Tuition Discounting is on the rise and this is good news if you want to reduce the cost of College.  Tuition Discounting is when a college will offset its published tuition price with a discount of institutional grants and scholarships to entice students to enroll in their school.  The vast majority of private and public colleges and universities use tuition discounts to attract students. According to a report released on August 25, 2015, by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), tuition discounting is at an all-time high. This is even true of many institutions that are struggling with decreasing enrollment and declining revenue. The good news for parents, the trend is going to continue.

While the practice of tuition discounting has been going on for many years, 2014 saw the use of tuition discounting dramatically increase. The average freshman in 2014 received institutional money that covered an astonishing 54.3% of the school’s published tuition price.

Why the sudden increase in tuition discounting? Private nonprofit colleges and universities use tuition discounting to compete with public schools for students. Also, many colleges want to increase the number of incoming freshmen and some schools use tuition discounting to increase diversity at their respective school. Moreover, most colleges use tuition discounting to attract better students, wealthy families, and students of alumni (legacies).

If you are one of my coaching clients or have watched one of my video lessons, you have learned that schools use enrollment management to place incoming freshmen into classifications and set a range of tuition prices based upon these specific pools of students. Colleges put incoming freshmen into pools and set a range of tuition prices based on those pools. Many times a family’s income and assets play a big role in which pool a student is placed. This process of “financial aid leveraging” within each pool helps set the parameters on how much financial aid can be issued. This mathematical and computer-based process helps a college to attract and enroll the best students into their college while issuing the minimum amount of financial aid.

For example, a school might take a $30,000 scholarship that, in the past, they have given to a needy student in a lower classification; and instead, give three scholarships of $10,000 each to a wealthier pool of students. Because the school was able to attract three wealthier students to their school with a scholarship instead of just one needy student, the college now has increased its total revenue. Without the tuition discount, the more affluent students probably would not have attended this particular college.

If colleges are going to play this game of “financial aid leveraging” then you should learn the rules of the game first, and then hire a great college planning coach that has years of winning experience to help you reduce the cost of college (like me).

The bottom line is… there are two types of families with two different prices that they will pay for college:

One price for families that have me working on their behalf and a much higher price for those families who do not.

Please contact me for a free 30 min. College Cost Reduction telephone call.

You can purchase the report THE 2014 TUITION DISCOUNTING STUDY directly from NACUBO . The cost is $750 for non-members of NACUBO.

The post Tuition Discounting appeared first on Clark College Funding Inc..