Financial aid calculators - there are better ways to illustrate your institution's story

On uwebd, there was a post yesterday by someone who was looking for quick and simple source code to do a financial aid calculator on their website.  Another member responded that he would only point her to the code if she promised that it wasn't because she read in a report that 83% of students wanted it.  I thought to myself "well, there are certainly worse reasons for wanting to implement something on your website than meeting the needs/expectations of a user."  

I always said that one of the reasons I felt I had been successful as the interactive recruitment manager at my last job was because I had done the one-the-road recruiting/admissions counselor thing before it.  That was 80% of it in my eyes.  It's hard for those who haven't seen that side of the house to understand it but when you do college fair after college fair and end up getting asked the same questions over and over and over again, you find out pretty quickly what is ACTUALLY important to students (and it isn't a school having a social network for them!).  Here's the deal: 
-PARENTS are interested primarily in the location of the school.  If you've ever heard the term black hawk, you understand - they don't want us pulling their precious son or daughter 3000 miles away from them when they aren't necessarily ready to cut the cord just yet.  
-PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS, ironically, are primarily interested in finances.  They want to know how much your school costs and how much debt they are going to be in upon graduation. Don't get me wrong, parents are also very interested in this and are likely to be more vocal about it than their students, but it doesn't top their list of concerns.  Students, like all the studies say, are more covert about it but if you talk to them at fairs or in interviews or do testing with them on your website, you'll see where they gravitate to.  

So how do school best meet this need on the web?  I'm not a huge fan of financial aid calculators because anyone that has worked in admissions will tell you that the financial aid process is usually far more complicated because of the competing priorities of the institution - things like major, gender, geographic region and ethnicity may receive more financial aid than others depending on the type of student body your higher-ups are looking to attain.  A simple, down and dirty, financial aid calculator can hardly be expected to take those outside variables into consideration since the financial aid package any student ultimately receives will come at the end of a very large and complicated algorithm.  

I've always liked MIT's way of illustrating their financial aid story (and I don't know for sure that MIT started this but I first saw it in a mailing they did in 2005 so I'll credit them).  They tell the stories of their students, some of whom come from wealthy families and some of whom don't, to show that anyone can afford an MIT education: 



You can read more stories on their website.  They then go one step further and offer a detailed look at sample financial aid packages to illustrate that they will always cover a student's demonstrated need, while also listing examples of extenuating circumstances that also may affect the overall package:

You can visit the full website here: http://web.mit.edu/sfs/afford/sample_aid_packages.html

Here the rub: Stuff like this isn't sexy and its hard to quantify.  Although I would put money on the fact that this is one of their most visited admissions/financial aid pages, you will never be able to say a student applied or enrolled as a result of a page like this but that doesn't make it any less vital to their decision making process.  It's also not a snazzy piece of technology that you developed or implemented that would look good on a resume.  Now for schools like MIT, I don't think it matters as much - they're going to get students regardless.  But say you work at a tier three school that costs just as much as MIT that is trying to attract future engineers through stellar financial aid packages.  If you don't demonstrate up front that you're going to cover these students financially, they're going to move on to another school that has a better brand name than your school or has shown they will cover full need and then some to get the student there.

Ultimately, students and their families want to be able to know they are going to be able to afford your school without being up to their ears in debt before they invest too much time/energy/money in including it in their college search process.  This is one of the basic questions that needs to be answered before they'll give you the time of day.  Once you show them they can, it becomes easier for the black hawks to cut the cord and explore the opportunity with their child.