How the Rising Cost of College Is Changing Families’ Calculus

Summary

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WSJ What’s News – Episode Summary

Episode: How the Rising Cost of College Is Changing Families’ Calculus
Date: August 24, 2025
Host: Sabrina Siddiqui
Guests: Sandra Kilhoff (Supervising Producer), Oyen Adityan (WSJ Reporter)

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Overview – Main Theme

This episode discusses how the escalating cost of college is forcing American families to reconsider how, where, and if they pay for higher education in 2025. Through the story of one California family, the Wall Street Journal’s reporting explores both personal and national trends in college selection, financial aid appeals, and the tough financial trade-offs driving decision-making for students and parents.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Scope and Scale of the College Cost Crisis

• Enrollment & Costs:
  • Around 18 million students enrolled in U.S. colleges in spring 2025—up 3.2% from the prior year.
  • Sticker prices keep climbing: college tuition fees rose 4.7% from 2020 to 2023 (01:26).

“Millions of students are in the pool a year, the cost is only seen to be rising and it's only seen to be getting more competitive and more high stakes.”
— Oyen Adityan (01:54)

• Drivers of Cost:
  • Administrative costs and decreased state/federal funding fuel tuition hikes.
  • Political factors—like the Trump administration’s funding and priority decisions—impact institutional finances (02:26).

2. The Complexity of Financial Aid and Net Price

• Sticker vs. Net Price:
  • Families face confusion distinguishing between publicly posted tuition (sticker price) and the net price after aid and scholarships (02:46).
  • Appeal and negotiation with colleges are increasingly routine parts of the process.

“That particular equation...is what vexes families and students the most.”
— Oyen Adityan (03:25)

3. Case Study – One Family’s College Calculus

• Early Preparation:
  • Families now start saving and strategizing earlier—sometimes as early as middle school—via 529 accounts and hiring specialized counselors (03:51).
• The Story of Anna Sophia:
  • Anna Sophia, an ambitious high school graduate from California, applied to 20 colleges, including prestigious institutions (04:00).
  • Despite diligent saving, her top choices brought daunting costs.

“She had this list of 20 colleges that she decided to apply to, and among those colleges included Boston College, Boston University, Cornell, Harvard, big name institutions that we've all heard of.”
— Oyen Adityan (04:15)

4. Navigating Family Dreams vs. Realistic Budgets

• Parental Perspective:
  • Immigrant parents unfamiliar with U.S. college norms find it difficult to balance multiple children’s ambitions.
  • Use of college counselors to bridge knowledge gaps and map out a feasible plan (05:17).

5. The Acceptance and Appeal Process

• Admission Results:
  • Anna Sophia was accepted to 13 schools; her dream was Brown University (07:11).
  • Brown at first offered no scholarship. Other offers from prestigious schools included aid.
  • Anna Sophia, following peer advice, appealed to Brown using competing offers as leverage.

“She spoke with a student...that student encouraged her to appeal her financial aid award at Brown and...say to this school, hey, you know, you’re my dream institution...Is there anything we can do?”
— Oyen Adityan (07:23)

6. Institutional Responses to Cost Pressures

• Colleges’ Role in Affordability:
  • Sticker price is up, but average net price is declining as colleges compete for students by increasing aid (08:26).
  • Schools are increasingly responsive to appeals to keep admits from “talent poaching.”

“They get an appeal from a student and they look back at their numbers and see if there's any way that they can make themselves more competitive.”
— Oyen Adityan (08:41)

7. The Ongoing Cost Burden

• Even With Aid, Gaps Persist:
  • Brown’s tuition is over $70,000/year; Anna Sophia won more aid through appeals but still requires campus jobs, additional scholarships, and planning for future law school expenses (09:36).
  • She is prepared for summer work, internships, and scholarship applications throughout school.

“It’s not just tuition and fees and room and board, but you also have to pay for clothes and books and other costs that come up.”
— Oyen Adityan (10:14)

8. Shifting Trends and Harder Choices Nationwide

• Broader Shift:
  • College advisor Greg Kaplan notes more families choosing affordable state schools over elite institutions due to cost (10:53).
  • Data: Families’ annual spending on college is up 9% to $13,837; 82% will stretch financially for the best opportunity, but 79% have ruled out schools based on cost (11:19).

