August 22, 2017
The following article is from Inside Higher Ed
Many colleges are confusing or discouraging low-income students with overly complicated net price calculators, said a report issued last week by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. The report praised simple tools that perform some or all of the functions of net price calculators, which federal law requires colleges to provide as a means for prospective students to figure out their aid eligibility.
But the report noted that 30-plus elite colleges block College Abacus, one simple tool, instead insisting that students instead use the colleges' own aid calculators. And one tool that the report did praise was a calculator used at Wellesley College that turns out to have much in common with College Abacus and that is now being used by other colleges as well. The issue raised by the report is, in effect, would simple be best for providing aid information to the students at the lowest income levels?
Many net price calculators aim for precision, and they tell prospective students to gather their parents' tax records, information on family income and assets, and more. For middle-class families (and upper-class families who qualify for aid at plenty of colleges), this may make sense.
But aid experts have long said that for low-income, first-generation students, these kinds of questions can be intimidating -- and scare people off. Further, they say that once you establish that someone is very poor, that may be all the information you really need. And that's the idea behind College Abacus, which is sponsored by ECMC Group, a nonprofit educational corporation. (ECMC Group is the nonprofit owner of Zenith Education Group, which purchased some of the Everest and WyoTech campuses formerly under Corinthian Colleges.)
Abril Hunt, outreach manager for ECMC, said it's all about the questions you ask. With the right questions for low-income students, you don't really need tax records, she said. In five minutes, with just a handful of questions, you can get the necessary information, she said.
For example, a key question is: Are you eligible for reduced or free lunch at school?
For those who answer yes, there is no need for more information to tell them that they will almost certainly qualify for Pell Grants, other forms of federal aid, institutional aid and various government-backed loans, Hunt said. Of course, they will later need to complete formal aid applications, Hunt said. But this stage is about showing students what is possible and encouraging them to take the next steps in applying to college and for financial aid.
"The whole focus here is on the first-generation students who are intimidated by the process," she said. The other key part of the tool is its ability to allow students to specify all the colleges that intrigue them and to be told of eligibility at all of them (including varying levels of likely aid).
About 50,000 students or counselors have used the tool this year. It is also available in Spanish. The typical time required to answer the questions and get an estimate is five minutes.
Some colleges that have blocked access to Abacus have said that they fear there could be privacy issues or that someone could try to sell student data. But Hunt said that Abacus doesn't save the files. In fact, except for a minority of students who ask to save files so they can return and check on more colleges, most students' data are never saved at all. Students find out they are eligible for aid (typically a lot), are encouraged, and proceed.
She said that Abacus "doesn't have anything to sell," so the idea of selling data is a groundless worry.
MyinTuition
Also gaining traction is a similarly simple approach (again, with the idea of a few questions and no tax forms) called MyinTuition.
It is the system from Wellesley praised by the Cooke Foundation. It doesn't take the place of a net calculator or a full aid application. But it does encourage low-income students that they qualify for lots of aid.
The system was created for Wellesley by Phillip B. Levine, the Katharine Coman and A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics. He has since created a nonprofit to expand the tool, which is now in use at 15 colleges, including Amherst, Bowdoin, Carleton, Colorado, Dartmouth, Mount Holyoke and Pomona Colleges.
Levine reports tens of thousands of unique sign-ins to the system in the last year. And he too argues that educators should start off with a basic tool and worry about tax returns and precision later. "I like to think about it like a financial aid funnel," he said via email. "Enter little information, get a quick ballpark answer (note we present a range of estimates). Enter more information, get a more precise answer."