How Much You'll Pay for Your Senior's Degree

(This viz almost certainly needs to be viewed from a desktop.)

Beyond the Brand is the theme of this year's March Madness blog series. It's meant to demonstrate ways to glean as much information as possible about students' colleges options. In other words, it's about research.

Amazing that something as fundamental as the total cost of attendance would require time and analysis, but here we are.

And here we go:

March Madness, Round 3: How much would parents of current seniors pay for a four-year degree at any of the schools remaining in the NCAA tournament?

Ever bought a house? I read somewhere that the average home closing require over 100 signatures from the buyer, at least if a mortgage is involved. It's been almost a decade since we bought our current home, but I still remember my husband complaining of writer's cramp.

Think about the types of documents we all sign during that transaction. There are a lot of disclosures, truth-in-lending statements, inspection reports, and more. And, you know, we tend to read that fine print a little more closely than, say, the verbage on mobile phone agreements or just about anything else shoved under our noses in the course of a day. Why? Because we don't want to find ourselves blindsided by unexpected costs or hassles.

Let's say, hypothetically, that we decided to throw caution to the winds and skip all that documentation. I bet there would still remain one piece of information everybody in the room would know. We'd all know how much we had agreed to pay.

You probably see where I'm going with this. What if we treated a home purchase the way we let kids commit to attend a college? Would we spitball mortgage payment amounts? Or muse, "Let's just hope for the best, I guess?"

I'm not quite sure why an entirely different set of expectations surrounds the college choice, but it's some combination of love for our kids, grief for our days gone by with them, and probably caffeine.

I cannot guarantee the cost of any particular college, but pairing AI with government data allows me to make an educated guess. I also think it's a fair guess, as each school's projected prices are extrapolated using median increases from their own data. Obviously, the chart above contains those projections.

Couple of notes:

I've calculated total costs of attendance for students living on campus. Colleges themselves aren't always in control of how much room/board costs may rise. In a perfect world, I'd break down the increases by tuition vs. everything else. But, hey, I'm a solo developer and have only so many minutes to churn out a post.

A cautionary word about grad rates

The chart above projects the four-year cost of college for a current HS senior.

One can never overemphasize the importance of that 4-year grad rate, or overlook the fact that the 6-yr rate is considered the default. BTW, look at the College Scorecard interface. (Continued below)

See the little "i" next to the grad rate?

Here's what you see when you click it. (You can't just hover; you have to click.)

Never do I seek to be provocative or acrimonious.

But why are we okay with an 8-year-rate shown as the default?

I raise the issue in the context of the costs for obvious reasons: I don't want to make my tired AI platform churn out prices through 2034. And I want to catch some basketball.

See you in Round 4!