Report Examines How High School Students and Parents Perceive Public College Cost
Author: Erin Dunlop Velez and Laura Horn
Source: National Center for Education Statistics
A new Stats in Brief report published by the National Center for Education Statistics describes how high school students and their parents perceive the cost of one year at an in-state public four-year college.
The report uses data from the Base Year, the First Follow-up, and the 2013 Update of the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. Authors compared estimates from students and parents with institutional published in-state tuition and fees from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.
Key findings include:
- 57 percent of ninth graders overestimated the costs of one year of tuition and mandatory fees at an in-state public four-year college by more than 25 percent.
- 32 percent of ninth graders underestimated the cost of one year of tuition and mandatory fees at an in-state four-year college by more than 25 percent. Black students were more likely to underestimate the cost (46 percent). Similarly, students from the lowest quintile of the socio-economic status were more likely to underestimate the cost (45 percent).
- 27 percent of ninth graders were not at all confident in their estimate of the cost of one year of tuition and mandatory fees for one year at an in-state public four-year college. In eleventh grade, the same students had a higher degree of uncertainty (51 percent).
- The percentage of students planning to enroll in college decreased from 51 percent for ninth grades to 45 percent for eleventh graders.
To read the full report, please visit the National Center for Education Statistics website.
—Georgiana Mihut
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