College Affordability Is More Than a Metric
What does it mean for college to be affordable?
It sounds like a straightforward question. We can look at tuition and fees, cost of attendance, financial aid, net price, student debt, and, increasingly, earnings data. At the federal and state levels, those measures are essential for understanding trends, supporting accountability, and comparing institutions.
But they do not tell the whole story.
I was reminded of this while preparing for a panel at Lumina Foundation's Achieving College Affordability Convening. I asked members of AIR's Board of Directors and Data Policy Advisory Panel what they measure, how they use the data, what information is missing, and how they communicate affordability to students and families.
I am grateful for the thoughtful responses from colleagues at community colleges, public and private research universities, residential colleges, and university systems. The insights they revealed aren't statistically representative or generalizable to the field, but they illustrated how some institutions are approaching college affordability. One idea surfaced repeatedly:
Affordability is not simply whether a student can afford to enroll. It is whether the student can financially sustain that enrollment long enough to complete.
That distinction changes what we seek to measure and the questions we ask of the data.
Their responses also reveal a tension worth examining more closely: Affordability is individual and personal, making it difficult to measure in standardized ways and communicate simply.
Moving beyond the price of admission
Institutions routinely monitor familiar affordability measures, but some are connecting those measures with information about what happens to students while they are enrolled.
As one community college respondent observed:
"I think some of the more useful affordability measures emerge when we connect financial information with enrollment behavior and student outcomes."
Institutions can examine persistence and completion by Pell status, unmet need, financial aid status, and aid eligibility. They can also look for behaviors signaling financial pressure—stopping out, reducing credit loads, moving from full-time to part-time enrollment, dropping courses, carrying balances, or not registering for the next term.
Such signals are particularly important in the community college sector, where low tuition can create the impression that college is inherently affordable. Transportation, childcare, housing, food, technology, textbooks, and the income students give up to attend class may present larger barriers than tuition itself.
My community college colleague suggested another way to think about affordability:
"Treat affordability as a longitudinal student-success measure rather than simply a point-in-time price measure: Can the student financially sustain enrollment long enough to complete the credential?"
Other institutions approach affordability through a similarly broad lens. One university system includes time and credits to degree among its affordability measures, recognizing that an extra semester or unnecessary credits have financial consequences. One university monitors Pell enrollment and graduation rates, including differences between Pell and non-Pell students, to assess whether institutional decisions are affecting its commitment to access.
The question is not simply, "How much does college cost?" It is also, "When does financial pressure begin to change the choices a student makes?"
Measurement matters most when it leads to action
Measurement alone is not the goal. Using the information to make better decisions for students is.
Affordability measures become more valuable when institutions connect them to decisions about aid, pricing, student support, or institutional policy—and determine whether those decisions made a difference.
A relatively small outstanding balance may prevent an otherwise successful student from registering for another semester. That information can inform completion grants, emergency assistance, payment policies, or targeted outreach.
Timing matters too. As one respondent observed:
"A relatively modest intervention immediately before registration may have considerably different implications than assistance provided after a student has already stopped attending."
And the assessment should not end with the number of grants awarded or students contacted. Did students subsequently register? Accumulate credits? Persist? Complete?
As one respondent observed:
"The important question is not simply how many students received assistance, but whether the intervention reduced the barrier it was intended to address."
At one public research university, data revealed financial challenges for several groups of students—including low- and middle-income students and those transferring from community colleges. The institution also examined the effects of price increases during a student's enrollment. Those findings helped inform several affordability strategies, including targeted need-based aid for Pell-eligible and middle-income students, additional tuition support for eligible community college transfers, and a four-year guarantee that provides more predictable tuition, fees, housing, and dining costs.
At a small liberal arts college, student surveys revealed more basic-needs insecurity than expected, including students reporting that they skipped meals because they could not afford to eat. Some middle-income students also reported greater financial concerns than lower-income students receiving more substantial aid. The findings were shared with financial aid, enrollment leadership, and the bursar, helping inform additional campus supports and changes in outreach.
These examples raise an important point: A student can persist and still experience the consequences of financial strain. Enrollment alone does not tell us what a student may have given up to remain enrolled.
The data institutions still cannot see
Despite the additional information available within institutions, there was agreement about the limits of what we can see. Institutional data tell us about a student's financial aid, account balance, academic progress, and enrollment, but reveal much less about the student's financial life outside college.
