Copyright The New York Times
It is the scourge of college shoppers everywhere: In so many instances, you have no idea what you’ll pay until you apply and get in. Now comes a company called Niche, with a tool that could help. You spend a few minutes setting a budget, listing the colleges you’re interested in and entering your academic and financial details. A few minutes later, out pops a detailed side-by-side comparison estimating what financial aid colleges (up to 20) might offer and what your bottom-line price could be. Niche is not the first company to build a tool like this one. But its reach — it claims that half of all college-bound high school students register on its website each year — demands attention. And it is almost certain to get a lot of it from the many colleges that will test it extensively and object to the inevitable variations in price quotes. Colleges offer their own cost predictions (but not guarantees) through their so-called net price calculators, which they have to offer by law. Some of them collect more financial detail than Niche does, but their calculators can be out of date and may not predict merit scholarships the way that Niche tries to. Moreover, you have to input the same data over and over and over each time you start in with another college. In my testing of Niche’s True Cost tool before its introduction on Tuesday, I found a lot to like. It allows users to set budgets and get detailed information on travel costs to school, local off-campus housing costs and prevailing wages for part-time jobs. Then it searches federal data, the colleges’ own information on their “common data sets” and financial aid awards from former students. What Niche does not do, however, is scrape information from the colleges’ net price calculators. It may do this someday soon, but only with permission from partner schools. In the meantime, it works with a company called College Aid Pro to help with estimates. I did some comparisons between Niche’s estimates and others from universities’ net price calculators using various financial situations. In two instances, Northwestern quoted prices that were about twice as high as Niche’s. Nobody’s perfect — and the problem could be Niche’s, Northwestern’s or related to additional details that the college asks for that Niche does not — but that’s a big gap that could mislead users. Niche said it looked at the issue on Monday and suggested that Northwestern’s calculator was off. During internal testing of the True Cost tool, its quotes were within $2,500 or 5 percent (whichever was greater) of the colleges’ own net price calculator results 77 percent of the time. Northwestern did not respond to messages seeking an explanation. There is some revealing history here. In 2012, a graduate student, Abigail Seldin, set up College Abacus, a tool that scraped colleges’ net price calculators so users could compare their costs side by side more easily. The colleges were not pleased. Some of them blocked her searches. She got nastygrams from institutions that clearly believed they were singular and incomparable — and really, how dare some kid question them anyway? After another entity acquired College Abacus, the acquirer shut the tool down several years later. But Ms. Seldin — now chief growth officer of Scholarship America, which administers about $340 million in awards each year on behalf of businesses, nonprofits and others — still pines for total college cost transparency, upfront. “For the vast majority of families, the biggest question in selecting a college is: Can we afford this?’” she said via email. “To answer that question, they need to have accurate financial information — and I’m thrilled that Niche is putting real resources into helping families make this critical decision.” College Abacus was a gnat as far as the colleges were concerned. Niche is an elephant. Will they howl in protest about significant differences between their own estimates and Niche’s? Will they then feel compelled to work with Niche and feed it official predictive pricing data? Many of these schools already work with Niche, given its other college-related offerings. “The reason colleges ultimately partner with us is because we have an engaged user base that believes in Niche and trusts Niche,” said Luke Skurman, the chief executive. Whatever his intentions, his robust entrance into the college price quote game is welcome, because the phrase “college price quote game” is not one that we should ever have to utter. If colleges have a problem with Mr. Skurman, they have no one to blame but themselves. After all, they could have offered better clarity and easier comparisons a very long time ago.
