving support systems and tailoring offerings to students career goals. Otherwise …

Jennifer Freeman: … people go back and then they kind of go back to the same college format, structure that didn’t work for them in the first place.

Jon: Columbia’s Davis Jenkins agrees. He says, sure, free helps, but two-year schools will ultimately need to improve their product.

Davis Jenkins: Community colleges. I love them, but they generally don’t treat adults well. They’re going to have to move toward more of a 24-seven advising. They’re going to have to schedule the courses when students need them, not Tuesday through Thursday between 10 and 1, when the professors want to teach.

Jon: Sara Goldrick-Rab, on the other hand, defends these programs, because she says no-cost college broadens access and benefits society. She says the current financial aid system, which requires filling out complicated forms and figuring out formulas to calculate how much college will cost, is an obstacle for too many students.

Sara Goldrick-Rab: Things that knock out a given cost, like tuition, are more promising than things that are predicated on jumping through a bunch of hoops.

Kirk: And advocates say these programs help students like Rebecca Beaucher in Massachusetts. At 45, Beaucher returned to college last fall thanks to the state’s new free college program. Beaucher started college 20 years ago, but quickly dropped out because working full time as an IT analyst and parenting spread her too thin. Going back wasn’t easy, either.

Rebecca Beaucher: I think I was intimidated. You know, it had been so long since I had been in a class environment.

Kirk: She says the free program was the enticement she needed to re-enroll at Northern Essex Community College. She recalls when she heard the news that the program passed in the state’s budget.

Rebecca Beaucher: My heart just dropped and I immediately burst into tears and I sent a text to my husband, like, this is it. Game on. I’m finally getting my degree. I’m just, I’m going for it. I can’t believe this finally happened.

Kirk: This year, Bouchet is taking business classes online and says her goal is to earn her doctorate someday.

Rebecca Beaucher: On my headstone I want it to say, ‘Dr. Rebecca Beaucher.’ I understand that I’m 45, and I may get that when I’m 90. And I am absolutely okay with this.

Jon: So free college is a mixed bag. Some students might only be interested in taking a few classes to brush up their skills. Others might want to get a doctorate someday. But we do know the vast majority are hoping for a four-year degree.

Surveys show more than 80 percent of community college students aspire to earn a bachelor’s degree. Only a small percentage do, though — just about 13 percent, even within six years. That’s according to the U.S. Department of Education. And those rates are even lower for low-income, male, Black and Hispanic students.

Kirk: Yeah. Economists like Josh Goodman at Boston University say there are lots of reasons why low-income students might be better served if they went straight to a four-year college.

Josh Goodman: It’s a combination of things. One is we know the community colleges are less well funded per student than a four-year institution, so they have fewer resources. [Students] are with peers who are academically weaker. And that may have an influence on their success in their own coursework. And though many students plan to start at a community college and then transfer to the four-year sector, many of the students who plan to do that don’t end up succeeding, either because they misunderstand that transfer process or because the alignment between their community college coursework and the requirements of the four-year institutions is not always great.

Kirk: We have a whole episode just about that topic from our first season. It’s called ‘The Transfer Trap,’ so be sure to check it out.

Jon: Okay, so, Kirk, I guess the old saying there’s no such thing as a free lunch — that still holds.

Kirk: Yeah. So here are a few key takeaways from this episode.

One: Do your research. Make sure you’re enrolling in a free program that meets your career and personal goals.

Two: Ask about retention and graduation rates. Because if nobody graduates, then free doesn’t really mean anything.

And three: If your aim is to earn a bachelor’s degree someday, ask whether the credits you earn will even transfer and if they’ll transfer to your major. Because while most community college students say they want to earn a four-year degree, few do so within six years, and the rate is even lower for first-generation, low-income, Black and Latino students like Magno Garcia.

Back at Bunker Hill. Garcia told me the new free community college program for adults there renewed his hope to earn a degree.

Magno Garcia: Third time’s a charm. I actually feel very confident saying that I will graduate.

Kirk: Garcia has found a support network on Bunker Hill’s campus through a program designed for men of color. That’s another good takeaway, Jon: Find a support network on campus.

Garcia is now working as a social worker at a high school while wrapping up his associate degree, and he switched his major from accounting to psychology.

Magno Garcia: It made a huge difference. I was enjoying my classes. The subject matters were more interesting to me than, you know, crunching in numbers.

Kirk: This fall, he plans to transfer to a four-year university and pursue a bachelor’s degree so he can become a teacher or a school counselor.

This is College Uncovered from GBH and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza …

Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to gbhnewsconnect@wgbh.org. And tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. And if you’re with a college or university. Tell us what you think the public should know about higher ed.

This episode is produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …

Kirk: … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is supervising editor. Ellen London is executive producer. Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. We had production assistants from Diane Adame.

Theme song and original music by Left Roman out of MIT, and all of our music is by college bands.

Mei He is our project manager, and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX.

It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Thank you so much for listening.

The post College Uncovered, Season 2, Episode 5 appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

As they struggle to fill seats, universities on average dole out more than half of the revenue they collect from tuition in the form of discounts and financial aid.

If a private company discounted its products by more than half, it would be out of business. It’s an incredibly self-destructive model, but no one seems willing to be the first to stop doing it.

This financial arms war among colleges is draining so much revenue that many are losing money even as they increase their tuition. That’s because almost no one pays the advertised price; nearly all students, including those whose families can afford to pay, now get discounts and institutional financial aid. Not only is this pushing colleges into insolvency; it discourages many students and families — particularly low-income ones — from considering a college, since they see only the advertised cost and don’t realize they’d almost certainly pay a much, much lower one.

These many machinations are beginning to slow down the annual increases in the cost of college. Some institutions are even lowering their prices. In this episode of College Uncovered, The Hechinger Report and GBH will show you how to take advantage of the college pricing chaos.

Listen to the whole series

Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about these topics, with links to additional helpful information — including a tool to help you search for calculators that will tell you the likely net price you will pay at any college, based on your income.

Jon: So we’re here at Vinyl Index, which is a very hip record store. They sell new and used vinyl, in the very hip boom market section of Somerville outside of Boston.

Kirk: And you’re looking for some ’80s albums? Maybe Chicago?

Jon: And we are not looking for some ’80s albums, but we’re looking for some rare albums, and we’re going to see what kind of a discount we can get.

Kirk: You’re going to haggle.

Jon: We’re going. To haggle.

Aaron Wetjen-Barry: I am Aaron Wetjen-Barry, aka Aaron-eous. I work here at Vinyl Index, ordering new and used music.

Kirk: Aaron-eous. Can you explain the nickname?

Aaron Wetjen-Barry: So, I started in college, actually, but I’m a visual artist, and I’m kind of from the hip hop scene where we all have our, like, hip hop names.

Jon: So tell me what the most expensive album is that you have here?

Aaron Wetjen-Barry: So, we sell a lot of, say, Grateful Dead box sets here. So, you know, like, something like this. This record just has, like, eight records in there. So it’s, like, four hours of music.

Kirk: How much does that go for?

Aaron Wetjen-Barry: This one goes for $200 even.

Jon: So can we get this for 56 percent off?

Aaron Wetjen-Barry: Unfortunately, the mark up is not that good, so it wouldn’t be able to do that.

Jon: Yeah, so what would happen if you sold everything here in this shop for 56 percent off?

Aaron Wetjen-Barry: We’d probably be out of business in a week.

Jon: That makes pretty logical sense if you do the math. I mean, a business can’t give back more than half of what it makes and stay in business.

Kirk: But that’s exactly what colleges and universities are doing in a complicated and largely unknown pricing strategy that makes seemingly no logical sense at all. Or does it?

This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report podcast, pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work.

I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH.

Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report.

Kirk: We’re calling this episode “Half Off Full Price.”

Jon: We’ve been talking on this podcast about how families can negotiate their way into a discount on the cost of college, but how much money colleges are actually giving away might come as a surprise.

Colleges give back, in the form of tuition discounts and financial aid, 56 percent of the revenue they take in. And that’s the average. Some are giving overall discounts of 60 or even 70 percent.

The colleges don’t call them discounts. They call them scholarships. And that’s how families see them when they get offered their financial aid. But those are just fancy ways to reduce the price, the same way retailers do when they’re trying to attract more customers.

