A Cost Comparison Tool That Includes All Student Expenses

The topic of college cost has always been complex—and for many families, never more so than in 2025. Sticker prices are on the rise, with some institutions now costing more than $100,000 annually. Congress’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act will limit some students’ access to federal loans. Nontuition expenses are also increasingly daunting, and there is no national standard for how colleges calculate and publicize those costs.

On the other hand, the majority of students don’t pay their institution’s full sticker price. A rising number of states and institutions are launching pathways to allow lower- and middle-income students to attend college tuition-free. For all but the wealthiest students, some analyses argue, the total cost of college is now equivalent to or less than it was a decade ago.

These seemingly contradictory problems pose challenges for parents and institutions alike: Colleges are struggling to come across as affordable to the average family, and families lack good information to inform the college-selection process.

A new product by Niche, the Pittsburgh-based college review website, looks to solve those problems. It’s the latest in a long line of tools and initiatives that have sought to address families’ concerns about college cost clarity, from tuition resets to a new hypersimplified price estimator being used by several selective colleges. But Niche’s tool aims to stand apart by including a variety of expenses that may fit into a student’s total cost of attendance that other tools leave out. It also defaults to showing the cost of a degree over four years rather than just an annual price tag.

Called True Cost, the resource prompts families to enter information similar to what they would submit to a college’s net price calculator or the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, as well as how much they would want to pay out of pocket annually. From there, the tool produces a guess of how much of a funding gap the family would have to fill using student loans or other forms of aid.

The tool is intended to allow students and families to “really see in high fidelity all the costs related to college, exactly how much they’re expected to contribute,” said Luke Skurman, Niche’s CEO. “We want to help them get that feedback so they can shape their decision and add and subtract schools that may not be the right fit.”

From Dining to Décor

The True Cost calculator allows users to compare up to 20 different institutions and displays the anticipated cost of “literally anything that we could think of that the average student would need to spend money on over four years,” said Michael Georgoff, who led the creation of the calculator. That includes expenses for a campus parking pass, dorm room decorations, doing laundry on campus and taking a “basic” spring break trip every year. It provides an estimate of how much institutional aid the user will receive, based on data from College Aid Pro, a college financial planning company that also maintains a database of user-submitted student aid offer letters.

Finally, it calculates how smart of an investment each institution would be—on a scale of “safe,” “caution” and “risky”—based on the student’s projected debt compared to how much they will be earning five years after graduation, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data for the career they said they plan to enter and where they plan to live. (If they don’t include a city they hope to live in, True Cost uses their home ZIP code.)

In Inside Higher Ed’s review of the calculator using similar numbers to the reporter’s real statistics when applying to college in 2016, looking at a mix of 18 public and private colleges across the U.S., two were labeled “safe,” two were labeled “caution” and the rest were labeled “risky.”

Admissions and financial aid experts who reviewed the tool told Inside Higher Ed that any effort to expand the pool of information available to families about college costs was commendable. But some worried about the way the information was provided to families as well as about what Niche plans to do with the data it receives through the tool.

Chris Mullin, strategy director of data and measurement for the Lumina Foundation, noted that private companies like Niche aren’t bound by the same restrictions as the federal government when it comes to student data. Data sold to companies or political parties can then be used to create targeted advertisements.

“I’m not suggesting that it’s nefarious in any way, shape or form, right? I’m just saying there’s a business interest in having this information about individuals,” he said.

In True Cost’s FAQ, Niche states that user data isn’t sold “unless you grant us explicit permission. We respect your privacy and use your information only to generate your report and highlight opportunities that can help you afford college.” Niche’s director of communications and content, Nick Liberati, told Inside Higher Ed via email that the company will only share nonfinancial data.

‘Assumptions’ About Spending

Kristin Blagg, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute who studies financial aid, questioned whether some of the categories included in the True Cost calculations make the projected cost appear higher than most families would actually be spending. She pointed out costs like traveling home multiple times a year or purchasing a brand-new laptop are not relevant to students who might choose to stay on campus over some breaks or use a hand-me-down computer to save money.

“Especially with that four-year lens, even small changes could make pretty substantial differences in whether something is affordable or not according to the way they’ve defined it in terms of loan payoff,” she said.

Karen Kristof, the assistant vice president and dean of admission at Colorado College, a liberal arts college, added that the tool “makes some assumptions about how college students work.” At the same time, she noted that many parents are unaware of the many hidden costs of college, and tools like the True Cost calculator are useful for making it clear that budgeting for higher education means accounting for expenses beyond tuition, room and board.

In Inside Higher Ed’s review of the tool, a laptop and tech accessories, which includes things like headphones and chargers, cost as much as $2,200, depending on the university. Flights home were estimated to cost up to $3,800 over the course of a four-year program at the institutions farthest from the home ZIP code.

Blagg also noted that the True Cost calculations don’t match up precisely with College Scorecard, the Department of Education’s cost-comparison tool, noting that the difference could come down to some of the cost-of-living metrics.

Georgoff agreed that not every line item will be relevant to every family, adding that the company hopes to make the tool more customizable over time. But he also argued that understanding the potential for these costs at every university can help inform students’ and parents’ final decisions; if the cost to fly home every break is prohibitively high, a student might opt to study closer to home.

“I had this literal exact conversation with my dad 20 years ago; he built a spreadsheet like this and there was one [college] that was much cheaper and he had the same story. He was like, ‘Hey, if you go here, you can go study abroad. If you go to this other one, you’re not,’” he said. “We want to empower those types of family conversations and planning decisions.”

Still, Kristof said she wished the tool made it clearer which costs are optional or avoidable for families who might not have as much experience navigating college financial decisions.

“It’s not Niche’s job to tell a family, ‘You should emphasize this versus this.’ It seems to me they’re just trying to jump into a space where more information is better,” she said. “I just felt like I wanted a lot of yellow signs … like, ‘This is one way to approach how a student pays for college.’”

Blagg also said that the large four-year “all-in cost” shown for each of the selected institutions may be intimidating to a fault. With numbers rising into the several hundreds of thousands for many institutions, she worried the figures could scare students away from applying to those institutions and seeing what kind of scholarships and financial aid they might receive.

According to Niche, the goal of the four-year format—which can be toggled off to instead show the price per year—is to ensure families understand the full cost of the degree, rather than just the annual cost of attendance.

Niche’s leaders say they hope to expand the tool in the future into a more “personalized” college budgeting tool. Until then, they hope it will give students and parents a better understanding of what college might actually cost in practice and will open the door to conversations about what they’re able to spend.