The American Enterprise Institute recently made a startling claim: only 36 percent of Georgetown University students receive “any financial aid,” so the other 64 percent pay the school’s published price — “all six figures of it.” The essay, by Preston Cooper, concludes that “‘Nobody pays the sticker price’ is a fiction we can no longer afford to tell aspiring college students.” The percentage comes straight from federal data. The interpretation is completely wrong.
It’s true that college pricing can be opaque, and families deserve to know what they will owe before they apply, not after. But the essay does not show what it claims. I am a data scientist who studies injustice, so I downloaded the essay’s chart and the federal data beneath it.
Imagine a supermarket reports that 36 percent of shoppers used a coupon. It is correct to conclude that 64 percent did not. It is not correct to conclude that everyone else paid the same total: some bought smaller baskets or used other assistance the tally missed. Nor can you add rent and bus fare — costs the store never rings up — to anyone’s grocery bill. A coupon count identifies one kind of discount, not a stack of receipts.
That supermarket report is the essay’s method. The coupon is grant aid: federal data show that 36 percent of Georgetown’s degree-seeking undergraduates received grant or scholarship aid, averaging $46,250 among recipients. The essay, though, calls this “any financial aid,” and it is not. The tally leaves out student loans and veterans’ benefits — loans finance a price rather than discount it, but they are financial aid all the same. Where the federal data do measure any aid, for the narrower group of full-time, first-time students, the figure is 44 percent, not 36. And the baskets differ too: the 36 percent counts all degree-seeking undergraduates, part-time students included, while the chart prices every school at its full-time tuition.
From there, the essay’s chart subtracts the coupon tally from 100 and labels the remainder “Share of Students Paying Sticker Price.” I reproduced that subtraction across all 1,183 colleges in the chart. The arithmetic works perfectly. But it establishes only that those students had no recorded grant — not that they received no aid, much less that they all paid the same amount. That includes the essay’s most sweeping figure — that 42 percent of students at the “priciest decile” of colleges pay full freight. It, too, counts missing coupons, not payments.
And the rent and bus fare? For its Georgetown headline, the essay pairs that mislabeled 2023–24 percentage with the university’s $100,864 cost-of-attendance budget for 2026–27. That six-figure number is a planning estimate rather than a single amount Georgetown charges, adding housing, food, books, and travel to tuition and fees. Those are real costs, but they are not all charges paid to Georgetown, and they vary by circumstance. The same page, for example, lists $87,740 for a student living with parents. Nothing in the chart’s federal inputs records any family’s actual bill or payment. A budget is not a bill, and a coupon count is not a receipt.
None of this means that nobody pays sticker price. Some families do. The question the essay never asks is who they are.
At Georgetown — the essay’s own showcase — the answer is built into the aid system. All aid there is need-based, and the university pledges to meet the full demonstrated need of every eligible undergraduate. For an eligible student who sought aid, receiving no grant generally signals that Georgetown’s formula found little or no demonstrated need. The broader enrollment picture is similarly affluent: in the cohorts studied by Raj Chetty and colleagues, nearly 18 percent of Georgetown students came from the top 1 percent of earners; about 3 percent came from the bottom fifth. At Georgetown, paying sticker price is by and large a marker of wealth rather than a trap that springs on unsuspecting families.
Nor is Georgetown typical. It is one of 16 institutions CNBC identified with a six-figure cost-of-attendance budget for 2026–27. Even the Brookings Institution analysis the essay cites reports that only 16 percent of students at private nonprofit colleges paid full sticker in 2019–20. Some families do pay it; nobody claimed nobody. The point of “ignore the sticker price” was always that the sticker tells most families little about what they will actually pay.
Why does the distinction matter? In a randomized experiment led by Susan Dynarski, high-achieving, low-income Michigan students were promised free tuition before they applied. The university offered no additional aid; it simply made existing aid certain. Applications jumped from 26 percent to 68 percent, and enrollment rose from 12 percent to 27 percent. Price perception changed behavior.
That mechanism matters in a broader campaign against higher education. A national Strada survey found that 77 percent of adults already considered college unaffordable, while most overestimated public-college prices. Congress has now eliminated Grad PLUS loans for new borrowers and capped new Parent PLUS borrowing, while raising endowment tax rates on some wealthy private universities. An anti-education campaign need not close colleges to keep people out. Narrow the means to pay, then convince families that the door is financially locked, and many will turn away on their own. A six-figure headline built on a mislabeled statistic helps turn the key.
Opaque pricing still deserves fixing. The remedy is useful transparency rather than alarmism. This fall, Tufts is tuition-free for U.S. undergraduates from families earning under $150,000 with typical assets; next fall, the University of Chicago will be tuition-free for families earning under $250,000 with typical assets, and Whitman College will cap tuition at 10 percent of family income. Colleges should publish the distribution of prices families actually pay, and they should quote their own charges separately from estimates of students’ living costs — so that a budget can never again masquerade as a bill.
The federal data can count coupons. They cannot produce receipts. The notion that everyone without a coupon pays six figures is the real fiction we can no longer afford — and the students it harms most are the ones who believe it and never apply.
This is the kind of data-driven justice work I do in my book Unlocking Justice, now available from Princeton University Press.