Kirk: This discounting practice started back in the ’90s, the last time colleges faced a really big enrollment decline. Today, both public and private colleges do it.

Will Doyle: Many people thought a lot of private colleges were going to go out of business at that time.

Kirk: Will Doyle is a professor of higher education at Vanderbilt University.

Will Doyle: What the private colleges did, though, was they figured out that the worst thing in the world is an empty seat. If they could figure out what somebody was willing to pay for a seat and charge them that, then they might as well fill every seat and get what they could for it.

Kirk: So Doyle says that’s exactly what they did.

Will Doyle: They looked at what people in different categories were willing to pay and figured out what they could charge them. And by doing that, they ended up being able to fill those empty seats. And they survived what was supposed to be an incredibly difficult time, actually pretty well.

Kirk: Notice that he isn’t saying that the money goes to the people who couldn’t pay the full freight, just that they might be on the fence about picking a school. So colleges have steadily shifted some of their financial aid to people who might not actually need it, just to get them to enroll.

Will Doyle: Colleges actually will charge a little less for the highest-income students, the ones who are closest to the ability to do full pay, because just a small discount, a small honorific discount where you’ve told the student they’ve gotten the scholarship, can tip the decision for that student to attend. Many of the highest-income students with not necessarily great test scores actually do receive some amount of financial aid.

Jon: Right, just like the way the person sitting next to you on an airplane might have paid a completely different price for the flight. From the college’s point of view, it sort of makes sense. You need to have at least some people who can pay at least some of the tuition.

Brett Schraeder: But if you don’t give them anything, they may never show up. And so then you don’t have any revenue from that student to help with your mission, to help serve other students, to pay your faculty.

Jon: That’s Brett Schraeder, managing director for financial aid at the consulting firm EAB, which advises colleges about this kind of thing.

But as the years have gone by, this approach has sort of trapped many colleges and universities in a cutthroat competition for students to whom they have to give more and more discounts and financial aid. And continuing to advertise a very high list or sticker price that almost no one pays is discouraging some students from even applying to colleges that might be a really good fit for them.

Kirk: Okay, so what does all of this mean to you if you’re a student or a parent? Well, you could be missing out. One survey found that a majority of families don’t know that colleges discount their price. Another, by the student loan company Sallie Mae, finds that nearly 80 percent of people eliminate a college from consideration because they see the list price, and they think it’s too high.

Brian Rosenberg saw this firsthand from the inside.

Brian Rosenberg: I am president emeritus of Macalester College and author of a recent book, Whatever It Is, I’m against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education.

Jon: Rosenberg says the whole pricing mechanism is complicated and baffling to a consumer.

Brian Rosenberg: And so students, particularly first-generation students, students who aren’t particularly sophisticated, will simply look at the fact that a college’s posted price for tuition, room and board of $70,000 and say, ‘Well, I’m not even going to think about that.’

Jon: That’s right — even though almost no one actually pays that price. I ran the federal data, which, as you know, Kirk, is something I like to do in my free time. And there are 428 colleges and universities at which not a single incoming freshman pays the full price.

Kirk: So that leads to another little secret you might not have noticed. Yes, it’s true that the price of tuition and fees has been going up at three times the rate of inflation, but those price increases have suddenly leveled off.

In 2022, average tuition actually went down, when adjusted for inflation.

Let’s be clear. Paying for college is still scary and expensive. But the point of all this is that it doesn’t cost as much as people sometimes think. And the price? It’s pretty much stopped going up.

Jon: I mean, as you said, college is still really expensive. Tuition, room, board, books and other costs comes to nearly $60,000 a year at private nonprofit colleges and nearly 30 grand at public ones. But colleges are giving back more and more of their money to fill seats. Which means they’re running into money crunches of their own.

So how do students and their parents take advantage of this practice? We asked one of the top experts who helps low income and first-generation students do it.

Scott Del Rossi: My name is Scott Del Rossi and I am the vice president of college and career at College Possible. College Possible is a national nonprofit, that provides college access and college success coaching to about 25,000 students across the country.

Jon: So how can a family find out how much of a discount they might get from a particular college? I mean, short of actually applying.

Scott Del Rossi: If you navigate to their financial aid page. Oftentimes they’ll have a tuition calculator that you can enter in your family’s income, yearly income. And that will let you know how much college will typically cost for a family at that income.

Jon: That’s true. The colleges are actually required by law to provide these net price calculators. They’re supposed to tell you what you’ll actually pay after discounts and financial aid based on your family income. And for the most part, they’ll give you the right general idea.

But a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that some of the links didn’t work, or the prices were out of date, or they didn’t say what year they were from. So don’t assume they’re right on the money — so to speak.

Scott: Absolutely. Ironically, I was looking for one for the other day, and it was very much buried on the website. You kind of had to know it existed in order just to find the calculator.

Kirk: So now you know, and just knowing about these discounts can be a big help in getting the best deal, especially with many colleges so desperate for enrollment. Here’s Scott Del Rossi again.

Scott Del Rossi: We always recommend to students and families that they apply to more than one college.

Jon: You mean, so they can pit one against the other?

Scott Del Rossi: You can always present that as, you know, ‘Hey, these are the things that I really hope that you consider, and reevaluate the financial aid award. And these are the types of awards I’m getting from other colleges and universities.’

Kirk: This growing discount rate is a major reason why a lot of them are closing or likely to close, which we’re also going to be talking about this season.

Don’t just take it from us. We asked Brian Rosenberg, the former president of Macalester, who had to deal with this problem, whether a 56 percent average discount rate at private colleges is too much.

Brian Rosenberg: It’s unsustainable.

Jon: So why don’t colleges stop?

Brian Rosenberg: They have no choice. I mean, the obvious question that a lot of people ask is, ‘Well, if your discount rate is 50 percent, why don’t you just cut your sticker price in half?’ And some colleges are doing that.

Jon: You’re talking about a tuition reset.

Brian Rosenberg: A tuition reset.

Jon: A tuition reset is the higher education’s sort of typically wonky way of describing lowering the price. And as Brian Rosenberg says, some colleges are trying that now, charging everyone the average that people were paying anyway without playing the game of showing one price and charging another one.

Kirk: Especially in places where they’re running out of students, like in the Northeast and the Midwest. That’s where an enrollment cliff is on its way, as the number of 18-year-olds declines.

Susan Stuebner: My name is Sue Stuebner, and I’m the president of Colby Sawyer College, which is in New London, New Hampshire.

Jon: Last year, Colby Sawyer lowered its advertised price by more than 60 percent, down from about $46,000 to $17,000 a year, not including room and board. Not a single student was paying the full price anyway.

Susan Stuebner: As institutions’ tuition prices go up, you’re losing the chance to have a conversation with more and more families. And so the pool you’re actually drawing from gets smaller and smaller. And we looked around the marketplace and our listed or sticker-price tuition was among the highest in New Hampshire as well as even in in New England. So when I mentioned that statistic earlier about not being in conversation with so many families, you know, that combined with the enrollment cliff had us very nervous.

Kirk: Stuebner says that Colby Sawyer has gotten a bump in applications, and a lot more of the students it accepted have already put down their deposits. And other colleges are watching whether this model works.

Susan Stuebner: We’re getting a lot of interest. You know, a lot of folks have reached out and just asked about the process. So I think, if nothing else, a lot of schools are considering it.

Kirk: But American consumer behavior is a little strange. For one thing, if something costs more, we seem to think it must be better. Like cars. Or whiskey. Will Doyle says it’s called the Chivas Regal Effect.

Will Doyle: It’s called the Chivas Regal Effect because Chivas Regal is this kind of mediocre whiskey. And they came up with a brilliant strategy, which was actually to increase their price. And by increasing the price, they moved it from the bottom shelf to the middle shelf. And people look at whiskeys and they think, ‘Oh, the middle shelf must be an okay whiskey.’ And they bought that one.

Lots of colleges find the same thing that when they reduce the sticker price. When they reduce the stated price, the perceived quality of the institution goes down. So if an institution maintains a very high stated price, they’re kind of saying, ‘Oh, we’re a high-quality place. Then they can quietly discount for the set of students that they’re seeking to enroll.

Kirk: So you’re there in Tennessee, a major producer of whiskey, and the sticker price at Vanderbilt is now approaching $100,000 a year. Is that the Chivas Regal Effect?

Will Doyle: I’m going to decline to comment on my own institution.

