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New Tool Can Help Predict College Costs

August 01, 2024 Steve Schwaller

(Undated)– For Iowa students thinking about attending college in the fall, an interactive online “Tuition Tracker” can help them figure out some of the costs ahead of time. The tool can be especially useful to people attending college for the first time.

The Tuition Tracker lets a student calculate the “real costs” by seeing not only the published tuition, but the cost of other needs, showing them what they might end up actually paying. Andrew Koricich, with the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges, says a tool like this can be helpful for students in rural areas…

“Whenever you have rural students, many of whom are still going to be the first in their families to go to college, maybe coming from communities where there aren’t a lot of folks with college experience, tools like the Tuition Tracker can be really important.”

The latest Tuition Tracker update also shows historical data, such as student retention and graduation rates. But Koricich says no matter how accurate the data, there many factors that can affect the actual price of college – and it could sometimes be lower than what the tracker reflects…

“It is a very complicated thing that includes a lot of variables. And so, you can have state grant programs that may not be reflected in the net price, even though any in-state student attending that institution will receive that grant.”

Koricich recommends doing additional research, including visiting the website of each school the student is interested in to get the most up-to-date information.

(Courtesy Iowa News Service)