To many people, strategy is a total mystery. But it’s really not complicated, says Harvard Business School’s Felix Oberholzer-Gee, author of “Better, Simpler Strategy”.
00:00 To many people, strategy is a mystery.
00:25 Strategy does not start with a focus on profit.
00:52 It’s about creating value.
01:00 There’s a simple tool to help visualize the value you create: the value stick.
01:30 What is willingness-to-pay?
02:30 What is willingness-to-sell?
03:14 Remind me: Where does profit come in again?
03:48 How do I raise willingness-to-pay?
05:00 And how do I lower willingness-to-sell?
06:18 Real world example: Best Buy’s dramatic turnaround
Companies should simplify and focus on two value drivers, he argues: customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. By aligning strategic initiatives on these alone, leaders make their workers’ jobs less complicated and improve customer experiences.
Oberholzer-Gee is the author of the Harvard Business Review article “Eliminate Strategic Overload” ( as well as the book “Better, Simpler Strategy: A Value-Based Guide to Exceptional Performance” (
Produced and edited by Scott LaPierre
Video by Dave Di Iulio and Elie Honein
Animation by Alex Belser
Mortgage delinquencies are expected to rise further as renewals continue, but CIBC says other credit indicators show little evidence of broader deterioration.
Real net tuition at public four-year colleges has fallen 48% since 2012-13. The price problem today is housing, fees, and the school you pick, not tuition inflation.
Most “just cut costs” ideas are worth hundreds of dollars a year per student, not thousands. Shutting down athletics is the biggest single line, at roughly $800 to $1,700 a year at a typical non-Power public.
Only four things cut what a degree actually costs: buying less time, starting at a cheaper school and transferring, changing how you take classes, and not paying for campus housing. Families can act on all four without waiting for a college to change.
I’ve spent almost 20 years writing about student loans and how to pay for college. The one thing I hear more than anything else, from readers, from parents in our Facebook groups, from reporters, is some version of “college just costs too much.” And the follow-up is always the same: “Schools need to cut costs.“
I completely agree that schools need to cut costs and make higher education more affordable for students. The problem is, they really can’t.
We pulled the research on every idea I’ve ever heard for lowering the cost of college: cut administrators, shut down sports, stop building dorms, go online, freeze tuition, send more state money, make Ivy League schools like Harvard spend their endowments. Then we ran the numbers on what each one would save a student.
The answer is a challenging pill for most families to swallow: there simply aren’t many levers left for colleges to pull, and most of the ones that exist are worth a few hundred dollars a year. Picking up dollar bills gets you to $100 if you find 100 of them. The problem is there aren’t 100 of them on the ground, and some of the bills are IOUs that move the cost to someone else.
The bigger surprise is that the cost of college families pay at public universities got cheaper – but families don’t realize it because it’s a black box. The sticker price went up, and the real net price went down. What went up is everything around tuition: housing, meal plans, fees, and the gap between a $25,830 year at the University of Florida and a $54,674 year at UC Berkeley.
Only four things in the research move the needle for a family – but they all fall on college buyers, not the schools themselves: buying less time, starting somewhere cheaper, changing how you take classes, and skipping the dorm.
Everything below is the breakdown, lever by lever, with the trade-offs for each.
Every Tactic For Cutting College Costs, At A Glance
Tactic
Would It Save Money?
Savings Per Student Per Year
Cut Administrative Staff
Yes
$450 To $905
Shut Down College Sports
Yes
$800 To $1,700
Cut Programs And Merge Campuses
No
Under $100
Stop Building New Dorms
No
$120
Freeze Tuition
No
Shifts To Fees And Out-Of-State Students
More State Funding
A Little
$60 To $320 Per $1,000 Of State Money
Federal Loan Caps
Unproven
$0 Documented So Far
Harvard And Yale Go Free
Yes, For 0.8% Of Students
$87,150 At Yale, $0 Everywhere Else
Earn Credits Before College
Yes
$25,850 For Each Year Skipped
Start At Community College And Transfer
Yes
$13,554 At UC Prices, $5,070 At Cal State
Three-Year Degree
Yes
$25,850 For The Year Skipped
Online Or Self-Paced Program
Yes
$1,100 To $5,000+
Skip The Dorm
Yes
$9,300 To $15,200
The College Investor. Figures are explained and sourced in each section below.