Kirk: Okay. Fair enough. So the other thing that colleges have done is disguise the discounts as scholarships that parents love to see. It gives the parents bragging rights. And at a lot of colleges, almost everybody gets them. But we love to get awards. And so when colleges lower the price, Susan Stuebner says parents want to know where their kids’ scholarships went.

Susan Stuebner: The group that had the most difficult time understanding what we were trying to do were our current students. We provided them with a comparison of what they were currently receiving from the college that year and what they would receive the next year. When you looked at the actual amount they paid to attend Colby Sawyer, it was the same. But for some families and for some students, you know, their initial reaction was, you’re taking this scholarship away from me.

Jon: Brett Schrader’s consulting firm does a survey of high school seniors every year to find out what would attract them to a college.

Brett Schraeder: We ask them, ‘Hey, if you had three different awards, if you had a $40,000 prize and a $20,000 scholarship, if you had a $30,000 prize and a $10,000 scholarship, or you had just a $20,000 prize — so basically same net cost for each one — which one would you pick?’ Always. They pick the ones with the scholarships.

Jon: The bottom line is that colleges and universities have created a system that makes it ridiculously hard for people to figure out what they’ll actually pay, even though it might be less than they expect.

Susan Stuebner: In today’s era, higher education is being scrutinized for how much it costs, and at the same time, what it actually costs to families is much less for most of us than what we list. So it’s very confusing.

Jon: It’s pretty quiet here on a Thursday morning on a campus. I thought it was Friday that students didn’t go to class.

Kirk: We went to the campus of Lasell University, which, like Colby Sawyer, also cut its price this year by about a third, from nearly $60,000 to just under $40,000. Lasell is one of those schools we mentioned earlier where not a single student had been paying the advertised sticker price. That raises the question, do students who are already attending save any money when a college cuts its list price?

Jon: We caught up with a business management major on her way to or her off campus job.

Rose Andrey Pluviose: My name is Rose Andrey Pluviose. I’m a senior here at LaSalle, and I’m from Boston, Massachusetts.

Jon: Did you come out ahead when they lowered the price? Did you end up paying less to go here?

Rose Andrey Pluviose: I would say about $1,500 less.

Jon: Other students came out even.

Parker Tallman: I’m Parker Tallman. I am 21 years old. I’m from New Jersey. So for me, it didn’t really make an impact. Tuition went down, which means your scholarships go down, too. So even though we’re paying less out of pocket, the scholarships go down as well. I don’t know what the dollar figure is, what I’m paying right now anymore. And I just heard that it’s possibly going up again.

Jon: Lots of students told us the same thing — that the pricing system at colleges doesn’t make much sense when tuition gets lowered by $20,000, but their own price stays the same or falls by maybe $1,500.

Parker Tallman: It shouldn’t be that difficult. If you’re going to have a set price, have a set price.

Jon: But in your case, basically you came out even.

Parker Tallman: I came out even. Yeah, basically I came out even, luckily.

Jon: Scott Del Rossi also warns that tuition resets are a little bit of a gimmick when you do the math, and that people shouldn’t get too excited about them.

Scott Del Rossi: If the sticker price is still being lowered, but the financial aid package is getting lowered, we certainly do want to get students’ and families’ hopes up.

Kirk: So the moral of this crazy story is to not assume that the price you see is what you’ll pay for college. You will likely pay a lot less.

Jon: We’ll let Brian Rosenberg have the last word here. The former president of Macalester says colleges are clinging to this impenetrable pricing strategy in a desperate bid for survival.

Brian Rosenberg: These colleges need students. And unless they keep marking down the price more and more, students simply are not going to come. There are many, many colleges where not a single student pays the full price. It is like a business that is struggling to stay alive.

Jon: And yet we keep doing it.

Brian Rosenberg: And yet we keep doing it.

Kirk: This is College Uncovered. I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH.

Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus from The Hechinger Report. Be sure to keep listening to future episodes to hear more about what colleges and universities don’t teach you.

Kirk: We would love to hear from you. Send us an email to gbhnewsconnect@wgbh.org and tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. And if you’re with a college or university. Tell us what you think the public should know about higher ed.

Jon: This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …

Kirk: … and Jon Marcus, and it’s edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is our supervising editor and Ellen London is the executive producer.

Gary Mott and David Goodman are our mix engineers. We had production assistance from Diane Adame.

All of our music is by college bands. Theme song and original music by Left Roman out of MIT.

Mei He is our project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

The post College Uncovered, Season 2, Episode 3 appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Okay, so you’re going to college. But will the college you pick still have its lights on by the time you get to graduation?

It’s a question more and more families are asking as universities and colleges face financial and enrollment challenges, close or merge. We’ll tell you what schools are doing to stay alive, what happens to students when they shut down and how to check on the financial health of colleges.

Listen to the whole series

Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about this topic, and for links to more information.

Jon: This is College Uncovered. I’m Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report …

Kirk: And I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH. We’re getting out of our Boston studio to start today’s episode and heading to the nearby town of Brookline, Massachusetts.

Jon: Nice neighborhood up here, huh, Kirk?

Kirk: Beautiful view up here, Jon. Is this where you live?

Jon: No, I do not. This is Fisher Hill. It’s a really swanky neighborhood. It was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the guy that laid out Central Park. The inventor of the smallpox inoculation lived up here. So did search Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony. These mansions around here are some of the best 19^th-century architecture you can find. I saw one listed this morning, Kirk, for just a little over $8 million.

Kirk: Is there a pool?

Jon: Yeah. Well, one thing apparently this neighborhood didn’t need was college.

Kirk: That’s right. There used to be a college here. It was called Newbury College, and it closed five years ago. It had $11 million worth of debt and a dwindling number of students. It lost $7 million just in its last year. When it closed, the campus was sold for $34 million. So, Jon, the real estate that we’re standing on right now, it was worth more than the actual college.

Jon: That’s right. And some of it is now being transformed into this giant luxury elderly housing complex. You can hear it going up across the street.

Kirk: That’s right. And they converted this part over here, over your shoulder, it looks like, into a dog park.

Jon: Yeah, a dog park where rich people walk their very expensive dogs.

Kirk: Dogs that have Instagram accounts, we found out.

Your dog is on Instagram?

Dog walker: Yup. His name is Bennie in Boston with an “-ie.”

Kirk: Bennie in Boston is a Cockapoo, by the way.

Okay, so a lot of colleges are closing — more of them in Massachusetts than in any other state. But it’s happening all over the country, too. These days, among the things you need to know before you pick a college is whether it will even stay in business long enough for you to graduate. So how do you know whether your school might close? We’ll tell you how to find out.

A lot of colleges are closing around here, and in other parts of the country, hit hard by an enrollment decline. Massachusetts has seen nine nonprofit colleges close or merge since 2016, giving it the rather dubious honor of being first in the nation for nonprofit college closings.

Just a few miles away from Fisher Hill in Newton, Massachusetts, Mount Ida College closed suddenly in 2018. It was the spring, and the abrupt decision, delivered to the campus community in an email, would leave hundreds of students in debt and in limbo for years.

Like Newbury College, Mount Ida was out of cash and out of luck. But at least Newbury gave students a year’s notice about its closure. Mount Ida’s dirty little secret was that to get more students in seats, it had been discounting its tuition heavily. Very few students were paying the sticker price or even close to it. But like a lot of small private colleges here in New England and across the country, Mount Ida’s board seemed to assume the college was just one more marketing campaign away from turning it all around.

Jon: And it wasn’t?

Kirk: No, Jon, it was not.

Newscaster: ‘It’s WGBH’s morning edition. I’m Joe Mathieu. Under a deal announced last week, Mount Ida will shut down. UMass will acquire its campus.’

Kirk: In public hearings, one by one, I heard Mount Ida students and their parents blame administrators for the school’s sudden closure.

Lisa McLean: Someone needs to be held accountable and do what’s right for these students.

Kirk: Lisa McLean said Mount Ida’s president had told parents like her that the college failed because it offered tuition discounts it couldn’t afford. The college was basically cutting the cost to students by more than half.

Lisa McLean: If this is the case, why are they being offered? Why are you preying on our children? Luring them to come to Mount Ida with this nonexistent money?

