For families with a shortlist and no idea what it costs
Sticker prices, partial aid, room and board quietly excluded, packages that shrink after freshman year. Name three colleges your student is looking at and Coach Randy prices all three across four years, live — while the list can still change, rather than after somebody has already said yes.
Identity, visibility, positioning and strategy decide it — who your student is on paper, which colleges can actually see them, where they land in a pool, and whether any of it was planned. That is the part almost nobody works on, and it is the part that moves both the acceptance and the price.
It is also the honest reason to work with Coach Randy rather than another tutor: a tutor raises a score. This changes where that score is worth the most.
Colleges publish a cost of attendance and a discount rate, and the two together are close to meaningless for any individual family. What decides your number is where your student sits in that college's pool, whether merit and need money stack there, and whether your first-year package renews. None of that is on the brochure, and all of it is knowable before you apply.
Average tuition discount for first-time undergraduates at private non-profits (NACUBO). Sticker price is a starting position.
What you are actually buying. Nearly every comparison families make is of year one alone.
Federal borrowing limit for a dependent undergraduate across the whole degree. The gap is yours to fill.
Three real numbers, and the method — so the fourth college you think of next week you can price yourself.
What each college's published figure includes and what it quietly leaves out. Travel and personal costs are the usual omissions.
What your family would realistically be offered at each of the three, need and merit separately.
Whether merit money adds to need-based money at that college or simply replaces it. This one question can move the number by tens of thousands.
Which parts of a package renew, which are one-year awards, and what the historical increase has been.
Three four-year numbers, side by side, in dollars you would actually pay.
Written down, so you can do this yourself for any other college on the list.
What a family normally pays for each piece, and what this costs.
You should come off this call with a four-year number for each of the three colleges you named. If you do not, tell me and I will work them out by hand and email them to you — and you will never hear from me again.
Said plainly, because thirty minutes with the wrong family helps nobody.
Thirty minutes, and the brochure stops being the thing you are comparing.
Price my three collegesCoach Randy, on what the session actually covers. Two minutes.
Who is running it
Coach Randy Narciso is the founder of AthletIQ Connect and the creator of College Pathway Intelligence. A USC engineering graduate with a USC MBA, he spent thirty years in business leadership, technology and strategy before turning the same systems thinking on college admissions. Fifteen years guiding students into universities across the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia, and a father who has been through admissions, financial aid and funding himself. He does not teach theory; he teaches what he has lived. He is a college planner, not a financial adviser, and he sells no financial products.
“Visibility changed everything. Building a searchable online identity through AthletIQ Connect helped me land a full ride to UCLA to play baseball. I’ve worked with Coach Randy from elementary through high school. I didn’t just apply — I got found. That’s the game changer.”
“Before AthletIQ, I was just another kid with stats. After working with Coach Randy for several years? I was a recruited asset. I received full ride offers to both USC and St. Mary’s College to play basketball. Coach Randy didn’t just coach me — he helped colleges discover me.”
“I wasn’t just chasing times on the track — I was building a brand that colleges could find. Thanks to AthletIQ Connect and Coach Randy, I got into Pepperdine, USC, and several UC schools. What stood out? Coaches said my digital portfolio made me unforgettable.”
Then this is the wrong call and the Runway Map is the right one. Pricing colleges your student has not chosen is an exercise in arithmetic, not planning.
They are estimates built from each college's published cost of attendance, its aid policy, and where your student sits in its pool. Wrong by a few thousand is normal. Wrong by the fifty thousand families are routinely out by is not.
Yes. Randy has placed students into universities in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia, and out-of-state public pricing is one of the places families lose the most money without noticing.
It is what almost every family assumes, and it is where most of them lose. Thousands of students have the grades, the scores and the activities. Highly qualified students are turned down every year, not for lack of intelligence, but because nothing in the application says who they are, how they lead, or why a college should remember them. The work is to be unforgettable, not merely qualified — and that is built over years, not written in an essay in December.
Probably not as far as it feels, and that is worth thirty minutes to find out rather than to keep wondering. Most families arrive saying some version of we do not know where to start, we do not know what to do next, or we should have begun sooner. The call answers those three for your student specifically. If it turns out there is genuinely nothing to do yet, you will be told that too.
No, and he will tell you so on the call. He is a college planner. He works out what colleges will charge your family and where the money comes from. He does not sell insurance, investments or savings plans, and he takes no commission from anybody.
No. Bring rough numbers — household income, roughly what you have in savings and investments outside retirement accounts, and your state. That is enough to get within a few hundred dollars, and nothing you say is stored.
It works better if they are, especially from tenth grade up — the decisions are theirs to live with. But a parent alone is fine, and plenty of these are booked by one parent who then plays it back to the other.
A seventeen-year-old who has already decided is very expensive to argue with. The cheapest moment to find out what a college costs is before the visit.
Price my three colleges