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November 27, 2006

TuitionCoach: Tuition Planning Site Is Good Birth Control

Natali Del Conte

29 comments »

TuitionCoach attempts to give parents a clear idea of just how much their kids’ college will cost them. When I got a demo that estimated what it could cost to pay for one offspring’s education out-of-pocket, I rethought my desire to ever have kids.

TuitionCoach launches tomorrow. It is geared towards parents of teenagers who might be putting kids in university within the next year or two. What it lacks is financial planning and savings help. It tells you how much college will cost, how much financial aid you can get, and how to negotiate for more. But it doesn’t tell you how to save. If your kids are in grade school, what is the best way to put away? Should you contribute to an IRA or a 401K? This is not the site to find that info, although the CEO Monisha Perkash hopes it eventually will be.

“Right now with our module, it’s more targeted for kids that are in high school already so you’re thinking one to four years out but what we do plan to do in our future modules is provide tools that help you in starting to plan when your kids are 8 or 9 or 10,” Perkash said in a phone conversation on Monday.

TuitionCoach allows you to create separate profiles for each child that you plan to put through school. The most helpful part is the interactive spreadsheet. The numbers can be manipulated easily in order to figure out how to qualify for the most amount of aid. For example, what if your child has a savings account in his/her name worth $10,000? That could reduce your family’s financial aid eligibility by 35 percent. Changing that number to zero, decreases your financial responsibility by $3,500 per year.

Perkash compares the TuitionCoach service to Intuit’s TurboTax in that it is a paid-service that makes it easier to do something that you could do yourself. The cost calculator is free but the financial aid help and worksheets come with an annual $59 subscription.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, November 27th, 2006 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. The Rqtect

    November 27th, 2006 at 1:00 pm

    india has the best tuturors
    loook what they did for my spelling

  2. xxdesmus

    November 27th, 2006 at 1:14 pm

    Wow, way the heck over priced, and the free option is far too limited to be useful.

    Thanks for pointing this out, but I will look else where.

  3. J Maguire

    November 27th, 2006 at 1:14 pm

    OOh! An online calculator! That’s genius!!

  4. Drama 2.0

    November 27th, 2006 at 1:22 pm

    Does it include ways to estimate expenses related to parents’ contributions to kegs, legal incidents and abortions?

    Seriously, is college even needed these days? Bill Gates and Michael Dell both dropped out, and isn’t Mark Zuckerberg worth like $2 billion? I’m pretty sure he is. Kevin Rose, another dropout, made $60 million in 18 months and everybody knows that Facebook is wayyyyy better.

  5. ginchy

    November 27th, 2006 at 1:27 pm

    I think I hear thousands of military recruiters rubbing their hands together with glee.

  6. Sean

    November 27th, 2006 at 1:31 pm

    I’ll save the $59 subscription and put it towards my kids college fund! Thanks anyway!

  7. Ben

    November 27th, 2006 at 1:42 pm

    so, the quick calc gives me a number for yearly college expenses without even asking for …

    - the age of my children
    - any notion of the type of college (ie in state at University of Texas, or out of state at Harvard)

    The number spit (and I do mean spit) out is completely meaningless, but never fear, just “Sign up for a TuitionCoach subscription and we’ll work with you to” spit even more meaningless junk at you.

    Actually, I have no idea of this service is any good or not, but the completely meaningless number thrown out by QuickCalc does not endear me to try any further.

    cya

  8. anonymouse

    November 27th, 2006 at 1:51 pm

    incredible. web 2.0 at its finest. this will be on the cover of businessweek. if only I had a billion dollars, I would snap this sucker up immediately before google does.

  9. Michael

    November 27th, 2006 at 1:53 pm

    The most noticable flaw in the calculator that I immediately noticed was that it doesn’t even ask what school I plan to go to. There might be a little difference in price between MIT (~$50,000/yr) and a local college (~$6,500/yr). Not to mention the fact of what year I would be entering college, as Ben noted.

    Good idea, but I am very skeptical as to the website’s accuracy.

  10. alex

    November 27th, 2006 at 2:24 pm

    you need to proofread your content before you publish. but i guess that’s what techcrunch is known for — providing quick, accurate, and interesting posts with no concept of sentence structure or grammar.

    welcome.

  11. Patricia

    November 27th, 2006 at 2:31 pm

    I think this would be cool rolled into a calculator site that calculates a ton of different things - like salaries, how much it costs to have a kid from birth to age 18, housing in specific markets, etc.