Jon: Mount Ida is definitely part of a bigger trend, one that’s being felt around the country. At the time, junior Jared Maimon was working part time as a campus tour guide — not at Mount Ida, but 50 miles southwest at another small private college, Nichols College, in Dudley, Massachusetts. Maimon says he didn’t start thinking about the financial challenges of small colleges like Nichols until Mount Ida closed abruptly.

Jared Maimon: And that’s when it kind of popped into my head and I was, like, ‘Oh, man, like, is this something that could happen to us?’

Jon: And he started hearing prospective students and their parents talking about the same things on the campus tours he gave. They started asking him not just about food, dorms and classes, but about whether his college would be around long enough for them to graduate.

Kirk: And, Jon, that’s also when, for the first time, I began getting that question at our higher ed desk. Stressed-out parents started calling me, wanting to know if the colleges they were considering for their kids would still be open in four years.

So how do you know? There’s no surefire way to know whether college is at risk of shutting down. But there are a few things you can look for.

Over the past 20 years, more than 1,900 colleges have closed. About 80 percent of them were for-profits. But the other 20 percent were private nonprofits like Newbury and Mount Ida. That’s according to an analysis by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, which tracks these things.

Jon: And last year, 2023, was a record year, with about 80 colleges closing, many of them small liberal arts colleges with enrollments around 1,000 students or less.

Kirk: Eighty! Okay, that’s a lot of colleges — I mean, at least six a month. And experts are predicting many, many more will follow as college enrollment problems are getting worse.

Jon: That’s right, because the number of high school graduates is shrinking and the percentage of those who do graduate high school going directly to college keeps falling. Meanwhile, compared to 40 years ago, college costs have more than doubled. So it makes sense that only one in three American adults now says a degree is worth the cost.

All of these headwinds are about to push a lot of colleges straight off a demographic cliff.

So many colleges have closed recently that there’s even an app to tell you whether your college is on the way up.

Kirk: What? Come on. Are you kidding me?

Jon: Nope. A former administrator at Westminster College in Missouri is now a researcher and founder of something called College Viability. It’s an app that collects publicly available data so that you can compare and contrast colleges across the country.

Kirk: Come on. Will you text me that?

Jon: Sure. Hold on. It’s a little clunky and it’s not exactly scientific. It simply shares the characteristics of colleges that might be financially shaky. But the fact that it even exists, Kirk, proves there’s demand for this kind of information.

Kirk: Definitely. Well, rather than relying on this app. I sat down with Michael Horn. Horn thinks and writes about college closures all the time. He’s the co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, a research outfit that has long predicted lots of colleges would close because the enrollment and tuition numbers simply don’t add up. Sitting in his living room, looking back on 2023, Horn told me that he and his research team were right. A ton of schools did close.

So I asked him: What’s going on?

Michael Horn: Well, I think there’s a few things going on. One, the pandemic forestalled, actually, a lot of colleges from closing, because they were going to close, but then all these federal dollars comes in and basically saves them. And then we’ve got a bunch of colleges that need to close. Structurally, they’re not sound. And 2023, the federal money is gone. They start to collapse.

Kirk: How many schools are we talking about?

Michael Horn: Yeah, it was over one a month last year, in 2023. And the pace is increasing. Right? And this isn’t even counting the for-profit schools that closed. Higher ed has never seen anything like this.

Kirk: Michael, do you predict we’ll see more schools shut down in 2024?

Michael Horn: I think the number’s going to go up and up and up. The real cliff is going to start coming in about two years. So we’ve got a little bit of time. Maybe there was pent-up colleges that needed to close, and so maybe it’ll be about the same. I think at least 20, 25 schools will close, and that doesn’t count the mergers. It’s not going to be less.

Kirk: You’re talking about 2026, when we’ll see the number of 18-year-olds drop precipitously because no one was having babies in 2008, during the Great Recession.

Michael Horn: Exactly. Everyone stopped having babies in 2008. And generally, in the past, after recessions, people started having babies again. That didn’t happen this time, and so we don’t see a rebound. And that’s why a lot of people don’t like the word cliff. They like slide, or something like that — something more gradual. But that’s why people call it a cliff, because it doesn’t rebound.

Kirk: If I’m a prospective student — because, you know, we’re very consumer focused on our podcast — how do I know whether the school that I choose will still be open, will still have its lights on in four years? You’re shaking your head.

Michael Horn: It’s the greatest question, because there’s just not great information for students and families. Everyone asks me this question: ‘How do I know?’ And it’s really hard to tell them. I think what I would do is, frankly, look at a few sources of information. Number one, has enrollment been dropping over the last 10 years? I wouldn’t look in just the last year or two. I would look over a decade. Number two, is enrollment below a thousand students? If so, and the school doesn’t have a really strong name brand, I’d be really worried. And number three, can I look at some historical lists? You know, there’s databases out there about schools that are struggling. Take a look at them and see, was this a school that was already on life support before the pandemic? And if so, I’d be really nervous if it’s hitting on those other two as well.

Kirk: But even those things, there’s no guarantee, right? You think about schools like Hampshire College, right, where Ken Burns has swept in and raised a ton of money to keep that school afloat. It hits all of those targets that you just mentioned, but it’s still open.

Michael Horn: Yeah, absolutely. Look, there are colleges that have basically hit the cliff and then rebounded, right? There’s Hampshire, there’s Sweet Briar College — alumni saved it. Those are schools with strong brands. And so I might say, give them a chance. Frankly, the schools that are closing aren’t generally ones we’ve heard of.

Kirk: You mentioned you get this question all the time. I remember when Mount Ida College shut down here in Newton, people started calling me because they heard me on the radio reporting this, and they said, ‘I’m thinking about sending my kid to this school. Is it still going to be open?’ Do you get the same calls?

Michael Horn: Yeah, because you’re the expert, right? You’re the one, right? Well, I mean, that may be scary to both of us, but, like, you’re the one reporting on this, you’re seeing the numbers, you’re seeing the trend, you’re seeing, frankly, the struggles that students are then having as a college closes on them. Right? They’re trying to transfer credits. They’re trying to find a school that will accept them. They’re trying to find a comparable school that has a major that will work for them. The Department of Education will say, ‘Oh, schools have lots of, you know, brothers and sisters out there you can easily transfer to.’ But if you’re a student in the soup, so to speak, you’re not seeing that big picture. And so it’s scary.

Kirk: And, Jon, there is one other potential red flag. Michael Horn did not mention at first.

Jon: Yeah? What’s that?

Kirk: Well, in the wake of Mount Ida, education officials in Massachusetts created a so-called financial stress test for colleges like the one the federal government launched for banks after the 2008 recession. This was the first of its kind in the country, and it was really controversial. But the idea was to alert students and their parents if a college was in financial trouble.

At the time, the higher education lobby pushed back on the plan. They said no one stress test fits all.

Barbara Brittingham was then head of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. That’s the regional accrediting body. She told me colleges worried if the public really knew about their financial challenges, their demise would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Barbara Brittingham: When an institution is financially fragile, we ought to be watching it. The accreditor should be watching it. Arguably, the state ought to be watching it. But we ought to do it in a way that doesn’t overly burden the institution, which is already working very hard to make things work.

Jon: Well, that makes sense. I can understand that once word is out that a college is in trouble, no one’s going to want to go to that school.

So if the public can’t see this financial stress test, how on earth is it useful? And how do I know if the school I’m choosing will close?

Rachel Burns: You don’t.

Jon: That’s Rachel Burns with the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.

Rachel Burns: So I work on all of our projects related to financial aid, data and research and finance.

Jon: While financial stress tests don’t appear to have any teeth, she says they can still effectively protect consumers behind the scenes, almost like the pipes in a building. You don’t see them, but it’s good to know they’re there, right? And she thinks more states should install them.

Rachel Burns: Absolutely. State agencies should be requiring institutions to have plans in place in the event that a closure happens.

Jon: College closings disproportionately affect low-income and Black and Hispanic students. So Burns says these plans should include pathways for all students to continue their educations.

Rachel Burns: So whether they transfer to another institution that has agreed to take those students, if they have a really strong sort of crosswalk of how their credits might apply to other local institutions, and that there’s some sort of — this is less likely — but some sort of financial recompense for students. So if they’re getting tuition returned for that semester or if they’re getting any sort of assistance, you know, because that’s such an important indicator for whether a student is going to continue after a closure, is if they had some sort of support from the institution, whether it’s financial or, like, transfer agreements.

