Every advisor with clients who have kids has had this conversation: a family sees a $90,000 sticker price and panics — without realizing that number is rarely what anyone actually pays. Phillip Levine, a leading researcher on college affordability, pulls back the curtain on how college pricing really works: the need-based and merit-based aid formulas that quietly discount tuition for most families, and why the system is built the way it is. You'll leave with a clear, defensible way to guide a conversation that's equal parts confusing and emotionally loaded for clients — plus concrete strategies families can use to potentially lower what they actually pay.
Learning objectives:
- Get inside the "black box" of college pricing to understand how sticker price, need-based aid, and merit aid actually interact — so you can speak to it credibly in client conversations
- Walk away with strategies you can bring to clients to help them potentially reduce the price they pay for college
Phillip Levine is a Professor of Economics at Wellesley College and one of the country's leading voices on college pricing and financial aid. His latest books, A Problem of Fit: How the Complexity of College Pricing Hurts Students — and Universities and Hidden Tuition: An Insider's Guide to College Pricing and Financial Aid, examine how confusing and opaque pricing systems limit access to higher education — and what can be done to fix them.
Levine founded MyinTuition Corp., a nonprofit whose tools give families simplified, personalized estimates of college costs at dozens of institutions; following its acquisition by the College Board, he now serves as the organization's Senior Fellow for Higher Ed Affordability and Transparency Initiatives. He is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.