Table of Contents
Has College Actually Gotten More Expensive?
Where Does The Tuition Money Actually Go?
Could Colleges Cut Administrative Costs?
What Would Shutting Down College Sports Save Students?
Would Cutting Programs And Merging Campuses Lower Tuition?
Why Are Dorms And Meal Plans So Expensive?
Does More State Funding Lower Tuition?
Could Federal Loan Caps Force Prices Down?
What If Harvard And Yale Just Made College Free?
What Are The Four Things That Actually Lower The Cost Of College?
How Families Can Use This To Pay Less
Frequently Asked Questions
Has College Actually Gotten More Expensive?
It’s important that we talk about college the same way:
Cost: What the school actually has to pay to educate a student
Sticker Price: The list price of a college
Net Price: What a family actually pays after financial aid
Sticker prices rose. Real net tuition fell. At public four-year colleges, net tuition and fees peaked at $4,450 in 2012-13 and sit at an estimated $2,300 for 2025-26 in today’s dollars, according to the College Board’s Trends in College Pricing (PDF File). That’s a 48% drop in what the average first-time student actually pays after grants.
The 30-year story and the 10-year story point in opposite directions. Real sticker tuition at public four-years rose 101% over 30 years. Over the last 10 years it fell 7%, and at community colleges it fell 10%. Grant aid has exceeded community college tuition since 2009-10, which is why net tuition there is negative $1,190.
Public college has always been heavily subsidized, and the chart below is the long version of that story. In 1980, students covered about 21% of what public colleges took in to educate them, and in FY2025 they covered 38.4%, per SHEEO’s State Higher Education Finance report. Even at full sticker, a public four-year student has never paid what the school spends. The spending line is SHEEO’s measure of state money plus net tuition per full-time student, which leaves out housing, research, and hospitals, so it understates the full number in the next section on where the money goes.
Public Four-Year College: What’s Spent, The Sticker, And What Students Pay 1995-96 To 2025-26
Spent per student (state money plus net tuition) Sticker tuition and fees Net tuition and fees after grants $0$5,000$10,000$15,000$20,0001995-962000-012005-062010-112015-162020-212025-26 $19,541$11,950$2,300 $5,940 $17,294 $4,030 Peak $4,450
2025 dollars, in-state public four-year. Source: College Board, SHEEO. The College Investor.
Private colleges are running the same play with bigger numbers. The average discount rate for first-year students hit 54.5% in 2024-25 and an estimated 57.1% in 2025-26, per NACUBO, with 90% of first-year students getting institutional aid. A $45,000 sticker overstates the average student’s bill by about $28,000. The most expensive colleges on our list almost never collect their list price.
Sticker Price Vs. Net Price By College Type, 2025-26
College Type
Tuition And Fees
Housing And Food
Net Tuition And Fees
Public Two-Year
$4,150
$10,850
-$1,190
Public Four-Year (In-State)
$11,950
$13,900
$2,300
Public Four-Year (Out-Of-State)
$31,880
$13,900
Not Reported
Private Nonprofit Four-Year
$45,000
$15,920
$16,910
Source: College Board, Trends in College Pricing 2025. Net figures are for first-time full-time students in 2025 dollars. The College Investor.
Where Does The Tuition Money Actually Go?
Public colleges spent $49,372 per full-time student in 2021-22, and only 26% of it went to instruction. That’s up from $36,205 in 2009-10 in constant dollars, according to NCES Digest Table 334.10. So cost kept climbing while the price students pay fell. Someone absorbed the gap, and the answer is states through aid, colleges through discounting, and families through student loans.
The fastest-growing lines since 2009-10 weren’t professors. Hospital services grew 109% per student, net grant aid 57%, academic support 33%, student services 32%, and institutional support (central administration) 28%. Instruction grew 12%.
The honest way to read this for an undergraduate is to strip out hospitals and research, which are enormous at flagships and have nothing to do with the cost of a bachelor’s degree.
