Access: Net prices, affordability, and equity at a highly selective college

With financial aid data on over 14,000 aided students at Williams College for the past 14 years, we can describe how much students actually paid to go to this highly selective and expensive school—their net prices—across income levels and over time. In 2001–02, the last year of our data, aided students across the five income quintiles of the US family income distribution paid, on average, 6–20% of their pretax family incomes—the lowest-income quintile paying the smallest share. No-need students at the 95th percentile of the income distribution who paid full price spent 22% of their family incomes for a year at Williams.