Jon: Burns says one reason more states haven’t followed Massachusetts’ lead is the strong private college lobby.

Rachel Burns: I mean, that’s part of it. I think some institutions are never going to be beholden to those rules because, you know, you wouldn’t ask an Ivy League institution or a really large land grant. And that’s not really who we’re focused on anyway.

Jon: Instead, they’re focused on small private colleges where the enrollment cliff has already arrived. Forty percent of colleges in this country enroll fewer than 1,000 students.

Another problem, Burns says, is that most state agencies don’t have the capacity to monitor the financial health of colleges.

Rachel Burns: We’re not going to catch any of the bad actors out there with authorization, because they’re already authorized. State agencies who are responsible for this authorization process just have to pick their battles. And even if those policies are on the books, they’re not always being enforced. So it’s on both sides of the equation. You know, the institutions aren’t doing it, but then the agencies aren’t enforcing it.

Kirk: Okay. So this gets wonky and bureaucratic pretty fast, but it’s so important. So let’s slow it down a bit. Bring it back to earth and explain why it matters to you. Jon, what happens to students and their credits when their college is closed?

Jon: Well, there is some research on this, and it shows there are two different scenarios. One is where a student is attending an institution that has a teach-out plan, or something similar between the closing institution and another college. It’s almost like automatic enrollment. In those cases, students tend to do pretty well. All or most of their credits transfer, and they just keep going as if almost nothing happened, although they might have to move or become an online student. Two thirds of those students re-enroll and they go on to complete a credential.

But Rachel Burns, who’s studied college closings, says then there are the students she’s most worried about. And this is the majority of students at colleges like Mount Ida, that give students too little warning that they’re going to close.

Rachel Burns: These are what we call the abrupt closures. They happen pretty quickly. There’s not a lot of notice, a lot of warning. And the institution itself doesn’t have any plan in place. And those students may be able to get their credits to transfer. They will always be able to access their transcript, but there’s no guarantee that another institution will take those credits, particularly if it’s a closure that happens for some sort of accreditation issue.

Jon: So if a school is losing accreditation, for example, those credits essentially have no value anymore.

Rachel Burns: The majority of students, when they’re in that situation, a little over half just don’t re-enroll. And if they do re-enroll, only about a third of them end up completing. So it’s a pretty significant barrier to getting to getting any further. And so then they tend to end up worse off. So they’ve spent all this time and this money for credits that don’t mean anything and never earn a credential.

Kirk: Wow, let’s repeat that. Half of those students whose colleges shut down abruptly never even re-enroll.

Jon: Yeah, 52 percent of those students never do. So they end up with debt and no degree.

Kirk: But that means the other half do transfer and continue on. Take Sam Marshall. She and her sister, Siobhan, were both enrolled at Mount Ida College when it announced it would shut down.

Sam Marshall: Yeah, I was in an accounting class, and I remember my professor looking like somebody had told her to look at her email. And she goes, ‘Why?’ And they’re like, ‘You need to see this.’ And she opens it and she goes, ‘Okay, so you all need to open your emails. And I’m going to allow you to leave for the day, and we’re just going to call class done. Because you guys don’t have a school and I no longer have a job.’

Siobhan Marshall: They were still giving tours that day, after I saw the email.

Kirk: Weeks later, the Marshall sisters attended a college fair on campus, and Sam decided to transfer to nearby Newbury College.

Sam Marshall: When Newbury came to Mount Ida to recruit students, I had sent an email to the admissions office asking if the college was in any danger of closing down, if they’re in any financial trouble. And they said, ‘Oh, no, we don’t have any plans of closing anytime soon.’ So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go there.’

Kirk: But then a year later, Newbury shut down. Sam says she was depressed.

Sam Marshall: Oh, I was done. I just wanted to drop out. But I had to keep going.

Kirk: Sam transferred once again to Suffolk University in Boston. All of her credits didn’t transfer, though, so she says she had to enroll for a fifth year. Her experience at Mount Ida and then Newbury undermined her motivation and her faith in higher education.

Sam Marshall: I didn’t join any clubs. I wasn’t getting involved. I just wanted to graduate.

Kirk: And she worried about Suffolk University’s fate.

Sam Marshall: I don’t know, I always thought in the back of my mind that it was going to shut down, too.

Kirk: After four years, Sam thought she should have been done with college. But administrators told her she didn’t have enough credits.

Sam Marshall: So I did have to take another year. And even then, they said I would have to do another semester. But I said, ‘That makes no sense. I’ve done this much schooling.’ So the guy who I was talking to, very nice, looked into my past classes and said, ‘Oh, I found credits. You’re good to go.’

Kirk: She graduated, finally, with a degree in interior design. Meanwhile, her sister, Siobhan, was determined to finish her education so she could work in the funeral industry.

Siobhan Marshall: So I moved seven hours and out of state to a school that was supposed to provide me with the same education. And I stayed there for — what was it, like, two and a half years? — until Covid. And then the pandemic happened, and then I came back and immediately started working in a funeral home. And I worked all through the pandemic, and I was trying to complete my education during that time.

Kirk: That’s when Siobhan says she found out she’d been sold what she describes as …

Siobhan Marshall: … I was sold a lie going to New York because my education wasn’t comparable. There’s different laws in the two states. There’s so many things that I was told were interchangeable that were not. And it made working in this state while having to learn in that state pretty impossible.

Kirk: Now in their mid 20s, the two Marshall sisters are living at home with their parents, facing nearly $100,000 in student loan debt — each — and working jobs that don’t necessarily require their degrees.

Kirk: Are you surprised that Americans have so little faith in higher education?

Sam Marshall: No, not at all. Personally, I think I would be better off joining a trade or something else. I don’t know. It’s tough.

Kirk: In 2019, three former Mount Ida students filed a class-action lawsuit against the school’s leaders, claiming they were deliberately misled about the college’s ailing finances. But a federal judge dismissed it, saying Mount Ida had made all of its required public disclosures showing that the school had been operating at a deficit for three years — if they had bothered to check it. Philanthropist Bob Hildreth funded the lawsuit.

So why did you get involved?

Bob Hildreth: Because this was at the very beginning of colleges closing. I thought that students were being screwed by a process that didn’t give them enough time to pursue their education.

Kirk: Hildreth called the judge’s ruling appalling, not just for former Mount Ida students, but for college students and their families across the country.

Bob Hildreth: Universities, which were increasingly corporations, were treating their kids like Wall Street treats their employees. When they get into financial trouble, they just throw them out onto the street.

Jon: Harsh words. Well, Kirk, five years after Mount Ida shut down, higher ed researcher Rachel Burns predicts we’ll see more colleges head for the exits. It’ll be another long year of college closings.

Rachel Burns: We kind of anticipated as soon as federal funding dried up, there would be a bunch of closures right away. But we’re seeing that it’s actually sort of trickling across several years because every institution was kind of in a different place at the start of the pandemic. So it makes sense that they’re recovering or not recovering at different rates. So I don’t know that I would say 2024 will be historic, but I think the next three years combined, once we hit that demographic cliff — I think that will be significant. Probably the most closures we’ve had since about the 2010s, when there were all of the shutdowns of the private for-profits that had shady practices.

Kirk: So where is the accountability? The problem, Michael Horn says, is that the boards of trustees who are supposed to be overseeing these colleges are not really on top of this issue.

Michael Horn: They’re not asking the right questions of their presidents and provosts to say, are the trends in the right direction? This is a really terrible market in the sense that the buyers, the students, they have very little information. The college leadership has all the cards. And if, again, the school goes under, that hurts. That makes you uncertain about, ‘Gee, my neighbor just had this happen to them. Is this a good place for me to spend my next four years? Maybe I ought to just get a job.’

Kirk: Should more states adopt similar financial stress test?

Michael Horn: I think all states ought to adopt something like what Massachusetts has done, because the accreditors are not on top of this as much as they should be. They’re one line of defense. The federal government is a second line of defense. But it’s too big a country for them to be able to monitor this. And states are a third line of defense. And this is a really great place they can step in.

Jon: And more states might need to step in because higher ed’s enrollment problems are not going away. So as more colleges stop operating, experts say states will need to help protect consumers against the fresh wave of closings.

Kirk: This is College Uncovered from GBH and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza.

Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus.