The cost driver that best fits the last decade is the least exciting one. Benefit costs per employee at public colleges grew about 4% a year from 2002 to 2010 while salaries grew under 1%, and the Delta Cost Project (PDF File) called rising benefits “the main driver of higher compensation costs.” Public enrollment is still 7.2% below its 2011 peak per SHEEO’s State Higher Education Finance report.
The costs of buildings, pensions, debt, and tenured faculty are being spread over fewer students.
That is the cost of the people, not the number of people. It’s also the setup for the next question, because when readers say “cut administrative costs,” this is the line they’re pointing at whether they know it or not. Our own analysis of administrative staffing found non-academic staff average about 10% of enrollment once you remove hospital and graduate workers. The issue is their costs.
The growth is in benefits and student services, not deans, and nothing forces the savings onto the tuition line.
Yes, and a 10% to 20% cut to central administration would save about $450 to $900 per student per year. Institutional support was $4,527 per full-time student at public colleges in 2021-22, so the math is simple. Spread the same cut across every overhead line (administration, student services, academic support) and the ceiling rises to $1,108 to $2,216 per student.
Those are budget savings, not tuition cuts, because nothing forces a college to pass them to the tuition line.
The “bloat” most people picture is more deans. The data say otherwise. Executive and managerial staff per 1,000 students at public research universities fell from 13 to 11 between 2000 and 2012, while professional staff in advising, IT, counseling, compliance, and fundraising grew everywhere, per the Delta Cost Project.
The administrative cost that climbed is what each employee costs, and that’s where Mark Kantrowitz’s staffing analysis and I land in the same place: this is a compensation story.
California is the clearest example. Compensation is about 75% of core spending at both the UC and Cal State systems. UC salary spending grew 5.9% a year and benefits 5.3% a year from 2015-16 to 2024-25, and every 1% raise costs UC about $55 million, per the Legislative Analyst’s Office (PDF File).
Cal State’s CalPERS employer contribution for staff is now 32% of pay, up from 18.2% in 2011-12. A dollar of salary in 2011 cost the system $1.18. Today it costs $1.32 before health care, and that’s the kind of increase behind UC’s cohort tuition plan, which took entering-cohort tuition and fees from $12,570 in 2022-23 to $15,588 in 2026-27.
That’s administrative bloat in the sense that matters: the same people cost more. The reason a chancellor can’t fix it is that pensions cover faculty too, and California’s courts protect accrued public pension benefits from being cut. The legislature owns that lever, not the campus.
Real administrative cuts land in single digits, like the University of Arizona’s 7.5% administrative reduction after a $177 million shortfall or Syracuse’s administrative review after its first deficit in years.
The con here is that most of the professional staff growth is stuff students and parents asked for. Mental health counselors, financial aid officers, disability services, Title IX staff, and cybersecurity teams are “administration” in the data. Cut them and the complaint changes from cost to service, which is what happened when West Virginia University cut 28 majors and 143 faculty jobs in 2023 to close a $45 million budget gap.
The playbook for paying your college bill doesn’t change much either way, because the savings don’t reach the bill.
Source: NCES Digest Table 334.10, 2021-22, public institutions. Overhead is institutional support, academic support, and student services. The College Investor.
What Would Shutting Down College Sports Save Students?
Students see the money only if the athletics fee is cut, which no school in the record has done after a downgrade.
At a typical Group of Five public university, students subsidize athletics at about $1,300 to $1,700 a year. At an FCS school it’s $840 to $1,120. Only 22 of roughly 350 Division I programs took in more than they spent in 2023-24, and 20 of those were in the Power conferences, according to a July 2026 GAO analysis (PDF File) of NCAA data.
For most students, college sports are the largest single subsidy they can point to on their bill, and our earlier look at the GAO finding that 94% of programs lose money showed who covers the gap.
The math uses GAO’s median “institutional contribution,” which is student fees plus direct university support after the department’s own revenue. That figure is $25.9 million a year at a non-Power FBS school. Divide by 20,000 undergraduates and you get $1,295 per student, or $1,727 at 15,000. For an FCS school the median is $16.8 million, or $840 to $1,120 per student. At Division II, GAO puts it at about $2,850 per undergraduate. At James Madison, the real-world version is $55.54 million in mandatory athletic fees from 21,006 undergraduates, about $2,644 each, the most of any school in the country.
