Mark Salisbury
WHY YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PRICE TRANSPARENCY
TOM GEFFERS
Tell us about yourself and when you realized you wanted a career in higher education.
MARK SALISBURY
I have spent 25 years in higher education in one form or another. Most of it was on college campuses until I started TuitionFit in 2018. I realized I wanted to work in higher learning when I got to college, and I didn’t want to leave. My parents will tell you that was evident in the seven years I took to finish undergrad. Being on a college campus, for me, is such a wonderful, vibrant, and alive experience. There's so much going on. There's so much interesting development for young people and new ideas. I worked many different jobs in higher education. I didn’t want to leave. I want to keep working with colleges and universities, being on campus, and being involved in the campus environment.
TOM GEFFERS
How does TuitionFit work?
MARK SALISBURY
TuitionFit is about building a way for anyone to find out the prices colleges charge across different types of students and colleges. We are entirely accustomed to this kind of information being available when we're shopping for a car, a house, renting an apartment, mortgage rates or life insurance. The higher education marketplace is the one place where the only information about price people get is the sticker price, which virtually no students pay anymore. The only number people can get is the average price or what one student ended up paying. When the average is half of the sticker price, people figure out that number is irrelevant. The studies show there isn’t really an average in college tuition, everybody is on one side or the other.
When the range is $75,000 a year, the difference really matters. TuitionFit is built on the idea that we can fix this ourselves. We share information together to create a giant book of college pricing. Then the public doesn’t have to wonder about which schools fit their budget. We look to solve that early barrier for people trying to find a college that is the right financial fit.
TOM GEFFERS
Were you collecting information of different pricings and offerings throughout the years? Do you think every college treats students differently? If student A gets an award letter and student B gets an award letter for the same amount of money, does that mean they both get that amount or is it specific to those two students?
MARK SALISBURY
We don't do any averaging or aggregating. We show all the prices students have received. The point is to see that range, because similar students, from a similar financial background, and a similar academic profile, can end up seeing two very different prices at two similar institutions. Sometimes there might be two very different prices at the same institution. But the students never know that, they only know the price that’s been shared with them. It's like when you try to buy a used car and the salesman said, "Look, I'm going to give you a special deal, but don't tell anybody, because it's just between you and me." That’s happening at colleges now, and it’s confusing. Students are paying a crazy range of prices for their first year of college.
TOM GEFFERS
With that letter they can negotiate their pricing. Do you help them with that?
MARK SALISBURY
We don't spend a lot of time trying to tell people what to do. We're trying to build the dataset, so they can think about what to do and to have some confidence, context, and leverage. Some people decide they are comfortable paying a certain price because it’s fair, and there are some people who say you shouldn’t pay that price, no matter what. They think you should negotiate, but you can’t do any of those things without knowing the price. We create the data set and then provide that resource to the public, whether it’s a DIY search person or a college search professional. If they're working with a financial planner, a high school counselor, or anything in between, now you have ability to guide people because you have transparency.
TOM GEFFERS
You get information from mail students receive about colleges. Do they voluntarily give you that information? How is that information protected, if it’s protected?
MARK SALISBURY
It needs to be protected because people, with good reason, are distrustful of how organizations use people's data. There are many examples we can point to where people’s data was sold to others without their knowledge or consent. They are profiled to be sold to. People have become the product many times in the online space. One of our core values is that people are not the product, and their data is sacred. We must earn the trust of those sharing this information. There are no credit card numbers or Social Security numbers on the award letter, but we still want people to trust what we’ve done is right. We make people feel protected to ensure this.
We use passwords and do everything we can to protect the people’s data we collect. When they share an award letter with us, they have to share the unredacted award letter because we have to verify that it’s real. There have been a few people who have intentionally tried to upload erroneous data. We’re good at catching it. People are using these numbers to compare to other schools, so the numbers matter. So, they upload the unredacted letter and then we redact all the private information on the letter. We remove their name, temporary ID, and address. If there is a named scholarship that can be looked up easily on Google, we redact that as well. Then we show the student the redacted version and they must approve it. Ultimately, the user drives that so they know they are anonymized, and we’ve earned their trust.
TOM GEFFERS
Why do you say students should not show too much interest in school? That’s different from what most advisors tell their students to do.
MARK SALISBURY
All the advice that is the conventional wisdom in the college guidance space is framed around getting accepted. 40 years ago, getting accepted was the goal because the sticker price was a lot lower, and it was the price that most students were going to pay. You could use that as a mechanism to ensure you weren't going to look at a school that was ultimately outside your price range. 40 years later, all of that has blown up. Folks don't have any way to identify the schools that are going to be a financial fit for them.
We must remind ourselves loudly and often that the goal isn’t to just get into college, the goal isn’t even to graduate from college, the goal is to give students financial stability after they graduate so they can take interesting opportunities to help them in the long run. If a student graduates but they are under a pile of debt, we’ve failed. The question shouldn’t be about getting in, the question should be what price will you have to pay? Students have already narrowed down their choices when choosing which school to apply to. There are thousands of colleges and universities and they’ve applied to 10 of them. They’ve eliminated 99.9% of the other options.
It's important to keep in mind demonstrated interest when apply to college. Showing too much interest only works from the prospecting of the seller. It tells the sellers at universities and colleges that this student really wants to be at their institution. Colleges and universities are running a business. They must keep the lights on. This is the way a marketplace works. If you’re selling something and somebody is desperate to buy, your motivation isn’t going to be to give them the best price possible. Your motivation is that you think you can get a good price from them. So, you offer a price that may not be the best price you can offer.