We may not know that a student's car broke down, a parent lost a job, childcare fell through, or the student is sending earnings home, taking on credit-card debt, or skipping meals.
One respondent described the distinction between "financial need as administratively measured" and "financial vulnerability as actually experienced." Two students with nearly identical aid packages can have very different abilities to absorb an unexpected $500 expense.
As a colleague from a private research university put it:
"The absence of an observable financial problem is not necessarily evidence that a student is not experiencing financial strain."
There is also a problem of timing. As one respondent observed:
"By the time financial difficulty becomes visible in institutional data through nonpayment, withdrawal, reduced enrollment, or failure to return, the institution may be observing the consequence rather than the underlying problem."
By then, the opportunity to intervene may have passed. Can institutions identify financial pressures early enough to help students before those pressures disrupt their education?
Surveys, basic-needs assessments, emergency-aid requests, and other student-reported information can help fill these gaps.
At one state college, the institutional research team recognized that the federal Student Aid Index was not designed to capture some circumstances that put students at financial risk. The college incorporated a short questionnaire into its application, asking about housing, food, dependents, and other basic needs. The answers help identify students who may benefit from additional support.
The Student Aid Index was not wrong. It simply was not answering everything the college needed to know.
Sometimes improving affordability measurement requires another source of data. Other times, it requires recognizing what an existing measure cannot tell us.
But more data collection is not automatically better. Financial circumstances are personal. Institutions should have a clear reason for asking students to share sensitive information, appropriate protections for that information, and—perhaps most importantly—the capacity to do something beneficial with what they learn.
Providing information is not the same as communicating affordability
Even when institutions have good information about cost, communicating it clearly remains difficult.
One respondent distinguished between "providing required information" and "communicating information students can actually use to make decisions."
A cost-of-attendance figure may be correct. A financial aid offer may be accurate. A net price calculator may work exactly as designed.
But the question a student or parent is asking may be simpler: "How much money will I need to attend this institution this semester?"
That can be surprisingly difficult to answer.
Students need to distinguish direct from indirect expenses, grants from loans, and published cost of attendance from what they will actually pay. Their circumstances also matter: Are they living with family or independently? Commuting? Attending full time or part time? Paying for childcare?
Two examples illustrate just how difficult that question can be to answer.
One university explained that it can accurately describe itself as affordable based on tuition and required fees. But once housing and other living expenses are included, the total cost almost triples.
A university system hears a different concern. Families sometimes see living expenses included in cost-of-attendance estimates and conclude college is too expensive—even though students would incur food and housing expenses whether or not they enrolled.
Both examples point to the same challenge: More complete information is not necessarily more understandable information.
Affordability is personal. What college costs—and whether a student can manage that cost—depends on individual circumstances. Many institutions provide financial assistance and direct support responsive to those circumstances. But the more individualized the calculation, the harder it becomes to communicate affordability through a single, comparable number.
For students and families deciding whether college is within reach, that complexity can be enormously frustrating. Understandably so. They need clear, reliable information, not a lengthy explanation of why the answer is complicated.
The same tension applies to federal and state policy. Not everything useful for supporting an individual student belongs in standardized reporting. Before expanding data collection, we should consider what questions the information will answer, how it will be used, and whether the benefits justify the burden.
So what does it mean for college to be affordable?
The answers I gathered suggest it depends on who is asking, and when. For a family comparing institutions, it may mean a net price. For a student midway through a program, it may mean whether an unexpected car repair forces a choice between rent and registration. Both are real. Neither is complete.
The discussions at Lumina's convening reinforced the value of different perspectives. Practitioners, researchers, policymakers, funders, and students may approach affordability differently, but understanding those perspectives helps us develop better measures and more useful information.
Common measures remain essential for policy and comparison. But affordability is experienced by individual students, making it difficult to define, measure, and explain. That complexity is not a reason to step back. It is the reason the work of understanding and explaining affordability matters.
Our responsibility is not simply to measure affordability more accurately. It is to help students and families understand what college will cost, make informed decisions about whether it is within reach, and have the support they need to enroll, persist, participate fully, and complete.
Christine M. Keller, Ph.D., is the Executive Director and CEO of the Association for Institutional Research (AIR), a non-profit higher education association that empowers professionals and institutions to use data, information, and analytics to inform better decision making.