Kirk: Our show is created by Jon …

Jon: … and Kirk, and it’s edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is our supervising editor and Ellen London is the executive editor.

Kirk: Gary Mott and David Goodman are our mix engineers.

Jon: All of our music is by college bands. Our theme music is by Left Roman out of MIT. We also used music by students in the Pacific Jazz Ambassador program at University of the Pacific. In today’s episode, it was “The Crossing” by Marwan Ghonima.

Kirk: Additional sound by W.M. Quincy from freesound.org.

Mei He is our project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

Jon: We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to gbhnewsconnect@wgbh.org and tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. And if you’re with a college or university, tell us what you think the public should know about higher education.

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Kirk: Thank you so much for listening.

The post College Uncovered, Season 2, Episode 4 appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Colleges make it hard to even understand what they will cost, with confusing financial aid offers full of indecipherable jargon. But that’s not where the trouble ends.

In a kind of bait and switch, for instance, students typically get less institutional financial aid if they return as sophomores, since colleges figure they already have them on the hook, a surprise for which they haven’t budgeted. Another cruel surprise: When students earn hard-won scholarships from the likes of local Rotary clubs and chambers of commerce, universities reduce their already-promised institutional financial aid by the same amount, resulting in a zero net gain — often without warning or explanation.

In this episode of College Uncovered, The Hechinger Report and GBH reveal these tricks. But there’s some good news, too. Though they represent a fraction of the nation’s more than 4,000 colleges and universities, more than 350 institutions agreed last year to simplify and standardize financial aid offers. And families might not know it, but they can negotiate for more financial aid, especially from the many universities and colleges that are having trouble filling seats these days.

Listen to the whole series

Jon: Interpreting financial aid offers from colleges and universities is confusing and difficult. And then there’s what happened to Emily Meyer, a parent from Saint Paul, Minnesota, who we met in our previous episode. She was sending her second kid to college when the financial aid process went completely off the rails. The school offered $3,000 in financial aid. Meyer did the math and figured that getting $12,000 over four years would be enough for her family to afford the school, so her daughter enrolled.

Kirk: Let the pursuit of higher learning begin, right?

Jon: Well, not exactly.

Emily Meyer: They came back the next year and said that that was a mistake. And that it shouldn’t have ever happened. And then we kind of argued back and forth about how, you know, part of our decision in agreeing to commit to this school was after we had negotiated the financials.

Jon: That’s right. The college offered the money, then took it away. She wouldn’t tell us which college it was, but as you can imagine, Meyer didn’t take this sitting down. This was money she was counting on.

Emily Meyer: And they said, sorry, it was a mistake. We’ll give you half of it for this year, but you’ll get no more going forward.

[College Uncovered theme music]

Kirk: This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report — a podcast pulling back the Ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH.

Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report.

Kirk: Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate. So GBH, …

Jon: … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you.

In our first season, we helped you navigate the college admissions process. Now we’re back to guide you through the even more confusing territory of paying for college. On the way, we’ll expose a lot of secrets that you really need to know, and some of the shady ways colleges make their prices seem much lower than they actually are. And before we’re done, we’ll tell you what you need to know to put the power back in your hands and get the best deal.

Today on the show: ‘Bait and Switch.’

Last time, we told you about misleading financial aid offers. Deciphering those is hard enough. Then you have the worst-case scenarios, like Meyer’s, in which the grant you counted on just disappears. And I should add that her family ended up having to take out more loans after the college rescinded the financial aid it promised her.

The whole process has become so frustrating for people that there have been few attempts to fix it.

Kirk: That’s right. But don’t hold your breath. The Department of Education urged colleges to adopt a single, simple, standardized financial aid offer. That was 11 years ago. And it was also voluntary. So fewer than half of colleges actually agreed to use it. Two years ago, the Government Accountability Office found that half of all financial aid offers from colleges made the total price seem lower than it actually was, and almost half did not include the price at all. That got Congress sniffing around and threatening to make colleges fix this.

To hold off the regulators, about 500 schools got together this year to create something called the College Cost Transparency Initiative. It’s supposed to make the financial aid forms more understandable and comparable from one college to another. If you step back and think about it, that’s pretty much admitting that they weren’t doing this all along. Which is kind of incredible.

Terry Hartle: Colleges and universities haven’t always done as much as they could to ensure that families had access to clear, accurate, comparable, consumer friendly information. And it’s clear to many of us in higher education that we needed to do a better job.

Jon: That’s Terry Hartle. For many years, he was higher education’s top lobbyist at the American Council on Education. Now he’s working with colleges to clean up these forms.

Terry Hartle: Obviously, to some institutions, a financial aid award letter is part of an effort to attract a student to enroll at that institution. So they can look more like a marketing document than a consumer information about how you’re going to pay for college.

Jon: Do you think colleges are signing on to this because it’s better than waiting for someone else to make them?

Terry Hartle: That was certainly part of the thinking that motivated us to sit down and say, ‘We need to do a better job.’ It was also, frankly, a thinking that, yeah, there’s some truth to the GAO report. We’re not doing as good a job as we can, and we owe it to consumers to do a better job.

Kirk: Some advocates for students are waiting to see if this new form really improves things. This is the first admission season colleges are using it. Plus, only about one in eight of them have signed on. Rachel Fishman works on this issue at the think tank New America. She believes Congress should require that financial aid offer letters be standardized, just as it regulates the people who sell you a mortgage.

Rachel Fishman: At the end of the day, they still format their own offers. They still make them all look their own way. You still can’t compare those offers readily or easily, and it’s still very complicated.

Kirk: That causes so much confusion that some students end up dropping out because they underestimated what college would actually cost, or they give up and never even set foot on a campus. This especially affects low-income students. About one in five students who are accepted in the spring never show up for college in the fall.

Jon: And, Kirk, even if they do enroll, the tricks that colleges pull with financial aid don’t stop there. There are a lot of rules around financial aid that families don’t always notice, even after their students are already on the campus.

Mark Salisbury: For example, to say you’ve qualified for $120,000 in scholarship money, and then the small print is over four years, and then the smaller print is, if you remain a full time student, pass 15 credits for a semester and maintain a 3.8 GPA.

Jon: That’s Mark Salisbury. He’s a former admissions counselor. And he says that’s only some of the fine print. We’ll tell you about more in a moment.

Salisbury says this is such a big problem that he co-founded a company called Tuition Fit, which uses crowdsourcing to help families find out the real amount of financial aid they’re likely to get. Basic access for families is free, and they can pay 49 bucks for more detailed information. Salisbury says it’s another potential solution to not getting the information that you need.

Mark Salisbury: And then it goes into our big data sets so that the family can come to TuitionFit and see which colleges are going to fit my price range. ‘Here’s my financial situation, here’s my student’s GPA, and we don’t want to spend more than $20,000 on college per year.’ Okay, here’s the schools that are offering a price in that price range. It’s all about balancing this marketplace so that the consumer has enough power in that space to be more likely to get the price that they need.

Kirk: Salisbury says colleges are playing on families’ emotions.

Mark Salisbury: There’s this notion that students have to shoot for the most prestigious place they can possibly get into, and that’s somehow their ticket to life as a successful adult. That’s a myth that’s absolutely been fostered by institutions, by the whole college marketing machine. And so from a parent’s standpoint, you start to think, ‘If I don’t make that happen for my student, then I’m a failure as a parent.’

Jon: But it’s really all about the money. I mean, colleges are businesses and they try to get their customers to pay as much as possible.

Kirk: Okay, so let’s recap here. Understand that financial aid may be contingent on keeping a certain GPA or remaining a full-time student, and scholarships and grants may be used to benefit the college’s bottom line instead of yours. Sadly, these are not the only dirty little secrets about financial aid that students and their parents need to know.

Jon: That’s right. So let’s talk about some of the other roadblocks families encounter. One of the most surprising to a lot of people is that the amount of financial aid they get will probably go down once a college has them on the hook. This is known as ‘front-loading’ or ‘bait and switch.’ What it means is that the amount of financial aid students get as freshmen typically goes down when they come back as sophomores. That leaves a lot of students in a bind. Do they take out more loans, transfer somewhere else, drop out?

Kirk: But wait! There’s more! Colleges often cut back on the financial aid they give students if the students also get private scholarships from the Rotary Club or the Garden Club or the Chamber of Commerce. After all the hard work you did to get those scholarships, about half of colleges reduce the financial aid they already promised you by the equivalent amount. This is known as scholarship displacement.