From the consumer's perspective, this is how this plays out with demonstrated interest. When you throw yourself at the mercy of a school, you're also telling them, "I'm willing to pay more to go there because I love it so much.” That's not the message you want to send. You might want to be professional. You might want to be respectful. You might want to be all the things that you're supposed to be as a kind person, but that's not the same as sending them a box of cookies and begging to be accepted in their institution. The same is true with the safety target and reach. That is all built on getting accepted. That's not built on finding a price tag that is a financial fit. Then the safety target reach is no longer useful because it’s going to be expensive if you get in. You just spent $100 on each application. If you’re just like everybody else, you’re going to get the average, which for many schools is $35,000 a year. Many people don’t have that. So, finding the price that fits for them is the most important.
MARIA GEFFERS
Who is your ideal client?
MARK SALISBURY
Anyone or any organization that will benefit from knowing the actual prices colleges and universities charge. Our ideal client is not a college search professional who promises their client to get them into their dream school. Our clients are everybody else. If you’re a parent or a student, and price matters, TuitionFit is exactly where you should go. We’re here for anyone who cares about solving this logjam.
MARIA GEFFERS
Is the best time to reach out to you when a student is a junior or a senior in high school?
MARK SALISBURY
If you're at the beginning of the college search and you're trying to find a list of schools you want to apply to, you would be crazy not to think about price. It's a waste of time, money, and emotional energy to apply to a place, get in, and then get a price that's nowhere close to what you want. You need that list to fit your financial situation as well as everything else. TuitionFit's the only place where you can ensure you find that. When you're building your college list, we are where you need to come. Then when you're at the end of the college search and you have some financial aid offer letters and you want to know if it's a good price, we're the only place that you can go to find that out.
MARIA GEFFERS
What's the biggest challenge you have faced in your business?
MARK SALISBURY
We’re not introducing a new fidget spinner. We’re not introducing a car that gets a little bit better gas mileage. We’re asking people to realize the way the system is designed is disempowering and disadvantaging them. The biggest challenge has been to tell conventional wisdom it’s not working but making it worse. It’s like pushing a boulder up a long hill that steadily becomes steeper. It’s been a challenge to put forward that message in a way that still recognizes that higher education institutions aren’t evil. I worked in them for a long time, and everyone I worked with was phenomenal, wonderful, caring, and trying hard to do right by students.
Higher education institutions and the public need each other. They have a lot of obstacles preventing both from being as successful as they could be. The TuitionFit project is built on the center of that marketplace. We need to create transparency, open a logjam, and fix something that needs to be fixed on both sides. It's easy to get jacked up about how the system works and paint higher education institutions as the bad guy, when they aren’t. The challenge is to remain in the middle and remind everyone we’re not trying to blow things up, we’re trying to make them better. One of the ways to make it better is to nudge colleges to go places they may not want to go.
MARIA GEFFERS
What is the most rewarding moment you’ve had in your career so far?
MARK SALISBURY
I have been lucky because I get to help organizations get better, whether I was working in athletics or figuring out how the organization could use their data better. There are certain people at organizations everybody looks to and says, "They've got it all together. They're perfect," but then there's everybody else. Many times, I have worked with both student affairs and instructors when things are hard. There is not enough time in the day and students aren’t as plugged in as you would like them to be. You’re questioning if you’re good at what you do.
When you do this work, you lay yourself out there and it can feel like you aren’t doing any good or helping anybody. Over the last decade I got to work with individuals and offices. I helped them see a different way to do what they do and gave them a few suggestions about student experiences and when they seem to learn something and grow. We find ways to make that happen more. It’s usually not a fundamental rewrite, the organization just needs a little tweaking here and there.
When you’re in the middle of the storm as an instructor, you can’t step outside of yourself and see if you’re coming off defensive because you’re in the middle of it. I get to help people with a little information and a little data. Then they light up and realize they can be better at what they do, they just needed help seeing it.
MARIA GEFFERS
With college fields constantly changing, how do you keep up with all the changes happening?
MARK SALISBURY
It helps to have 25 years of friends, colleagues, and relationships with people all over the country who are in the middle of higher education. There are also a lot of smart writers and journalists who pay attention to what's going on, what's on the edge, and what might be happening. There are several good publications that pump out interesting information. You combine those two things, and it is possible to have a sense of what's going on. It’s important to remember higher education is terrible with fundamental change. Even after COVID, we still have majors and minors. Student affairs and academic affairs still exist. People are still paying tuition and books. The basic structure of how colleges work hasn’t changed. It’s like the phrase, “The more things change, the more they look the same.”
One thing that is a part and parcel to what we’ve been discussing is that when folks are thinking about going into post-secondary learning, the focus is college. We miss that, for every student. They’re playing the long game. When they’re 18, they haven’t grown up yet. They’re not fully together. Our frontal lobes don’t fully develop until we’re in our mid-20s. Every student, as they think about college, needs to play the long game. Think about who you want to be and what makes you tick. There are multiple paths to get there. Those paths are all going to have curves and straightaways and college is a piece of that. When people think about it that way, it takes a lot of stress away and you’re more likely to get somewhere in the ballpark of what you were hoping to do.
TOM GEFFERS
Thank you for sharing your perspective.
