🎧 SHORT ON TIME?
Hit play above and listen on the go.
BEST FOR: RISING GRADE 12 • HELPFUL FOR GRADE 11 FAMILIES PLANNING AHEAD
She found the college in the fall of her junior year.
The program was exactly right. The campus was exactly right.
On the tour, she stopped walking, looked at me, and said:
“I could be happy here.”
And she was going to get in. I knew it. I had read her essays.
Her family still could not have paid for it.
Not with a stretch.
Not with a summer job.
Not with anything reasonable a seventeen-year-old could do.
💡 IF YOU ONLY READ ONE THING TODAY
Nobody in that family did anything wrong.
They just never ran one number.
And the tour was never going to tell them.
The tour is not designed to tell them.
💡 HOW THIS HELPS PAY FOR COLLEGE
Here is what makes this so hard:
The information was available the whole time.
The college had a net price calculator on its financial aid page. It took about ten minutes to complete and estimate what the family might actually pay after grants and scholarships—not simply the price printed in the brochure.
They could have run it in October of junior year, in the quiet, before anyone was emotionally invested.
Instead, they found out in April.
They were holding an acceptance letter in one hand and a financial aid offer in the other, realizing that those two pieces of paper did not belong to the same reality.
By then, most of their other options had already closed.
WHY WE DO NOT RUN IT
I want to be gentle here because I understand why.
Running the calculator feels like a mood killer.
Your teen is excited. The tour was beautiful. Nobody wants to be the parent who opens a spreadsheet in the middle of a good moment.
So it waits.
And by April, the number is no longer information.
It feels like a verdict.
The same number.
Completely different weight.
⏸️ WHAT I WOULD DO DIFFERENTLY
I would run it before the tour.
Not after.
Before.
A family that walks onto a campus already knowing the estimated number can enjoy the day without being naive about what the college may cost.
They know what they are looking at.
And when the number is workable, that tour can still become one of the best days of the entire year.
❤️ YOUR WEEKEND MOVE
Choose the college your teen loves most.
Go to its financial aid page.
Find the net price calculator and run it.
Then sit with the estimate for one minute before you say anything.
It is not a verdict.
It is information you have from July, not April.
That is the whole advantage.
And it is a very large advantage.
On Tuesday, the three tests that every college must pass before it goes on the list.
Not one test.
Three.
Most families only run the first.
You do not have to go broke to go to college.
—Angela