Okay, since I’ve literally written the book on this, I’ll bite.

The authors’ argument is principally that more information about pricing and aid would help students avoid the nefarious scheming (judgment theirs not mine) of colleges’ manipulation of price. https://twitter.com/postopinions/status/1265114693322133505

Their assertion is that more information would be particularly advantageous for the neediest students.

What information do they think students need? Average net price by family income. How do they want this information to be procured? They want government to compel universities to report it.

The good news is that these data already exist! @ipeds_nces publishes average net price by family income - nearly exactly the metric the authors were looking for.

While these averages aren’t perfect (they only capture students who receive Title IV funding), they are more than adequate for any student coming from the bottom 60-70% of household income.

The challenge isn’t principally the existence of the information itself; it’s access to that information.

That’s why my team and I have put together a suite of resources to help colleges and universities more clearly communicate pricing and aid: https://eab.com/research/enrollment/roadmaps/clearly-communicate-price-and-financial-aid/

But let’s move on to the less overt and more implicit assertion: that colleges are engaged in some nefarious practice related to he distribution of aid.

I won’t claim that this doesn’t happen, but I’ve spoken with probably in the range of 500 institutions about this, and I could count on my fingers alone the number who I thought were doing something shady.

Most institutions use what they call a matrix to assign grant aid based on only two characteristics: merit and need. Basically, different intersections of academic preparedness and financial need = different grant aid.

Almost all private colleges have consultants who help them do this because they want to understand how much tuition revenue they have to trade off to enroll a higher-ability class or a more diverse class. The consultants have predictive models that facilitate this analysis.

Because public divestment from higher education has left public universities more dependent than ever on tuition revenue (in Colorado, for example, the publics get <10% of funding from the state), many of them now employ this technique as well.

To those not involved, it may sound shady - like some sort of black box designed to funnel money to rich kids while duping low-income students into paying more, but this just isn’t how it works. And the proof is in the very metric these authors wish existed!

My analysis is a few years old on this, so it’s possible (though unlikely) that things have changed significantly, but I looked at the average net price by family income data to see if there were many schools that charged students from higher incomes less than low-income students

There weren’t. We didn’t find a single four-year public university where this was the case. And less than 20% of private four-year nonprofits had even 1 of the 5 income brackets out of order.

The reality right now is that unless you have wealth or some attribute that makes you highly desirable to some institution, higher education is far too unaffordable for all but the truly affluent.

But the truly affluent are also the ones with the best access to information. They’re the ones most likely to press the financial aid office for an extra thousand bucks because James is really just an *outstanding* student.

A College Board analysis of the College Scorecard when it came out showed that it only impacted the behavior of affluent students, students enrolled in private high school, and students scoring above a 1200 (out of 1600) on the SAT.

Information can be a great democratizer, but only if people are well-equipped to understand that the information exists, how to find it, and what it means. I fear financing a college degree is just far too complicated for any source of information to solve this problem.

The authors are right that there is a need for better breakdowns by income in the graduate data, but this is really hard to measure. How do you compare a 40-year-old career switcher with a 23-year-old recent grad? The grad might have family support.

Financing college and helping students understand how it works is, honestly, my favorite subject. Dispiriting to see “People need more information to prevent colleges from hosing them,” in a major newspaper op-es. It’s just not a good take.