The House settlement is making this worse, not better. Schools can now pay athletes up to $20.5 million a year, and the bill is landing on students. Clemson added its first-ever athletics fee at $300 a year in fall 2025, West Virginia added $250, and Virginia Tech’s fee is rising from $732 to $1,032 by 2029, per Athletic Business. North Texas students voted down an increase 57 to 43.
The $1.77 billion athletes earned in the first year of revenue sharing is partly coming out of the pockets of students who never set foot in the stadium.
Dropping a division saves less than shutting the whole thing down. Moving a Group of Five program to Division II (median subsidy about $7 million) saves roughly $945 to $1,260 per undergraduate. Conference payouts disappear on the way down, some support is in-kind and doesn’t vanish, and no school in the record cut its student fee after a downgrade.
UAB dropped football in December 2014 and brought it back six months later after donors pledged money. Hartford’s own consultant estimated it would still lose $3.8 million a year in Division III against $13 million in Division I, and the Protect College Sports Act that passed the Senate does nothing to change that math.
The counterarguments are real but smaller than fans think. A top-20 football finish raises applications about 2.5% and a championship 7% to 8%, per the Pope and Pope study (PDF File). Donors, legislatures, and Title IX all complicate a partial exit.
My honest take: the ask isn’t “shut down sports.” It’s “put the athletics fee as its own line on the bill and let students vote on it,” because the schools that have done that have mostly lost the vote.
Source: GAO-26-108640 medians from NCAA data. Per-student figures divide the median subsidy by an assumed undergraduate enrollment. Power schools usually enroll 30,000 or more. The College Investor.
Would Cutting Programs And Merging Campuses Lower Tuition?
Most eliminated programs had zero students, and mergers save well under 1% of a system’s budget.
Almost never. The 2025-26 wave of program eliminations saved no documented dollars, because most of the programs cut had few or zero students. Of the 75 degree programs Indiana eliminated under its 2025 law, 68 had zero students enrolled, per the Indiana Capital Chronicle. Syracuse’s provost said its 93-program sunset “was not a cost-cutting exercise.” Penn State’s 47 program closures follow the same pattern.
Mergers save real money in very small amounts. Georgia consolidated 14 institutions into 7 starting in 2011 and had redirected about $24 million by 2017, under 1% of an $8.8 billion budget, per the Chronicle of Higher Education. Pennsylvania’s PennWest merger beat its personnel savings target and then missed its enrollment projection by 4,800 students and its tuition revenue by $53 million. Penn State’s seven closing branch campuses needed $40 million a year to keep open, and closing them strands students more than it lowers anyone’s bill.
The colleges closing in 2026 remove high-cost seats, but nobody has measured whether the displaced students end up paying less.
Catalog cleanup is good management. It isn’t a tuition cut, and any school that tells you otherwise is counting savings it can’t show you.
A construction freeze in 2000 would have saved $4,193 a year. Real room and board stopped growing a decade ago, so a freeze today saves almost nothing.
Room and board is one of the biggest drivers of rising college costs, and more and more colleges are making it a required expense.
Because housing and dining have to pay for themselves, schools have to pass on this cost including every dollar of construction debt. Campus housing is an “auxiliary enterprise,” which means rents and meal plans must cover each building’s share of debt service, maintenance, and depreciation with no state money, as the University System of Georgia’s procedures manual spells out.
New student housing in California now averages $251,000 per bed and runs up to $400,000, per EdSource.
Housing and food is now the biggest number on a public bill. It’s $13,900 at public four-years in 2025-26 against $11,950 for tuition and fees, and it rose 4.4% this year while tuition rose 2.9%. Sector-wide debt service runs about $48 billion a year, roughly $750 per student at publics, and at Salem State students pay over $3,300 each toward building debt, figures Moody’s and a faculty task force reported through the Hechinger Report.
The average meal plan runs about $5,656 for nine months, against roughly $2,200 to $2,800 of groceries on the USDA Thrifty Food Plan for the same period, a comparison that shows why families spent $34,019 on college last year.
