Can college-bound high school students find your net price calculator? Most say, “no.”

In 2011, the federal government mandated that colleges and universities provide net price calculators on their Web sites, so that students and their families could estimate their net cost of attendance. While schools may be complying with the mandate, they are not making the calculators easy for students to find.

In a recent survey of college-bound high school juniors and seniors, less than a quarter reported using a net price calculator. Among those who did not use them, three out of four said it was because they couldn’t find the calculator on the school’s site.

Source for charts: Forthcoming 2012 E-Expectations survey of 4,025 college-bound juniors and seniors (Noel-Levitz, OmniUpdate, CollegeWeekLive, and NRCCUA®)

This last result illustrates the importance of making cost calculators easy to find. As financial aid consultants Todd Wilkins and Wes Butterfield have blogged about previously, placement is crucial for net price calculators. Todd Wilkins specifically recommends having a calculator within three clicks of your home page, in areas such as the admissions home page, the financial aid home page, or in your site’s main navigation.

The importance of estimating merit aid with net price calculators

When the federal government required campuses to have net price calculators—and when it provided its own calculator for campuses—it left out a crucial component: merit aid. Having a net price calculator that does not have a merit aid component makes a campus appear less competitive on price to potential students, as they will not see scholarships or other awards that could significantly lower their cost to attend.

The Noel-Levitz net price calculator, the TrueCost Calculator, is customized to include merit aid estimates for each campus, and visitor data show a strong interest in estimating merit aid. Among the more than 1,000,000 visitors who have accessed the TrueCost Calculator through more than 200 campus sites:

• 69 percent of those visitors completed the merit aid estimate.
• Of those, 51 percent went on to complete the full aid estimate.

The E-Expectations results and the TrueCost Calculator results suggest that more students will use net price calculators if they can find them and if they can see scholarship and gift aid along with federal aid. Campuses that are not providing merit aid estimates or are burying their calculators on their sites may be doing themselves a disservice in positioning themselves competitively.

What about your net price calculator? Do you know where it is on your site? And how can you use it to be a more effective online recruitment tool? Drop us an e-mail with any questions, and we’ll offer our suggestions based on our net price calculator work with campuses. After all, this issue is likely to only grow in importance in the coming years.