“He was seeing more families forego acceptances from quote, unquote, elite institutions in favor of a more affordable institution like a state school.”
— Oyen Adityan (11:04)

“Families felt like college is still viewed as a worthwhile investment, but they are extremely cost conscious.”
— Oyen Adityan (11:30)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “That particular equation, I think, is what vexes families and students the most.”
  — Oyen Adityan (03:25)
• “She had this list of 20 colleges…big name institutions that we’ve all heard of.”
  — Oyen Adityan (04:15)
• “If a school offers a student enrollment…they want that student to say yes and they don’t want that talent to go to another institution.”
  — Oyen Adityan (08:59)
• “Families felt like college is still viewed as a worthwhile investment, but they are extremely cost conscious.”
  — Oyen Adityan (11:30)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:26] – Size and cost of the U.S. college market
• [02:26] – Political and funding influences
• [03:51] – Preparing for college: early financial planning
• [04:00] – Anna Sophia’s college journey
• [07:23] – Financial aid appeals and negotiation
• [08:26] – Colleges compete to lower net price
• [09:36] – Family strategies for funding remaining gaps
• [10:53] – Trend: students choosing affordability over prestige
• [11:19] – Supporting survey data on shifting family priorities

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Takeaways

• The sky-high and rising price of college is fundamentally reshaping family decisions, not just which school to choose, but also how to pay—and whether dreams should be prioritized over debt.
• Real-world financial aid outcomes are more nuanced and negotiable than many families realize, but even after appeals and discounts, costs can remain overwhelming.
• There is growing evidence that families, more cost-conscious than ever, are increasingly choosing affordability over elite credentials—a shift supported by both advisors’ observations and national survey data.

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Transcript

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On average new for sale and rental listings. February 2024 through January 2025 hey, what's News Listeners? It's Sunday, August 24th. I'm Sabrina Siddiqui for the Wall Street Journal. This is what's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world. On today's show, we're breaking down one of the trickiest financial decisions parents face in 2025. Over this past week, the Journal's been looking at the cost of parenthood, and through a range of interviews, we've explored everything from fertility costs to the everyday budgets of new parents. To wrap things up, our supervising producer, Sandra Kilhoff spoke to Journal reporter Oyen Adityan about how the skyrocketing cost of college is weighing on kids and parents decisions and might even change what school they pick. Take a listen.

[Sandra Kilhoff]

So Oyin, firstly, just please set the stage for us here. How many Americans actually go to college and how expensive has it gotten in these days?

[Oyen Adityan]

Millions of students enroll in college every year. I think the latest numbers were, you know, about 18 million students enrolled in post secondary education this spring and that's up 3.2% compared to the same time last year. So you know, that sets the stage for a pretty competitive landscape. And sticker price, or at least the cost that we see of tuition when we google a college is continuing to go up. As of 2023, college tuition fees were up 4.7% compared to 2020. College costs have risen due to a variety of factors like increase in administrative costs but also decreases in state and federal funding. So you can see how this creates a lot of angst for parents and their kids, right? Because million of students are in the pool a year, the cost is only seen to be rising and it's only seen to be getting more competitive and more high stakes.

[Sandra Kilhoff]

You talk about state and federal assistance and I guess under the Trump administration we have seen several High profile colleges that perhaps have run afoul of the administration's priorities, seeing a lot of that funding being cut. So it's not just a general thing, but there are also, shall we say, factors more politically that can play into those costs, I assume.

[Oyen Adityan]

Exactly. And students and their parents are seeing this happen in real time, reading the headlines and factoring it into their decisions about where they want to go and how much financial aid or institutional aid they can get. It's pretty complicated when it comes to actually calculating how much a family can expect to get in any kind of financial assistance from an institution. We talked earlier about how the sticker price or the price that you look up, you see maybe $70,000 a year or $30,000 a year. But that doesn't always factor in how much financial assistance that college might be willing to give a star student or student athlete or a student with great financial need. And so then that gets into the net price and that's what the student and their family actually end up paying to go to school. And that particular equation, I think, is what vexes families and students the most.

[Sandra Kilhoff]

And Oyin, as part of your reporting, you spoke to one family about how they approach the. And I guess the question is, how did that family navigate this challenging landscape?

[Oyen Adityan]

So a lot of families are prepping earlier for this process, starting as early as middle school, getting their kid in a meeting with a specialty advisor or counselor who can walk them through the college application and decision process. They're saving in 529 investment accounts for their kids from birth. But something a lot of families are finding, and the family that I spoke with found was that the college that their daughter wanted to go to was still pretty expensive, even though they felt like they had saved up a good amount for college. And so I spoke with a young woman named Anna Sophia. She's 18. She recently graduated high school in California, where she's from, and she's super ambitious. So she had this list of 20 colleges that she decided to apply to, and among those colleges included Boston College, Boston University, Cornell, Harvard, big name institutions that we've all heard of.

[Sandra Kilhoff]

I think really at the crux of this, Oyin, is that at the heart of it all is a kid whose dreams about achieving a first rate college degree and living out those dreams. How do you as a family, as a parent, balance those dreams with what I guess is fiscally realistic and responsible? To your point, this family had been saving and it still turned out to be really, really expensive to meet her dreams.

[Oyen Adityan]

Yeah. And you know, she is the firstborn daughter in her family. She's got a younger sister who's a couple years younger. So her parents are already now thinking about her younger sister as well and what colleges she wants to go to. She's interested in pursuing a career in the dentistry field. And Anna Sophia is interested in going to law school. So their parents are looking at multiple iterations of school school and tens of thousands of dollars from tuition and other costs and the cost of just potentially living away from home. Because a lot of the schools that Anna Sophia had applied to were out of state. Her parents immigrated to the US when they were young. And so they are not familiar with the American education system and the American college system. So they're also navigating this for the first time. So they thought that it would be prudent to hire a counselor to kind of help them navigate this process and their daughter achieve her dream school while also counseling them on how to afford it.

