About TuitionScan
What college actually costs.
TuitionScan started with a frustration Eric ran into while trying to compare what a few colleges would actually cost — not their advertised sticker price, but the real bill after grant aid for a family at a given income. That number turns out to be surprisingly hard to find: the sites that rank publish national averages, and the per-school figures are buried in a clunky federal database or a school's own hard-to-find net price calculator.
So he built something clearer. TuitionScan is a free, no-account cost explorer that shows, for any U.S. college, the net price students at each family-income level actually pay after aid — tracked over time, and cited straight to the federal source it comes from.
Eric builds free, single-purpose tools that take a question people actually search for and answer it from a primary source, with the work shown. TuitionScan came out of the same conviction behind the rest of his work: on decisions this consequential, people deserve the real number and a link to where it came from — not a marketing figure and not a black-box score.
Part of the Veraino network of free tool sites.
How it works
Every tool on TuitionScan is grounded in a documented, citable method — a published formula, an authoritative standard, or a well-established model. We don't approximate or invent numbers. If we can't cite a primary source for the logic, we don't publish the tool.
For TuitionScan, “authoritative” means one thing: the U.S. Department of Education. Net price, cost of attendance, and published tuition come from the College Scorecard and IPEDS — the same filings every college is federally required to report. We publish a figure only when it traces to that data, we show the reporting year on the page, and we say plainly that federal figures run about two years behind. We don't blend in crowd-sourced estimates or invent a proprietary “value” score.
Our commitments
- Free, no sign-up required. Every tool on this site is free to use with no account, subscription, or paywall.
- We show our work. Every tool explains its methodology, cites its sources, and surfaces assumptions — so you can verify the logic, not just trust the output.
- Honest about limitations. Where precision is limited or assumptions are required, we say so. Tools compute; they don't replace professional judgment.
- Kept current. Tools that use figures that can change over time carry a “last reviewed” date and are treated as an ongoing maintenance responsibility, not a one-time build.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, or suggestions: hello@tuitionscan.com. Eric reads every message personally.