You Aren’t Using Your College’s Net Price Calculator Like You Should Be

Bringing up money in your conversations with parents

What do you, as a college coach, want to do most when it comes to the recruiting process?

You want to accelerate it when you are ready to pursue a recruit you really want.

What is one of the core aspects of accelerating the recruiting process?

Good, in-depth conversations with the recruit and his or her family.

What gets the interest of parents of your recruit?

Looking at our research, we know that it is discussions about money…specifically, how much money could their son or daughter get by coming to your school or being a part of your program.

And what is the easiest, most effective way for a college coach to get into a conversation about money with the parents of a prospect?

By getting them to complete your college’s Net Price Calculator.

I’m not concerned whether you feel it’s inaccurate at your college, or that it doesn’t factor in all the different athletic aid an athlete might receive at some schools. Why? Because it does something else that’s much more important: by completing the net price calculator, you now have the basis of a conversation about money that we know the parents of your prospects are waiting to hear from you on.

Let me walk you through the steps of how we see this playing out with the clients and subscribers who use it:

1. Ask your recruit common or preferably his or her parents, if their family has filled out the net price calculator on your colleges website.

2. Once they do ask them “what did it say you would need to invest for (name of your prospect) to come here to our college?“

3. The parents give you the number that the net price calculator came back with.

4. You follow-up by asking, “so based on that number…give or take a couple of thousand dollars either way…is that an amount your family could invest into (name of your prospect)’s college education and opportunity to compete for us here?“

5. They answer ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘I’m not sure.’

Do you know what you just did, coach?

You are getting them to reveal what their budget is for picking a college. And that is a significant move in your entire recruiting conversation with them, because it let you know as soon as possible what their mindset is, and more importantly, what their price tag is.

The feedback you get tells you whether or not your college is in the running, on the outskirts, or completely out of the conversation. And if you do that early in the process, you may have just saved yourself 6, 9 or 24 months of calling them, going to watch their games, having them to campus, and all of the other time consuming aspects of your day that goes into recruiting your list of athletes.

What happens if you don’t have a conversation about money is that the parents of your recruits go through the process, act polite, all the while thinking that if they drag out the process or impress you enough or position you against one of your competitors successfully enough, that you will give them more money.

“But Dan, our net price calculator isn’t that accurate at our college.“

That doesn’t matter. We aren’t in charge, as coaches, of giving them their official family contribution amount to get the education at your college. What we are in charge of, as coaches, is to understand the mindset of our recruits and move the conversation along as fast as possible if it is a recruit that we want in our program.

We need to have a conversation about money, and what the different possibilities at your college are, and bringing up this “what if“ scenario gets that conversation kicked off and just about the best way we’ve seen earlier in the process.

If you are a coach that can’t offer a full athletic scholarship to your recruit, or if you were a coach that is nervous about talking about money that the family would have to pay to come compete for you, this is a great nonthreatening way of getting them to have a discussion about it from their point of you, and it gives you critical information that you need to properly assess the situation with that recruit, and what you should do next as a coach.