Ron Lieber

NOTE: We will have an extended Q&A session following Lieber’s remarks. Come with your questions!

Resident pricing for state universities can now top $125,000 for four years of tuition, room and board. At many selective private colleges, students will pay upwards of $300,000 for an undergraduate degree. Discounts and scholarships are available, but the financial aid system that governs them works differently at different schools and can be wildly unpredictable.

Beyond an offer of admission and aid there is a decision to make about value. Does paying an extra $50,000 or $150,000 for one school over another make sense? Do the benefits match or outweigh the cost? Is it better to select a smaller or larger size school?

We need strategies to guide meaningful family conversations on this topic. This presentation is the culmination of Ron Lieber’s 15 years of personal finance reporting. Participants will hear questions that families don’t know (or are afraid) to ask. Lieber will put the existing data on this topic into context and summarize the research about what matters and what doesn’t as he pulls back the curtain on how schools set their prices.

Ron Lieber has been the “Your Money” columnist for The New York Times since 2008. Before coming to The Times, he wrote the “Green Thumb” personal finance column for The Wall Street Journal and was part of the startup team at the paper’s Personal Journal section.