I went into this believing that if every school stopped building dorms and only maintained what it had, prices would stabilize. The numbers half agree. If room and board had tracked inflation since 2000-01, a public four-year student would pay about $4,193 less a year today, per NCES Table 330.10. From a 2015-16 starting point, the gap is $120. Real room and board stopped growing a decade ago, and a third of the real growth since 2000 is food, not buildings.
A construction freeze would have saved a lot of money in 2000 and would save almost nothing now, while the student housing shortage pushes more students into private apartments that cost more than the dorm.
The amenities race is real, and it’s rational from the college’s side. Students will pay for amenities, and the ones who want them most are wealthier and less academically focused, according to the Jacob, McCall, and Stange study (PDF File) on colleges as country clubs.
LSU’s $85 million rec center tripled the rec fee to $200 a semester. Student fees at public four-years rose 95% from 2000 to the mid-2010s, faster than tuition, which is why I tell families to read the fee schedule before the tuition page.
Then there’s the part that makes the “skip the dorm” lever harder every year. A growing list of schools now requires two years on campus. Cal Poly phased in a sophomore requirement starting in 2020-21 while its own spokesperson acknowledged University Housing was still paying off debt from new apartments, per Mustang News. Michigan State reinstated its two-year rule for fall 2021 and said the added revenue would be reinvested in housing, a policy its student government later called one “primarily to increase revenue.”
San Diego State’s Sophomore Success Program requires non-local sophomores on campus, and Sacramento State starts a two-year requirement in 2026.
Former college finance officials I’ve interviewed describe the mechanism plainly: when a school borrows to build housing, the occupancy projection is the collateral, and a residency requirement is how you guarantee the projection. This cost is one of the six biggest money derailers in college that families never see coming.
Only 6 to 32 cents of each new state dollar reaches in-state tuition. Florida’s low price is a statute plus taxpayers, not a lower cost.
Only a little. The best studies find that 6 to 32 cents of every added state dollar reaches in-state tuition, and the rest gets spent. Webber’s 2017 study found a $1,000 per-student cut raised tuition $257, and older work found 6 to 10 cents on the dollar.
State funding per student in FY2025 was 9.2% above 2008 and total appropriations hit a record $130.7 billion, per SHEEO. The “state disinvestment” story that explained the 2000s ended around 2012 nationally, even though 24 states still fund below 2008 and state-by-state aid varies a lot.
Florida is the case that’s going viral right now, and it deserves a closer look. The University of Florida’s 2026-27 in-state tuition and fees are $6,440 on a $25,830 cost of attendance, per UF’s own budget. UC Berkeley’s 2026-27 in-state budget is $18,214 in tuition and fees on a $54,674 cost of attendance. Same flagship opportunity, $28,844 difference a year.
The reason is a statute: Florida sets resident tuition at $105.07 per credit hour, unchanged since 2014, and the state pays about 1.9 times what students pay. That’s why our list of the least expensive colleges is dominated by Florida.
Florida is low price, not low cost. The state’s own efficiency study (PDF File) from November 2025 shows operating cost per student rose 32% from 2017-18 to 2023-24 against 24.7% inflation, and credit hours taught per instructor fell 5%. The cost is being borne by out-of-state students, who got a 15% increase for 2026-27, the first since 2012.
Bright Futures, the lottery-funded scholarship, paid about $615 million in 2024-25, and the Orlando Sentinel found the top ZIP codes for winners all sit in the top 20% of income. Taxpayers and lottery players absorb Florida’s cost growth so students don’t. That’s a political choice, and it’s not the same as a cost cut.
Tuition freezes elsewhere follow the same pattern of moving the bill. Purdue has frozen tuition 14 years running on a nonresident share above 55%. Illinois’s guaranteed-tuition law pushed fees up 40%. Texas froze tuition through 2026-27 and UT campuses raised non-academic fees instead, and Arizona’s freeze is the newest version.
At the end of the day, more state funding is helpful, and it could lower the price for students a little bit, but the cost is just borne by other people in the state overall.
University Of Florida Vs. UC Berkeley, In-State, 2026-27
Cost Line
University Of Florida
UC Berkeley
Tuition And Fees
$6,440
$18,214
Housing And Food (On Campus)
$14,190
$23,640
Student Health Insurance
Not A Separate Line
$5,066
Books, Transportation, Personal
$5,200
$7,754
Total Cost Of Attendance
$25,830
$54,674
Total If Living With Parents
$16,240
$39,428
Source: UF Student Financial Affairs and UC Berkeley Financial Aid 2026-27 cost of attendance pages. UF living expenses include housing and food. The College Investor.
