Laura Beamer in Open Campus

Open Campus’s Scott Smallwood spoke to Laura Beamer, Lead Researcher in Higher Education Finance, about her recent Millennial Student Debt Report “How Schools Lie.”

The JFI analysis … used MIT’s Living Wage Calculator to look at how accurate colleges’ estimates were for living off-campus. It found 41 percent were underestimating the costs of room and board. And the average gap was substantial: about $1,500 for public colleges and $2,000 for private ones.

Digging into the numbers colleges report for all those other costs (room and board, books, other expenses) makes you wonder if we’re even talking about the same thing — and what a prospective student should think about any of it.

Read the piece here.