Transparent Pricing in Higher Ed

If you haven't read it yet, I recommend that you pick up a copy of Paul Tough's book The Years that Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us. In particular, the section starting on page 182 of the hardcover is a revealing picture of how college finances affect recruiting.  You can find the same (or very similar) content in this New York Times article.

In short, most private colleges need to balance academic admissions requirements with what are essentially financial admissions requirements. The latter are needed to ensure sufficient revenue to make a budget. Public institutions are not immune either, since for many of them their revenue also depends heavily on tuition. Academic goals and financial goals for recruitment vary widely from one institution to the next, depending on market position, endowment, and other factors. This leads to a lot of variation in the actual price a given student might pay at different institutions.

Every college now has a net tuition calculator, which--given a prospective student's characteristics--estimates the out-of-pocket cost, which often includes loans. However, this is just an approximation.

Mark Salisbury's idea was to make college pricing transparent by sharing real offers received by accepted applicants: crowdsourcing the problem. The site is about a year old, and you can find it at tuitionfit.org. To get a sense of how it works, look at this article. It looks like his timing (and co-founder Kimberly Dyer) was stellar, given the increased competition colleges are seeing from demographic changes and from the new acceptance of "student poaching" as an enrollment strategy.