We talked to Kalwis Lo about this. He’s director of strategic partnerships at Scholarship America, which represents those private scholarship providers.

Kalwis Lo: The amount that is reduced is typically equal to the dollar amount of a student’s scholarship award. So it leaves them with a zero net benefit for the hard work that they put in.

Kirk: This usually comes as another nasty surprise to families and students, and it’s so angers parents and policymakers that several states have banned scholarship displacement.

Kalwis Lo: Oftentimes, students will either get a bill in their student account or the numbers don’t add up. And when they go to find out from the financial aid office, they learn that the institutional grant or some form of grant was reduced because of their scholarship award.

Jon: And once again, it’s worst for the poorest families.

Kalwis Lo: College is not affordable at the moment for students who come from low-income families. And so rather than borrowing loans or working several jobs out there in college, students pursue scholarship awards. They have to submit essays, they have to seek letters of recommendation. And when all that effort is put into a scholarship application and they get awarded a scholarship, and they see other financial aid being reduced to zero at an equivalent amount of their private scholarship, then they feel that their hard work was wasted.

Jon: So that means people who think they’ll get financial aid throughout their student’s time in college might have an unpleasant surprise coming.

Kirk: Yesenia Bedolla is a student in California, and she also found her financial aid reduced in her sophomore year.

Yesenia Bedolla: I mean, to get an outside scholarship, I put in a lot of prior work to that, and that’s the case for basically every student that receives an outside scholarship. They put a lot of time and effort into the process alone. So it is very discouraging to sort of, in a way, be punished for the, work that we did.

Jon: Did you go back to them and ask if they could give you more?

Yesenia Bedolla: I actually wasn’t aware that we could do that. Is that something? Okay.

Kirk: Yes! It is something! Students and their families can negotiate for more financial aid.

Jon: Right. So, finally, some good news — and important advice. That’s what we’re going to leave you with today.

A lot of colleges have an incentive to be more generous. That’s due to demographics. Enrollments are in decline. And the college-age population in the U.S. is shrinking. Understanding that can help you get leverage in this process. We’ll tell you in our next episode about exactly how generous and how much financial aid and discounts colleges are shoveling out to fill seats. But a lot of parents don’t know that they can ask the financial aid office to increase their offer. So in addition to being on the lookout for all of these tricks in the process, and knowing to read the offers very carefully and ask what things mean, families can negotiate for more financial aid.

Here’s Debbie Schwartz, who counsels families about financial aid. She says not to be shy about asking for more.

Debbie Schwartz: You know, I say, why not? What’s the worst answer you’re going to get? No? So you’ll be in the same position you are today, even if you got a few thousand dollars, a few thousand dollars every year, you know, could add up to another $6,000 to $8,000 and more. So I say, why not ask?

Kirk: Mark Salisbury offers similar advice. He says you should approach the process in the same way as you might buy a house.

Mark Salisbury: The very first exchange with the other side of the transaction is a first offer. You go back to the school and ask for a better price, and you ask genuinely, respectfully, kindly, and you begin to make the case that this cost is a substantial challenge for us as a family. And we would like to make it work. But we need your help to get there.

Jon: Especially at colleges that are hurting for enrollment, which is a lot of colleges these days.

Mark Salisbury: Then you have a lot of leverage. You really get to take advantage of the buyer’s market. The only time that that’s not true is if the only schools you’re applying to are the schools that everybody else would give their left hand to go to. But if I’m not one of those handful of schools and I’m scrambling to fill my class every year, then I’m much more willing to negotiate.

Jon: Debbie Schwartz makes the point that we often make on this podcast that higher education is a business. She says she came to that realization after going through the process herself.

Debbie Schwartz: And I had this awe of the ivory tower, you know, the academic campus. And so I myself didn’t think of them as a business until I had to go through the admissions process with my daughter. And that’s when I realized that this is a business, which is okay. And you need to understand you’re the consumer and you need to approach it as any other consumer purchase that you will make.

Kirk: And since information is power, we have some links on our landing page with advice about how to be the best consumer of a college education.

This is College Uncovered. I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH.

Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus from The Hechinger Report. Be sure to keep listening to future episodes to hear more about what colleges and universities don’t teach you.

Kirk: We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to gbhnewsconnect@wgbh.org and tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. And if you’re with a college or university, tell us what you think the public should know about higher ed.

Jon: This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …

Kirk: … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is supervising editor. Ellen London is the executive editor.

Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.

We had production assistants from Diane Adame.

All of our music is by college bands. Our theme song is by Left Roman out of MIT. Mei He is our project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

The post College Uncovered, Season 2, Episode 2 appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Congratulations! You got accepted to college. The next notification you’ll get: a financial aid offer, telling you what it will cost.

Those financial aid offers are notoriously indecipherable and misleading, making it difficult to make college cost comparisons or even know how much you’ll owe. Often crafted in a way that make a college look more affordable than it is, they’re full of technical jargon and abbreviations. Loans are described as ‘awards.’ The offers will list an ‘expected family contribution’ of zero, not accounting for those parent or student loans, which, in fact, eventually require a substantial family contribution.

In this episode of College Uncovered, The Hechinger Report and GBH show you what to look out for and secrets to taking back control of the financial aid process, and getting the best deal.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

Scroll to the end of this transcript to find out more about these topics.

Sound of college applicants: Oh my God, guys, I’m just not realizing how much I want to go to Brown. I’m so scared.

Oh, it’s okay baby.

Oh my God. Oh my God. What the actual frick. …

I got in! I got in!

Kirk: Congratulations. You just got into college.

Jon: Right. Now good luck paying for it. Figuring out the financial aid process is hard enough, and this year it was even worse, thanks to the government’s bungled rollout of the Federal Application for Financial Student Aid.

Kirk: Yeah, that’s the dreaded FAFSA form. It was released months late and with mistakes. For example, it didn’t account for inflation. And this is a form that millions of students depend on to get the financial aid they need. So the impact this could have on college enrollment is devastating. But figuring out how to pay for college has always been, let’s say, uncomfortable.

Caroline Miller: It’s kind of like having a financial colonoscopy.

Jon: That’s a parent going through the financial aid wringer for the first time. And she makes a pretty good point.

Caroline Miller: My name is Caroline Miller. I live in Anchorage, Alaska, and I have a senior in high school and we are in the waiting process.

Kirk: You can hear it in her voice how stressed out she is about all of this.

Caroline Miller: It’s awful. It is so anxiety inducing. Sometimes it just wakes you up at night, just wondering. We aren’t exactly financial gurus. We’re just hanging on by our fingernails. And we were very nervous about getting it wrong. I wonder why we all do this. I really do. I kind of sometimes think, why didn’t we just direct him towards a trade?

[College Uncovered theme music]

Kirk: This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report, a podcast pulling back the Ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH …

Jon: … and I’m Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report.

Kirk: Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate.

Jon: So we’re here to show you.

In our first season, we helped you navigate the college admissions process. Now we’re back to guide you through the even more confusing territory of financial aid. On the way, we’ll expose a lot of secrets that you really need to know, and some of the shady ways colleges make their prices seem much lower than they actually are.

Today on the show: ‘Buyer, Beware.’

Kirk: So paying for college education is likely to be among the most expensive purchases that people ever make. Even when you buy a house, every fee and charge has to be broken down for you. But figuring out how much you’ll ultimately have to pay for college can be like deciphering a foreign language.

Jon: The whole point of this episode is how complicated and confusing financial aid is.

Kirk: First, we’ll show you about the first step in this process, which is when the college is supposed to tell you how much financial aid you’ll get. Then we’ll show you what they do and the language they use to make that much harder than it needs to be.

Jon: But hang in there, because in our next episode, we’ll tell you some secrets about financial aid that most families don’t know, and that can help you get the best deal.

Kirk: Okay, so after that acceptance that you worked so hard for — and, again, congrats — comes another message from the college. And this one might not be so welcome. It’s when you find out how much financial aid you’re getting, taking you from the high of getting in to the low of realizing how much it’s all going to cost. Emily Meyer has already suffered through that with two of her kids, and now she has a third one on the way to college.

Emily Meyer: It’s an exciting process. And then it’s, like, a heartbreaking process, because you don’t want to get in somewhere that is a dream school and you can’t go because you can’t pay for it.

