The Meter Is Running
Be prepared to pay for college long before Junior heads out the door
By a student's senior year of high school, most parents are struggling to save up any extra cash for college. But while focusing on tuition, financial aid, and housing, they are often shocked at costs that occur well before the child is even admitted to a school.
Test prep
Advanced Placement courses give high school students a head start. Earning a certain AP test score may allow a student to get college credit and bypass some freshman classes. Tests cost $82 per exam (though some school districts pay for them) and are offered in 20 subject areas. For students with financial need, the College Board offers a $22 discount per exam. Pricey? Yes, but far cheaper than a three-credit college course. That may help explain the 12 percent increase in tests taken this year.
Then there's the SAT. It's up in cost this year from $29.50 to $41.50, largely because it now includes a writing component. About half of students now take the SAT more than once. Many schools require the ACT, a curriculum-based exam covering English, math, reading, and science, as well as subject-specific SATs. Sam Boyd, a 17-year-old senior at Connecticut's Suffield Academy, has taken the ACT once and will take the SAT three times, in addition to SAT subject tests in economics and Chinese. The ACT costs $29 for registration and $14 for an optional writing component. For the SAT subject tests, it costs $18 to register plus $8 for most tests and $19 for language tests with listening sections. Fee waivers are available for qualifying students. Last year, 8 percent of all SAT exam fees were waived, says Brian O'Reilly, executive director of SAT information services with the College Board, the nonprofit organization that owns the test.
More kids are now taking SAT prep courses. Kaplan Test Prep reports its biggest increase in student enrollment in decades. The company offers private tutoring, classroom courses, software, and books for students. "Our most popular option is the classroom course, which is typically 36 hours," says Jon Zeitlin, general manager of SAT and ACT programs at Kaplan. The program costs $800 to $900. Kaplan also offers an online prep course for $399. The fastest-growing area for Kaplan, Zeitlin says, is one-on-one tutoring, which costs $100 to $140 per hour. Another alternative is a private tutor like Dan Harder, a writer in San Francisco, who offers an SAT essay-writing workshop for $300. Harder's class runs 7 1/2 hours, during which students write five essays in as many days.
The application
Simply applying to college can get expensive. Alice Boyd, Sam's mother, will spend about $400 for his eight college applications. Yet for Heather Banks of Montgomery Village, Md., a single mother whose son, Mark, is an incoming junior at Virginia Wesleyan College, application fees were not a big burden. Her son applied to six schools, but some waived the fee when the family made a campus visit. Colleges will also sometimes waive the fee if a student applies online.
advertisement