Economists expect at most a small price effect, concentrated at high-sticker private and graduate programs. Schools are replacing the loans, not cutting price.
Maybe, but it’s not clear yet. Plus, this entire piece is focused on undergraduate education, which has had the same federal loan limits since 2008. We do expect some pricing changes at the graduate level, but that is outside the scope of this piece.
Starting July 1, 2026, Parent PLUS loans are capped at $20,000 a year and $65,000 per student, which ends the unlimited borrowing that let some schools price without a ceiling. Meanwhile, undergraduate Direct Loan limits didn’t change.
The theory that financial aid inflates price (the Bennett hypothesis) holds where schools set their own price and students borrow to pay it. For-profit colleges with federal aid access charged about 78% more than comparable ones without it, per Cellini and Goldin. Selective private colleges captured 76 cents of each Pell dollar by trimming their own aid, while public colleges captured almost none.
So the caps hit hardest at high-sticker privates and graduate programs, not at the public universities where most Parent PLUS borrowers send their kids.
The economists who study this are cautious. Robert Kelchen, who found little national link between loans and price, expects “at most, a small decrease,” per an NPR interview. The documented response from schools so far is private and institutional loan pipelines to replace the federal money, not price cuts.
The earnings test that Congress recently passed can only fail a program only if its graduates earn less than high school graduates, which under 1% of bachelor’s programs do, and it contains no price component at all.
Families should plan on the borrowing limits changing what they can borrow, not what the school charges.
The endowment tax cuts the other way. The new 8% excise tier hits about five schools and costs Harvard an estimated $368 million a year, which is roughly its entire undergraduate aid budget. Expect slower financial aid growth at those schools, not lower prices, which brings us to the fun question.
About 45% of Yale and Harvard undergraduates already pay full price, so the money would mostly go to families earning over $200,000.
Yale could make attendance free for every undergraduate for at most $594 million a year, which is 28% of its annual endowment payout and 1.35% of the endowment itself. Yale enrolled 6,814 undergraduates in 2024-25 at a term bill of $87,150, its endowment distribution was $2.1 billion, and the endowment was $44.1 billion, per Yale’s financial report (PDF File). Multiply 6,814 by $87,150 and you get $593.8 million if every student paid full price. Since 55% already get aid, the true added cost is somewhere between $267 million and $594 million.
Yale already went tuition-free for families under $200,000, along with Harvard, MIT, Penn, Rice, and Wellesley.
MIT’s audited numbers put a hard ceiling on the idea. Every dollar of tuition at published rates across every MIT program was $825.5 million in FY2025, $502.1 million came back as aid, and net tuition was $436.1 million, per the MIT Treasurer’s Report (PDF File). Making all of MIT free would cost 1.6% of its $27.4 billion endowment.
Princeton already covers tuition for most families under $250,000 and reaches 70% of undergraduates with $327 million. They don’t go all the way for three reasons, and none of them is “they can’t afford it,” which is a point I’d make to anyone reading our list of tuition-free colleges.
The issue is that endowment money is mostly spoken for. More than 80% of Harvard’s endowment is donor-restricted and under 5% is fully unrestricted, and the unrestricted funds ran a $212 million deficit in FY2025, per Harvard’s financial overview. Undergraduate aid is only about 10% of Harvard’s $2.5 billion payout. The rest funds research, graduate students, faculty, and buildings, which is a different answer than the one families get from the FAFSA about where aid comes from.
The second reason is new. The 8% federal excise tax on the richest endowments costs Harvard about $368 million and Yale about $280 million a year, roughly each school’s undergraduate aid budget, per the Christian Science Monitor.
The third is who’d benefit. About 45% of Harvard and Yale undergraduates get no aid, and 15.7% of Ivy-Plus students come from the top 1% of income, per Chetty, Deming, and Friedman.
Free-for-all at Yale is a transfer to families earning over $200,000, the same families our most expensive colleges list is written about.
