How Much Does Living Off-Campus Cost? Who Knows?

Kim Dancy and Rachel Fishman's blog post, More Than Tuition: High Uncertainty and Complicated Incentives, was cited in The New York Times:

With no federal rules and few recommendations to guide them, colleges use a hodgepodge of methods to predict costs.

That might explain why room and board estimates for colleges within the same county can vary so much — on average, by $6,448, according to research by the New America foundation published in May.