Hi everyone I'm Rose Marie Miller here with Emma Whitford and education reporter here at

Forbes here to tell us about determining the actual cost of college.

Thank you so much for joining me today, Emma.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely.

So Emma, how do you see the role of financial aid

in making college education accessible, especially those from

underrepresented backgrounds?

I think for most families, going to college these days is not really possible without financial aid.

I mean you see so many media reports of the rising costs of college, of rising

sticker prices climbing into the 70-80-90-K range and for most people they cannot afford

investment like that without some kind of financial aid so it's definitely a huge part of the college application

process for almost every student these days. So can you explain some of the

challenges students and families face and trying to understand the true cost of college?

Yeah, it's actually really hard to figure out exactly what you might pay to go to college.

We can look up tuition prices at a given institution and what you'll find typically is just the sticker price which is how much they're charging for tuition that year but almost no students actually pay that price at most private institutions and a lot of public institutions as well.

They will pay what's called the net price, which is the out-of-pocket price that comes after financial aid and loans are taken into account typically.

So it's really hard to determine without going through the financial aid process what that cost actually will be.

Wow, that's interesting. You never really know how much you're paying to go to college.

It's very frustrating.

So how do private colleges utilize tuition discounting as a strategy and what impact does it have on the perceived cost of education?

Yeah, a lot of private colleges practice tuition discounting, which is setting a high net price and then in turn dealing out these really significant

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