Secrets To Spending Less On The Cost Of College

Money Tree Investing

Money Tree Investing Podcast

Stockmarket, Valuestocks, Investing, Finance, Passiveincome, Wealth, Business, Personalfinance

4.6 • 658 Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2025

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mark Salisbury shares the secrets to spending less on the cost of college! As the founder of TuitionFit, explains how the college pricing and financial aid system is designed to favor schools over families. He describes how emotional marketing, opaque pricing, and complex financial aid forms create confusion and limit families' leverage. he outlines how students and parents can regain control by defining their price range first, using resources like TuitionFit and net price calculators, and strategically managing assets, timing, and financial disclosures. He also covers how income, savings, and family structure affect aid, and more!

We discuss...

Mark Salisbury explains how the college pricing system is intentionally vague, designed to benefit schools rather than families.
This conversation exposes how the financial aid process operates like a hidden marketplace where families unknowingly pay vastly different prices for the same education.
Mark explains the difference between a school's sticker price, discount rate, and net price, emphasizing that the last is what truly matters.
He details how the FAFSA and CSS Profile collect information that can be used by colleges to assess a family's financial "willingness to pay."
Timing and disclosure of assets can dramatically impact how much financial aid a family receives.
Families with business ownership structures may have advantages in how assets and income are reported.
Fnancial aid formulas often penalize savings while rewarding debt.
Salisbury argues that families should start with their budget first, then find schools that fit within that price range—rather than applying and hoping for aid.
Tools like TuitionFit help families compare real financial aid offers and discover the true market price for college.
He advises against oversharing financial information before admission decisions are made to preserve negotiation leverage.
Negotiating college costs is compared to buying a car—where informed consumers who know their target price get better deals.
Transparency and data sharing among families are key to fixing the broken college pricing system.
Mark calls for systemic reform to make higher education pricing fairer, more transparent, and tied to real market value.

Today's Panelists:

Kirk Chisholm | Innovative Wealth
Douglas Heagren | Mergent College Advisors
Diana Perkins | Trading With Diana
Jack Wang | Smart College Buyer

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For more information, visit the show notes at https://moneytreepodcast.com/secrets-to-spending-less-on-the-cost-of-college-mark-salisbury-764

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Money Tree Investing Podcast. Stock market, wealth, personal finance, value stocks, invest in your life. Hello, the Smart Money Tree Podcast listeners. Welcome to this week's show. My name is Kirk Chisholm. I'll be your host. And today I'm joined with Mark Salsbury. How you doing any, Mark? I'm doing great, man. How are you doing great? Well, glad you having the show.
0:22.1	This is a very timely topic.
0:24.6	It's a hot topic this time of year.
0:26.6	For those of the listeners who don't know you, maybe you could tell us a bit about your background.
0:30.6	Spent my whole life working in colleges and universities, studying how higher education works,
0:35.6	and how it doesn't and how people make decisions about whether to go to college, what college to go to, and what to do while they're in college.
0:44.3	And as a function of that kind of diving into the weeds, I got pretty focused on one of the big problems is the fact that people can't figure out which schools,
0:56.7	which price for which student, and as a function of that, make all kinds of decisions without
1:02.4	having the information they really want to have. So my work over the last six years has been
1:07.3	with a project called tuition fit, which was and still is crowdsourcing, the
1:12.0	financial aid offer letters the students get so that the public has a central data set where
1:16.3	they can go to see which schools or which price for which student. And then educating people
1:21.4	through my nonprofit, pathways, planning, and insights on all the different ways that they have
1:27.0	a lot more agency than they think
1:28.6	to impact the price they pay for whatever post-secondary education path they take.
1:35.1	It's interesting. It's almost as if the process is deliberately designed to confuse people
1:41.2	with the price and the value and all that. Am I just guessing or is that actually the way
1:47.4	that things work? Capitalism 101, right? Sellers, buyers. Sellers want to get more money for the
1:53.8	product they're selling. Buyers want to get more value and pay less. The degree to which that
1:58.6	marketplace has rules that everybody's got to follow is the degree to which
2:02.8	it's a fair playing field versus an uneven playing field. Higher education space is a marketplace,
2:09.4	just like every other marketplace, and it's largely a Wild West. And, you know, that old phrase
	...

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