What “cost of attendance” means

What the cost of attendance is

The cost of attendance (COA) is a college’s own estimate of what one year costs a student. It adds up tuition and fees, housing and food, books, course materials, supplies and equipment, transportation, and miscellaneous personal expenses. Where they apply, it can also include loan fees, dependent-care costs, disability-related costs and the cost of a study-abroad program. Federal Student Aid defines the term and each college’s financial aid office sets its own figure for the academic year.

Two colleges can build the number differently — one assumes on-campus housing, another assumes the student lives at home — so the same “cost of attendance” label can cover different assumptions. The components are what to compare.

Sticker price and cost of attendance

People say “sticker price” for two different things: the tuition line alone, or the whole cost of attendance. On this site the sticker price is the published cost of attendance — tuition and fees plus housing, food, books and the rest — because that is the figure the aid formula uses and the figure the net prices are measured against. At public colleges it is the in-state figure; the out-of-state premium sits on top of it.

Tuition on its own understates a year by everything the cost of attendance adds. When a college quotes only tuition, ask for the full cost of attendance before comparing it with anywhere else.

Why it matters for financial aid

Need-based aid starts from this number. The FAFSA turns a family’s finances into the Student Aid Index (SAI), an eligibility index rather than a price. A college subtracts the SAI from its cost of attendance to measure financial need, then decides how much of that need it meets with grants, work-study and loans — the process Federal Student Aid describes. Total aid cannot exceed the cost of attendance.

So the same SAI produces a different need at every college, because every college has a different cost of attendance — and colleges differ again in how much of that need they meet. That is why two offers for the same student can be thousands of dollars apart. You can estimate your SAI in about two minutes, no account needed.

Cost of attendance and net price

The cost of attendance is the top of the range. The net price is the cost of attendance minus grants and scholarships — aid that does not have to be repaid — and it is the figure closer to what families actually pay. The College Scorecard publishes each college’s average net price by family income, and those averages are what the college pages and the state pages on this site show.

What a family can do with it

Compare colleges on the full cost of attendance, never on tuition alone. Then look past it: check the average net price for your income band at each college on the list, and run each college’s own net price calculator for a figure built on your numbers.

If a college’s cost of attendance leaves out a real cost your student carries — a long commute, a required computer, child care — the financial aid office can adjust an individual student’s cost of attendance for documented circumstances. It is worth asking.

Knowing what to do with these numbers — which colleges are likely to meet more of your need, which strategies could lower your number, what to say in an appeal — is the work families pay a private counselor for. It is what My School Advisor does, for $15 a month.