An Ivy League Education Can Be Surprisingly Cheap

This week in Business Insider, Mandi Woodruff discusses the difference between the sticker price of college and the net cost. She highlights findings from a recent Hamilton Project discussion paper, “Informing Students about Their College Options: A Proposal for Broadening the Expanding College Opportunities Project,” in which Caroline Hoxby and Sarah Turner present a strategy for improving college outcomes for high-achieving, low-income students. Building on previous research showing that most high-achieving, low-income students do not even apply to selective colleges, Hoxby and Turner propose expanding a recently piloted informational intervention called the Expanding College Opportunities (ECO) Project. Woodruff notes that the paper found “that cultural or familial factors are not a primary driver of students’ behavior,” and instead that information is the key barrier to many low-income high achieving students applying to selective schools. To read the full piece, click here.