Jon: Meyer lives just outside Saint Paul, Minnesota. And when her oldest went to college, her family got no financial aid. That’s because after raising her kids alone, she had just gotten remarried and her new husband’s income put them in a bracket that required them to pay the full price.

Emily Meyer: Quite honestly, I was stunned. I was stunned at what college was going to cost us. I mean, we qualified for nothing. We qualified for zero. And I think that, to me, is, like, I want to just scream it from the rooftops, because I don’t think that people know that.

Jon: Man, you can really feel for these parents. But no matter how complex they think the application process is, financial aid is worse. First comes the pain of filling out the FAFSA. We talked a little bit about that at the top and how bungled it was this year. And that’s only the first step. The FAFSA is what’s used to determine how much federal aid a student might get, but most colleges also use it to decide how much institutional financial aid to give. By the way, just to make things worse, some private colleges make you fill out yet another form for that purpose.

Anyway, all of this information is used by colleges to send you a financial aid offer. It’s supposed to tell families what they’ll be paying, but it’s often just a jumble of jargon. Like when you see on the form that your expected family contribution is zero? Don’t buy it. You may actually have to take out thousands of dollars worth of loans to make it work. For some reason, colleges don’t consider loans to be part of your — quote, unquote — expected family contribution, even though you have to pay the money back with interest.

Kirk: Right. And those loans are often hidden behind indecipherable and meaningless abbreviations, or they’re misleadingly described as awards.

Jon: After going through this herself. Debbie Schwartz now advises other parents about colleges’ financial aid tricks. Schwartz lives in Pennsylvania, and she describes what goes through a parent’s mind when the financial aid offer shows up.

Debbie Schwartz: Is this free money? Is this a scholarship? Is this a loan? If it’s a loan, who’s providing the loan? What’s the interest rate?

Kirk: Schwartz charges $200 to $300 to help parents make sense of these offers. But sometimes even the people who do this for a living can be stumped. When Michelle Jean-Louis got into college, it looked to her like some of the schools were giving her enough financial aid to pay for all of her expenses.

Michelle Jean-Louis: I thought that meant that everything was covered, but upon looking at the offer letters, I would still have to pay $15,000 for room and board.

Jon: Jean-Louis’s offer referred to something called ‘expected costs.’ And then it referred to something else called ‘estimated costs.’

Kirk: Come on. Are you kidding me?

Jon: Nope. And both of those are somehow different from the ‘expected family contribution.’

Michelle Jean-Louis: There’s ‘federal subsidized loan’ and ‘federal unsubsidized loan.’ I wasn’t sure what that meant — if the ‘unsubsidized’ or the ‘subsidized’ meant that I wouldn’t have to pay them back.

Jon: A financial aid officer from her local university volunteered to help her out, and even he was confused.

Michelle Jean-Louis: It felt like we were figuring out at the same time, just because a lot of times on our Zoom meetings, he would be Googling things.

Jon: We asked Jean-Louis to take us back through some of the forms she got from all the colleges that accepted her.

Michelle Jean-Louis: They did not look the same. For example, the one that I’m looking at doesn’t really include any sort of glossary for what any of the terms met. But for another college, they included a glossary of what every word meant for their specific institutions, which I later found out is not uniform across the board.

Jon: She finally decided on Harvard, which offered her the biggest amount of aid. But the whole torturous process took a lot of the celebration out of getting into college for her.

Michelle Jean-Louis: I like to say that applying to college is not the hard part. It’s applying for financial aid. Most students go through this process blind, and a lot of times when you do sign these financial aid offers, you still don’t know what you are in for until you get to college and you get the bill.

Kirk: Okay, so just to be clear, Jean-Louis was smart enough to get into Harvard but still struggled with these forms.

Jon: Yeah, like I said, they can trip up even the experts. Anika Van Eaton is vice president for policy at uAspire, which helps the most vulnerable students go to college. She says it’s often Black, Hispanic and low-income students, and students whose parents never finished college, who suffer the most.

Anika Van Eaton: A lot of first-generation college students are doing this by themselves.

Kirk: Andrew Moe experienced this himself. He used to be director of admissions at Swarthmore and now works at Matriculate, which links up high-achieving low-income high school students with advisors who can help them get to college. But before that, Moe himself was the first in his own family to go to college, and he says he met with his college counselor maybe four times for the entire time he was in high school.

Andrew Moe: And that’s what our students face, right? And it’s really problematic, especially for low-income students, those with less social capital, like first-generation students, to really understand this and then compare financial aid award letters.

Jon: So what happens to them?

Andrew Moe: There are some students that they take on this debt, or they see these bills and they drop out after a semester or after a year because it just becomes too much.

Kirk: Rachel Fishman says she saw this all the time when she used to volunteer as a financial aid counselor. So when she later started working at the think tank New America, she decided to investigate. Fishman collected more than 11,000 financial aid offers from nearly 1,000 colleges, and she found that they used a 136 different words to describe federal direct unsubsidized student loans.

Jon: Yeah, those are the most common kinds of loans that undergrads take out.

Kirk: Yup. And colleges called them things like ‘direct unsub’ or ‘d-unsub’ or ‘estimated federal unsubsidized.’ In two dozen cases, they didn’t even use the word ‘loan’ at all, making it seem like these offers were scholarships. But these are not scholarships.

Rachel Fishman: And then there were some institutions that were just doing a really, really bad job and making it seem like students were getting a full ride and doing some, like, confusing things with loans to make it seem that way.

Kirk: Seventy percent of colleges grouped all the aid together without specifying what was a grant and what was a loan.

Jon: We met up with Anika Van Eaton from. uAspire to look at a few examples.

Anika Van Eaton: Yeah, well, I actually see a few of the financial aid offers that I brought. So if you were to look at this, it looks like you’re getting a full ride. It looks like everything is covered. But actually the specific offer that I’m looking at includes the full complement of loans that the student would take out and actually $16,000 in a Parent Plus loan. So something that looks like a full ride actually includes about over $20,000 in debt.

Jon: To say this is confusing is an understatement. Yet colleges and universities persist in using these complex forms with wording families don’t understand.

So is it possible that that’s on purpose? That some of these colleges purposely make it harder for a family to realize they have to take out loans, or to hide the total cost?

Andrew Moe: Yeah, 100 percent.

Kirk: That’s Andrew Moe again. His organization helps smart, low-income students translate terms like EFC, which stands for ‘expected family contribution.’ EFC is one of those terms that doesn’t actually mean what it sounds like, since it usually doesn’t include the loans you need to take out. I think most reasonable people, Jon, would assume that a loan is part of the — quote, unquote — expected family contribution. But colleges don’t look at it that way, which can really trip people up.

Andrew Moe: And I had one really challenging example where a student sent me his letter. It had zero EFC — ‘zero estimated family contribution’ — literally written on the letter. And here he had about $40,000 in loans listed on the letter. And he wrote back and he said, ‘I think I just got a full ride.’ And I unfortunately had to tell him no. And it was written to essentially obscure what the actual cost is.

Jon: So a lot of families end up thinking they’ll pay less for college than they actually will. You put down your deposit in the spring, and when the bill comes in the fall, you find out, ‘Hey, I owe a lot more than I expected.’ A report from the Government Accountability Office found that half of all financial aid offers from universities and colleges made the total price seem lower than it actually was, and 40 percent did not include the price at all.

Kirk: So if you’re stressed out by just listening to us, describe all these obstacles that college has put in your way, you are not alone. So are a lot of other people. And in our next episode, we’re going to tell you about an effort to make colleges adopt a single standardized financial aid offer that’s much easier to understand.

Jon: And don’t forget: We’re going to give you some tips to make the process easier and help you get the best deal.

Kirk: This is College Uncovered, from GBH and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza.

Jon: And I’m Jon Marcus. We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to gbhnewsconnect@wgbh.org, and tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. And if you’re with a college or university, tell us what you think the public should know about higher education.

This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …

Kirk: … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating. Meg Woolhouse is supervising editor. Ellen London is the executive editor.

Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.

We had production assistants from Diane Adame.

All of our music is by college bands. Our theme song is by Left Roman out of MIT.

Mei He is our project manager and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Thanks so much for listening.

The post College Uncovered, Season 2, Episode 1 appeared first on The Hechinger Report.