It also doesn’t reach anyone else. Funding an $87,150 bill from a 5% payout takes about $1.74 million of endowment per student. Five schools clear that bar. T
he median college endowment in NACUBO’s 2025 study (PDF File) is $253.6 million, which throws off $12.7 million a year, enough for about 145 students at Yale’s price. The Ivy-Plus schools enroll 0.8% of American undergraduates.
The better question, which nobody at those schools wants to answer, is why Harvard has held enrollment near 7,000 for decades while its endowment grew tenfold. Berea College shows the model that does work: zero tuition for a student body that’s over 90% Pell-eligible, funded by about $1.1 million of endowment per student and a mandatory work program, which is why it sits near the top of our least expensive colleges list every year.
The Five Richest Endowments Vs. The Median College, FY2025
School
Endowment (June 30, 2025)
Annual Payout
Students A 5% Payout Could Cover At $87,150
Harvard
$56.9 Billion
$2.5 Billion
About 32,600
Yale
$44.1 Billion
$2.1 Billion
About 25,300
Stanford
$40.8 Billion
$1.9 Billion
About 23,400
Princeton
$36.4 Billion
About $1.9 Billion
About 20,900
MIT
$27.4 Billion
$1.23 Billion
About 15,700
Median U.S. College
$253.6 Million
$12.7 Million
About 145
Source: University financial reports and NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments FY2025. Last column divides a 5% payout by Yale’s $87,150 term bill. The College Investor.
What Are The Four Things That Actually Lower The Cost Of College?
Because of all of these major structural issues that are impacting the cost of college, the end result is that there are only really a few things that families can actually do to lower the cost of college. All of them involve making choices themselves.
Buy less time in college
Start at a cheaper school
Change how/where you take your classes
Don’t pay for a dorm
In all the research we pulled, these are the only four levers that cut what a degree costs to produce, not just who pays for it. Everything else, from state money to tuition freezes to Promise programs, moves the bill to another payer.
These four actually shrink the bill, and a family can pull all of them without waiting for a college to change. Our piece on how students can avoid the full cost of college walks through the tactics in more detail.
Earn Credits Before College Or Finish In Three Years
Would It Save Money?
Yes
How Much Per Student Per Year
$25,850 For Each Year Skipped
The Catch
Savings count only for years you would otherwise have paid for, and selective schools accept fewer transfer credits.
A year you don’t attend is a year you don’t pay for, and that’s the cleanest cost cut in higher education.
Three-year bachelor’s degrees are now approved by accreditors at Johnson & Wales, Merrimack, Plymouth State, BYU-Idaho, and Weber State, Indiana requires every public university to offer one, and Texas ordered a statewide framework with recommendations due December 31, 2026. We estimated the Texas saving at about $26,000 per student.
The catch is that these programs are tiny (Weber State expected about 10 students in year one), they’re mostly in applied fields with electives stripped out, and graduate schools haven’t said whether they’ll accept them.
Dual enrollment another version. Nearly 2.5 million high schoolers took a college course in 2022-23, per the Community College Research Center, and a lottery-based study of early college high schools found bachelor’s attainment of 30% versus 25% by year six at about $3,800 of extra cost per student.
A CLEP exam costs $93 against a course that averages more than $900, and a bipartisan bill would let students use financial aid to pay for it. Thirty credits earned in high school is a full year of tuition at the public price, about $12,000, plus a year of housing you never buy.
Only 16% of community college starters earn a bachelor’s in six years, and transfers lose about 37% of their credits. A written transfer guarantee is what makes this work.
English 101 is the same class at a community college as it is at a four-year university, and in California it costs $1,380 a year instead of $14,934 at UC or $6,450 at Cal State, per the Legislative Analyst’s Office (PDF File).
Two years of lower-division courses at a California community college followed by two years at a UC saves about $27,000 in tuition against a four-year UC start, and about $10,000 against Cal State. Our list of states with free community college drops that first number even lower in some states.
The guarantee is what makes California the model. An Associate Degree for Transfer guarantees admission to the Cal State system, and the UC Transfer Admission Guarantee gives community college students a guaranteed place at Davis, Irvine, Merced, Riverside, Santa Barbara, or Santa Cruz if they meet their campus’s GPA and course requirements.
