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Each email contains a link to a personalized financial-aid estimate listing the total amount of institutional grants and scholarships the student would get if accepted by the small liberal-arts college. About one in five messages includes an estimate of federal Pell Grant support, too. At the bottom of the page, each student’s net cost of attendance is shown, plus an incentive to apply by July 31 — and commit to the college a month later.
Those emails kicked off Cornell’s Save Your Seat initiative, an experiment meant to give families a way-early understanding of how much aid they would likely receive. It’s a new riff on the traditional financial-aid ritual, in which students first must apply for admission and submit a Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, to receive an official offer showing their total cost of attendance at a specific institution. But what happens when a college sends detailed estimates to students who haven’t even applied, a week before the Fourth of July, months before the 2026-27 FAFSA goes live?
Cornell will soon find out. “We see this as a way to reduce friction,” says Wendy Beckemeyer, the college’s vice president for enrollment management. “There are all these things a student has to do in the admissions process just to find out how much aid they’re eligible for. This is a super-quick way to know ‘Cornell is a possibility for me,’ or ‘This is not a possibility for me.’”
But wait, how did Cornell calculate what it describes as sound estimates for thousands of families who haven’t submitted their financial data?
It’s not as difficult as you might think, says Beth Davenport, the college’s director of financial aid. The task required digging into a trove of historical data on aid packages given to students — and some expert third-party help.
The story starts with Cornell’s “inquiry pool.” That’s the official term for prospective applicants who have conveyed interest in an institution by, say, contacting an admissions officer or submitting an online request for information. One essential piece of data in any college’s inquiry pool: a student’s home address.
A five-digit ZIP code often can tell a college something about an applicant’s financial situation, but a ZIP+4 code — which establishes the precise location of a particular household — can reveal much more. “By looking at the ZIP+4,” Davenport says, “you can figure out where a particular family’s income might land, even though you won’t know every little thing about each individual.”
Cornell’s partner in this experiment is College Raptor, a company that runs a college-search platform for consumers and offers an array of enrollment services to postsecondary institutions. The company’s FinanceFirst program, its website explains, uses aggregated financial data from a prospective student’s location to provide colleges with personalized financial-aid estimates “for every prospect, inquiry, and applicant in your database — well before they file the FAFSA.”
The inquiry pool Cornell shared with College Raptor included ZIP+4 data for about 19,000 domestic students. After all the aid estimates were calculated, Cornell sent a message to the 16,000 students for whom it had a valid email address. The college also mailed postcards to the full set of 19,000 students; each one contains a QR code linking to their estimate.
Though the estimates vary, each one includes a discount of at least $33,000. That’s the amount of the college’s National Academic Scholarship, given to all domestic students who enroll; it’s renewable for up to four years, provided that they maintain satisfactory academic progress. Students from Iowa and three neighboring states can receive slightly larger scholarships. And applicants can qualify for additional institutional aid. In short, no one is paying anything close to Cornell’s sticker price: $67,000.
Davenport describes Cornell’s initiative as a response to many families’ concerns — and confusion — about costs. “There’s sticker-price shock in higher ed,” she says. “Some families just look at the sticker price and think, ‘There’s no way we can afford that at all.’”
And just because a college lists scholarship information online doesn’t mean that everyone will understand it. “Over the last year, I’ve had many phone calls from parents of high-school juniors who’ve been on our website,” Davenport says. “They’ll ask, ‘Is this really true? Can my child actually get a merit scholarship?’”
Net price calculators were meant to give families a clearer understanding of what they would have to pay. Each Title VI institution enrolling full-time, first-time degree- or certificate-seeking undergraduates is required to provide such an online tool, which can help consumers gauge their likely out-of-pocket expenses after subtracting estimated grants and scholarships from the total cost of attendance.
But some colleges’ net-price calculators are more accurate than others. And even the best ones can’t help families that don’t use them. “There’s no doubt that net-price calculators are a good tool, but it does seem like they are not widely known,” says Jill Desjean, director of policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, known as NASFAA. “The people who are in there using them are the people who are in the know, who have experience with the system.”
Essentially, Cornell is taking its net-price calculator, doing some calculations on behalf of a family, and then packaging the results into an official estimate. But students must act quickly to take advantage of it.
With Save Your Seat, students who apply by the end of July and submit a deposit by September 1 are guaranteed to receive the $33,000 scholarship, plus any institutional need-based grants for which they might qualify, based on their estimate. They will also get first dibs on housing and first-year seminars. (Those who deposit by November 8 will get the same deal, minus the guaranteed need-based grants and priority registration for the seminars.)
September 1 is early, by any measure. That’s a few days before the first day of school in some districts, a month before the FAFSA is scheduled to become available, and two months before colleges’ early-admission deadlines. So how many families, even those whose veins run with Cornell’s purple and black, would feel comfortable committing to a college before Labor Day?
Here’s Cornell’s key selling point. Imagine that Johnny just received a financial-aid estimate from the college that includes $42,000 in institutional aid. But months later, when Cornell receives Johnny’s FAFSA data, the college sees that his Student Aid Index, or SAI — the FAFSA-generated number colleges use to create aid offers — is higher than Cornell’s estimate. Let’s say that means Johnny should get just $38,000 in institutional aid, according to the college’s financial-aid leveraging model.
If Johnny had deposited by September 1, he would still get $42,000, as guaranteed on his estimate. If not, he would get $38,000, based on the actual FAFSA data.
Desjean, at NASFAA, hadn’t previously heard of another college sending aid estimates to students who haven’t applied. “Broadly speaking, we are in favor of early notification of financial-aid eligibility,” she says. “Getting information out about a student’s potential eligibility for aid could be a good thing here, especially because the message about the difference between sticker price and net price is really hard to get out.”
Still, Desjean, who worked in financial-aid offices for 20 years, sees a need for caution. “You have to balance how early you can go out with an estimate and still be accurate,” she says. “The pro of something like this is that it drives home the message of ‘Here’s a possibility for you.’ The con is the question of whether it’s an accurate estimate. You don’t want students feeling like they were duped into applying just because they thought they would receive a certain amount of aid.”
It’s an important question. The college might project that a particular student will qualify for a full or partial federal Pell Grant, for instance, but it certainly can’t guarantee that outcome.
Davenport, the financial-aid director, says that if a student’s estimate includes state or federal need-based aid that ultimately doesn’t come through, her staff would have a chat with that family. In such instances, she says, the college might opt to use institutional funds to make up some of the difference: “We would see if we could meet in the middle.”
But Davenport says she’s confident that most of Cornell’s estimates, including for federal aid, will be accurate. This spring, she ran some tests by using the college’s net-price calculator to estimate the SAI for about 200 admitted students who hadn’t submitted the FAFSA. She also mined the college’s historical data to review the average family income for previous Cornell students who came from a particular ZIP code.
Later, Davenport compared her estimates with the actual SAI for about 50 of those students who had ended up filing the FAFSA. “We had maybe one or two that we were far off on, primarily because we just didn’t know how much those families had in investments,” she says. “Looking at straight income, we were pretty darn close.”
By Thursday afternoon, nearly half of the 16,000 students who received Cornell’s email about the financial-aid estimate had opened it, according to the college. Some had already applied for admission, and others were in the process of doing so, says Beckemeyer, the vice president for enrollment management. Several families who didn’t qualify for need-based state or federal aid, she says, had called in to say that the estimates had nonetheless helped them see that they could probably swing it.
Cornell, which enrolls about 1,000 students, is just one tiny college among thousands of postsecondary institutions. But its experiment speaks to a big idea: Many families want clearer information about costs early on, and the future just might deliver more innovative ways to get it to them.
