A How-To Guide to High Quality, Data-Driven Advising: Part Three - Affordability

By Ryan Hoch, Co-Founder and CEO, Overgrad

Reading time: Nine minutes

In Part One of this series, I explored the concept of Target Grad Rates, a fundamental component of high quality data-driven advising. In Part Two, I examined admissibility and different ways to estimate a student’s likelihood of being admitted to an institution to which they applied. The third leg of this stool is one that most college access professionals, students, and families think about on a daily basis: affordability.

On Affordability

Cost remains the largest barrier to higher education. “Affordable” is a completely relative scale, as what might be affordable to one family may be completely unaffordable to another. A proxy for this could be an individual’s Student Aid Index (SAI), the figure for a student generated by completing the FAFSA which replaced the former Expected Family Contribution (EFC). However, anyone who has counseled students on their financial aid packages knows that this is not such a reliable metric on which to base affordability. Many families cannot afford, or simply refuse to contribute, the amount the federal government deems they are capable of providing. This means that the student’s unmet need presents too large a gap, forcing the student to remove the postsecondary pathway from consideration, or, if they are currently enrolled, to drop out.

In thinking about affordability, I would challenge a change in mindset. When people question whether a house, car, or childcare is affordable, they think about the monthly cost. Can I afford this each month? Most students and families will think about college affordability in the same way: how much will I owe each month? The term for this would be out of pocket costs, defined as follows:

Out of Pocket Costs = Total Price - (Grants & Scholarships) - Loans

Divide this amount by twelve and you have your monthly costs for a particular postsecondary option. When advising a student one-on-one to figure out what they can afford, it can be helpful to ask questions like:

• How much can your family contribute monthly?
• How much could you personally contribute monthly if you had a campus job?
• How much could you make over the summer to contribute towards college?

While there are additional options to cover any affordability gaps, many of these, like Parent Plus loans, are widely discouraged in the college access field. Private loans can be even more debilitating to the student’s financial future. My recommendation is to advise in a way that avoids these options.

Benchmarking Your Caseload

The process above might feel feasible if you are advising students individually, but the reality is that most students only have access to their school counselor for postsecondary advising, and counselors can have caseloads of hundreds of students to work through. You might have an intuition on what is affordable for your students, and my suggestion is: use that intuition. You can always refine as you go. Another option is to survey your parents and attempt to gain some data on what they view as affordable.

If you work with a population of students from low-income backgrounds, what we see on-average is that families will view an option as affordable if its monthly cost is $200-$300. Your market may vary slightly, but this equates to an out-of-pocket target of $2,400-$3,600.

Advising for Affordability

Okay, so now you have your benchmarks (phew), what’s next? Start capturing that data! Average net prices are great during the search process, but when you are actively advising students who have living and breathing award letters, you must use those in your advising. You can utilize your CCR platform or a spreadsheet you have created, but your goal should be to pull out the out-of-pocket costs for the student for each university to which they have been accepted and then check that against your affordability threshold.

The leveled up version of this, once you have enough data, is to use the data to advise students proactively in their application strategy. To do this, you need to figure out what schools are typically affordable for your students. You can determine this by looking at all of your historical aid letter data for your students and grouping them based on their average out-of-pocket costs. Try to group these colleges and universities into student-friendly terms based on their affordability. Then, as students are thinking about where to apply, they can use these groups to proactively build their list with affordability in mind.

Putting It All Together

Still with me through the whole three-part series? Congratulations, because here is where we bring it all together in a really powerful way for students. Let’s revisit the three pillars:

1. Target Grad Rates: An institutional grad rate target based on a student’s academic credentials.
2. Admissibility: The likelihood a student is admitted to a given postsecondary option.
3. Affordability: The amount a student (and their family) can financially afford annually for postsecondary education.

What this boils down to is this: Can we find an option for this student that they can get into, which is affordable, and meets a certain quality threshold? This is a data-driven framework that echoes what high-quality advising is all about.

Let’s look at some scenarios and how data-driven advising can be applied in each of these scenarios based on the pillars we spoke about.