[Sabrina Siddiqui]

Coming up, more on getting into your dream school and what it takes to afford it. That's after the break. It is eyes wide open. We do believe we are in a.

[Oyen Adityan]

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[Sabrina Siddiqui]

Oyen.

[Sandra Kilhoff]

Before the break, we were talking about Anna Sophia's college applications and how she was pursuing 20 schools. You write that she got into 13 of them. Was one of them her school of choice? And how did finances play into that?

[Oyen Adityan]

So her dream school was Brown University. And she was ecstatic when she got in. She didn't even think that she would be accepted. But she also got into a couple of other competitive institutions, namely Northwestern, Notre Dame, and those schools were offering financial aid and scholarships. And Brown University had initially not offered her any scholarship. And when she was at Brown, she spoke with a student who had a very similar kind of financial background as she did. And that student encouraged her to appeal her financial aid award at Brown and to kind of get use these other awards that she had gotten from other competitive institutions and say to this school, hey, you know, you're my dream institution. I really want to go here, but I haven't gotten any financial aid. And these schools are offering me some money. Is there anything that we can do?

[Sandra Kilhoff]

That really brings me to a question that's been lingering, which is surely the colleges have a massive role to play here in keeping the costs down for students like Ana Sofia.

[Oyen Adityan]

They do, and that's why we're seeing that those sticker prices going up across the board for colleges, net price is actually going down. So more institutions are offering financial aid to students and many of them do it this way. Exactly like what we're talking about with Anna Sophia's case, where they get an appeal from a student and they look back at their numbers and see if there's any way that they can make themselves more competitive. Because at the end of the day, if a school offers a student enrollment into their college, they want that student to say yes and they don't want that talent to go to another institution. Brown had gotten back to Anna Sophia within a couple of days of her appealing. And they said, okay, can you send us a couple more financial documents that you might have to help us get a better picture of your financial situation and then we'll see what we can do to update your financial aid award.

[Sandra Kilhoff]

And oyin, even with that financial aid awarded by Brown University, I'm going to assume that the cost of studying there is still, still going to be really high. How did her parents respond to this choice and how are they going about actually paying for this going forward now?

[Oyen Adityan]

I mean, undergrad tuition at Brown is a little over $70,000 a year, right? So, so that's a really steep cost. And though she got some scholarships from the university and she has external scholarships that she's also applying to, her tuition, she's still going to have to make up a lot of that cost because she's going to be working on campus while she's doing her undergrad. And she's also planning to apply to more scholarships while she's in college. She's thinking proactively about law school and applying to law school scholarships that could kick in for after she graduates. And she's also said that she's willing to work at a coffee shop and do paid internships over the summer so that she can make up just those everyday costs that come up while you're in school, because it's not just tuition and fees and room and board, but you also have to pay for clothes and books and other costs that come up.

[Sandra Kilhoff]

This is a really interesting example of how one family is making it work in order to cover these really high costs for tuition, but not Everyone can make it work. And I wonder, are we seeing some sort of consequence of the ticker price skyrocketing? Some families perhaps have to make some harder decisions, but perhaps not choose that preferred university that didn't give, you know, enough financial aid or has that higher cost.

[Oyen Adityan]

Yeah. I spoke with Greg Kaplan, who is the advisor and counselor who helped Anna Sophia and her family make this decision. And he speaks to tons of students who are in this exact same place. And he told me that he actually noticed for the first time this year that he was seeing more families forego acceptances from quote, unquote, elite institutions in favor of a more affordable institution like a state school. So he thinks that this is indicative of a broader trend and shift in the way that students and their families are viewing whether, you know, a school is actually worth a particular financial investment. And there is some data that backs this up. Sallie Mae's annual How America Pays for College paper actually found that families spent $13,837 this year on college. And that's up 9% from how much they spent last year. Their findings included that families felt like college is still viewed as a worthwhile investment, but they are extremely cost conscious. So about 82% of families said that they were willing to kind of stretch their financial budget. So kind of like Anna Sophia's family. Right. To secure that best opportunity. But 79% did say that they also ruled out schools based on cost. So we're seeing some truth in the data around that sentiment.

[Sandra Kilhoff]

Oyin, thank you so much for talking us through this tough college decision making process. We really appreciate your reporting.

[Oyen Adityan]

Thank you.

[Sabrina Siddiqui]

And that's it for what's news? Sunday, August 24th. Today's show was produced by Charlotte Gartenberg with supervising producer Sandra Kilhoff. We got help from deputy editor Chris Sinsley. I'm Sabrina Siddiqui. We'll be back tomorrow morning with a new show. Thanks for listening.

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