  12. Michael Arrington

    November 27th, 2006 at 2:37 pm

    Natali - congratulations on your first snarky comment from Alex. Welcome to blogging. :-)

  13. Rob

    November 27th, 2006 at 2:40 pm

    I think this is an interesting contribution…as someone who is in the demographic that it pursues (parents with kids that will soon be off to college). The stuff about how to finance college is another topic entirely (and incidentally there are plenty of other places to help with the financial planning end of it once you know what it costs).

  14. Mike

    November 27th, 2006 at 2:48 pm

    why would anybody pay $59 to subscribe for the financial aid when you can get this free?

  15. Natali Del Conte

    November 27th, 2006 at 3:00 pm

    Thanks Alex. Welcome to my digital universe too.

  16. Andrew

    November 27th, 2006 at 3:20 pm

    Whatever happened to the notion of kids working hard and paying their own way through college. If the money comes out of your children’s pocket they will have a much stronger incentive to finish college and get out into the real world. They also have a lot more federal programs to tap into. And they’ll probably pick a less expensive college. Save your money for retirement and do your children a favor, let them pay for it. It will build character.

  17. Monisha Perkash, CEO/Co-founder

    November 27th, 2006 at 3:31 pm

    Thanks all for your posts and a lively discussion. Here are our responses to some points made thus far:

    Pricing: Our online services ($59) are based on the same offline services ($600-$1,200) provided by college funding advisors. Our interactive calculators are based on algorithms that provide strategies most relevant to you. You can’t get this for free anywhere.

    Credibility: Our tools are based on two decades of college funding advisory to 4000 clients by co-founder Paul Wrubel, a former high school principal who is frequently invited by schools and colleges to provide college funding workshops.

    Accuracy: The reason we don’t ask, “Which type of college are you applying to” is because your Expected Family Contribution (your cost of college as determined by a federally mandated formula) is roughly the same for all colleges, whether you’re applying to an Ivy or to a community college. Financial aid makes up the difference between your Expected Family Contribution and the actual cost of attending a particular college.

    There are many myths about how college funding works and about which colleges are within financial reach. We created TuitionCoach to dispel many of those misperceptions. We hope to help families remove cost as a barrier to college so that they can focus on what’s important: finding a good college fit.

  18. ePrep

    November 27th, 2006 at 5:11 pm

    529 Plans are the way to go for college savings. Savings always beats borrowing..so start saving today.

  19. Lex

    November 27th, 2006 at 5:26 pm

    I entered in a rough estimate of my finances, within reasonable ranges, and it told me I’d expect to pay $99,999 a year. What’s that all about?? Site needs some upper-bounds checks.

  20. Jason L. Baptiste

    November 27th, 2006 at 5:59 pm

    hmm, interesting site. Would I pay 59 bucks? No. Will some people? Yes. The question is whether this business can scale. I like Natali’s style: to the point, catchy, and no holds barred. Welcome.

    -JLB

  21. max

    November 27th, 2006 at 7:44 pm

    Who says parents have to pay for their kids tuition?

  22. David Mackey

    November 27th, 2006 at 9:12 pm

    My parents helped me out a few grand, but I made it most of the way on scholarships. Thankfully the year I went into PBU, the college I attended, they had a very generous scholarship program (which they next year they reduced).

  23. Pramit Singh

    November 27th, 2006 at 9:46 pm

    I agree when you say that the site lacks financial planning and savings help. Good content is Step #1 in attracting users.

  24. Charles Wilde

    December 15th, 2006 at 2:01 pm

    We have a student entering college in 2007. Now is the time for the college financial aid fire drill, and we found this site to be incredibly useful in our financial planning for college. We cheerfully paid the $50 to get access to the information available to subscribers.

    If you have never gone through the process to apply for financial aid, it holds a few surprises. The one thing that amazed us as parents was the way aid is distributed. The aid application is used to determine how much you can afford to pay for ANY university. The amount of the tuition for the university does not greatly affect this number. The most desirable universities are the most expensive, but they also have multi-billion dollar endowment funds that are used to make up the difference between what you can pay and the cost of tuition.

    To parents of the boomer generation, this is amazing, as we generally had to finance college on our own. What it means to our students is: get the best grades and do those activities that add to your application profile. Don’t worry about the money, you can go to the best school for which you can qualify for acceptance.

    The financial aid application process is complex, filled with seemingly irrational and whimsical requirements. All in all, it is very similar to the complexities of the tax code.

    The goal of using the information on the Tuition Coach site is to get the best financial aid offer possible, in a way very similar to tax planning. Now what is true is that you can probably root out from the Internet most the information on the Tuition Coach site. But time is money, and the subscription fee is quite reasonable for parents and students frantically getting all the paperwork done by the deadlines.

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