The Dose of Reality

Let’s say we have a student whose target grad rate is 45% and they come to you with the following college list:

Hopefully what you need to tell this student is clearly (but also painfully) obvious. While every option on their list meets both our grad rate and affordability targets, the odds that a student will be admitted to any of these schools are far too small. A quick calculation tells us that the odds this student is admitted to one or more of these schools are 5%. This student needs a dose of reality, so your goal with this student would be to work with them to find options where their odds of admit are more realistic and add them to this list to find a better mix of likely, match, and reach schools.

The Underachiever

Now we have a student whose target grad rate is 70%, how would you advise them given this list?

This one might be a little tricky. Schools One and Three look like they could be options since they are both affordable and the student is guaranteed to get in. Yet advising the student towards either path would be a disservice to their potential options. This student should be looking for schools that give them greater than a 7/10 chance of graduating, but both of these options the student is considering give them less than a 1/3 chance of completing. If you were advising this student, they might be scared of rejection or unaware of their potential admissibility elsewhere. Encourage them to expand their search, looking at schools where their odds of admit might not be as high, but the likelihood of completing is significantly higher.

The One and Done

Here we have the planned applications for a student with a target grad rate of 55%. What would you tell them?

This scenario gives you a snapshot into the risks with probabilities. This student might be 100% certain that this is their path because it meets their quality target, and they have a pretty good chance of getting in. The problem is that the odds of admission are 75%, not 100%. This student still has a one in four chance of having no college acceptances if they proceed with this application strategy. This is why it is helpful to have a minimum application count to quality options based on the three pillars. Again, math is our friend that tells us why. Let’s say this student updates their college list to the following:

The odds they are admitted to at least one of these schools is 95%! By applying to two more schools (with their odds of admit being even lower than the only school initially on the list), the student has actually increased their chances of being accepted to a quality school by 20%. That is the beauty of data-driven advising.

FAQs about Data-Driven Advising

What if we cannot find an affordable option?

Unfortunately, this is the reality of our higher education landscape. The affordability pillar is the hardest one to control for, and is largely dependent on the academic characteristics of the student you are advising. Some options to consider are to continue looking for additional grants and scholarships, appeal their aid letters, and broaden the search to include more institutions.

Is it really possible for every student to have a quality postsecondary option that meets all three criteria?

This depends, but the honest answer is likely (and unfortunately) no. Does that mean we should not strive to achieve this for every student? Absolutely not. At a minimum, you will be armed with data that will enable you to be a better advocate for your students in the broader ecosystem.

What are some benchmarks that you recommend?

I shy away from giving exact numbers because every community is different. But here are some recommendations on how to go about setting your data-driven strategies.

• Start gathering data now if you don’t have it already. The longer you wait, the longer it will take you to implement these best practices.
• Allow for some flexibility. Don’t mandate 100% compliance because that is likely impossible and does not allow for the art of counseling to have its rightful place. However, it is advisable to still set a threshold target you’d like your counselors to achieve, such as at least 70% of students on their caseload meet or exceed your data-driven requirements for advising.
• Set a floor for the number of applications students are expected to submit. But also:
• Set a percent of applications target for each student in relation to each of the three pillars. What this means is:
  • x% of apps meet grad rate target.
  • x% of apps meet admissibility target.
  • x% of apps meet affordability target.
  • y% of apps meet all three of the targets.

How many spreadsheets do I need to make this work?

Not going to lie here, if you are doing this on your own, then likely a lot. However, there is a better way. This is what we do here at Overgrad, so reach out to me at ryan@overgrad.com if you’d like to have a conversation and learn more.

How do I apply this to nontraditional pathways?

Great question, tune into part four of this series where I will bring it all home, expanding our definition of quality to be inclusive of all options that students have.

Thank you for reading and for your work in supporting students and families to find their next, best postsecondary pathway following high school.

Ryan Hoch is the Co-Founder and CEO of Overgrad. Overgrad is an all-in-one postsecondary access and success platform that guides students to and through high quality postsecondary pathways. From advisors to administrators, Overgrad streamlines processes and ensures data-informed practices for improved student outcomes. 

Read More:

• A How-To Guide to High Quality, Data-Driven Advising: Part One - Target Grad Rates
• A How-To Guide to High Quality, Data-Driven Advising: Part Two - Admissibility
• Forthcoming Revised Data Will Show Fall 2024 Freshman Enrollment Increased