Ron Lieber, the Your Money columnist from The New York Times, returns to talk to the community about one of the most important, confusing, and emotional decisions families must make as they navigate what to pay for college. Lieber is the author of The Price You Pay for College — An Entirely New Roadmap for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make , which was been named one of the best books of 2021 by NPR, a New York Times best seller, and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice pick.
More About The Price You Pay for College
Sticker prices at flagship state universities have skyrocketed. Discounts are available, but the financial aid system that governs them works differently at different schools and can be wildly unpredictable. Once you have offers of admission and aid, you have to make a decision about value. When does paying an extra $50,000 or $150,000 for one school over another make sense? For a smaller or larger size? For access to professors or guaranteed internships? For an alumni network that is quantifiably stronger than others? And in considering all these questions as parents, how do we reckon with the guilt, fear, aspiration, and snobbery that inevitably invade our minds in the process?
In Lieber’s book — the culmination of 15 years of personal finance reporting for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal — he asked college presidents questions that families don’t know (or are afraid) to ask, put the surprisingly small amount of existing data on this topic into context, summarized the research that does exist about what matters and what doesn’t, and pulled the curtain back on how schools set prices.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
