Net price calculators (NPCs) are online tools designed to increase transparency in college pricing by presenting students with individualized estimates of net prices to attend a given postsecondary institution. The federal template NPC predicts identical aid awards for similarly profiled students attending the same institution. Using the 2012 National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey, we use regression analysis to assess variation in actual financial aid awards among students predicted by the federal template NPC to receive identical awards. We find estimated aid, derived from the federal template NPC, accounts for 70 percent of the variation in actual grant aid received by students. We then consider modifications to the federal template NPC that include an additional upper-income bracket option and indicators of both high school grade point average and Free Application for Federal Student Aid filing time. These modifications explain an additional 16 percentage points, or more than half, of the unexplained variation in actual grant aid awards across all institutional sectors. These findings are especially relevant as legislators consider policy efforts to bring greater transparency to college cost and pricing, including creating a universal NPC in which prospective students can enter information once to receive net price estimates at any institution.

Place-based promise scholarships are a relatively recent innovation in the space of college access and success. Although evidence on the impact of some of the earliest place-based scholarships has begun to emerge, the rapid proliferation of promise programs largely has preceded empirical evidence of their impact. We utilize regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences analyses to investigate the causal effect of the Pittsburgh Promise on students’ immediate postsecondary attainment and early college persistence outcomes. Both analytic approaches yield similar conclusions. As a result of Promise eligibility, Pittsburgh Public School graduates are approximately 5 percentage points more likely to enroll in college, particularly four-year institutions; 10 percentage points more likely to select a Pennsylvania institution; and 4 to 7 percentage points more likely to enroll and persist into a second year of postsecondary education. Impacts vary with changes over time in the program structure and opportunities, and are larger for those responsive to the Promise opportunity, as instrumental variable-adjusted results reveal. Although the Pittsburgh Promise represents a sizeable investment, conservative cost–benefit calculations indicate positive returns. Even so, an important question is whether locally funded programs such as the Pittsburgh Promise are economically sustainable in the long run.