Florida’s statutory 2+2 does the same for every associate degree graduate. Employers don’t care where the first two years happened, as an NBER study of community college bachelor’s degrees found.
This is what the systems were built for. California’s 1960 Master Plan sent the top 12.5% of high school graduates to UC, the top third to Cal State, and everyone else to a community college with a transfer path, and every state with a serious community college system copied the idea.
Community college was built to be a cheap on-ramp. Families keep driving past it to pay full price at the four-year campus, which is the gap our coverage of community college student loans keeps running into.
Community colleges are also skipping the transfer step and awarding the bachelor’s degree themselves. Twenty-four states now allow it, 214 colleges offered 763 bachelor’s programs as of December 2025, and more than 16,000 students graduated from them in 2023-24, per the Community College Baccalaureate Association.
Florida sets the tuition in statute: $71.98 per credit for lower-division courses and $91.79 for baccalaureate courses, which is about $9,800 in tuition for the whole degree. California caps upper-division fees at $130 per unit against $46 for lower-division, roughly $10,560 for all 120 units, and Newsom signed two laws in 2026 letting districts add up to 12 new bachelor’s programs a year starting in 2028, on top of the 66 degrees at 49 colleges already approved.
The case for starting cheaper got stronger when UC went test-blind. UC San Diego’s remedial Math 2 course, which covers grades 6 through 12 material and carries no degree credit, grew from under 100 students a year in 2016 to 921 students (with Math 3B) in fall 2025, about 12% of the incoming class, and over a quarter of the students placed into it had a 4.0 high school math GPA. That class costs about $1,762 in UC tuition and fees, and every extra quarter it adds costs about $6,608. A student who needs to catch up on algebra can do it at a community college for a fraction of that, and a student who finds out college isn’t for them finds out for $1,380 instead of $15,000.
The con is that the transfer has to actually happen. Nationally, 33% of community college starters transfer and 16% earn a bachelor’s within six years, per the Community College Research Center (PDF File), and public-to-public transfers lost about 37% of their credits in GAO’s cohort (PDF File). In California, the state auditor found only 1 in 5 students who intend to transfer do it within four years.
Three in four colleges charge the same price online. The discount is real only at providers built for volume, and weaker students lose ground.
Online and self-paced programs lower the price at a handful of providers built for volume, but they generally don’t lower it anywhere else.
UF Online charges Florida residents $111.92 per credit, 75% of the on-campus rate, which works out to about $4,477 less over a 120-credit degree, per UF Online’s tuition page. Western Governors University charges a flat $3,760 to $5,325 per six-month term for as many courses as you can finish, and it enrolled 192,613 students in 2025.
University of the People charges no tuition and about $7,260 in assessment fees for a whole bachelor’s degree, and it earned WSCUC accreditation in 2025, though it doesn’t take federal aid and publishes no completion rate.
The caveat is bigger than the savings for a lot of students. A 2025 WCET survey (PDF File) found 74.4% of colleges charge the same tuition online as in person, and 12.4% charge more.
Online doesn’t lower a college’s cost to deliver a course. It lowers the price only where a provider spreads course costs over tens of thousands of students.
And the learning evidence cuts against the students most likely to go online to save money: Bettinger and colleagues found online courses lowered grades 0.44 points on a 4-point scale and cut next-semester re-enrollment about 9 points, concentrated among below-median students. WGU’s graduation rate is 54%.
If you’re a strong, self-directed student, the discount is real. If you’re not, the cheapest degree is the one you finish.
Two-year residency requirements take this lever away at a growing list of schools. Ask about exemptions before you deposit.
Living at home is the single largest saving lever available to a student, and it needs no permission from a legislature. The gap at UF between living on campus and living with parents is $9,590 a year. At Berkeley it’s $15,246. The Berkeley Student Cooperative charges $9,276 a year with food, against $18,335 for the cheapest campus package, per EdSource.
About 27.5% of undergraduates already live with parents, and only 15.6% live on campus, which makes the dorm a minority experience that gets priced like the default. Our room and board article covers the trade-offs in more detail.
The con is the one from section six. If the school has a two-year residency requirement, this lever is off the table unless you qualify for an exemption, usually a commute from a parent’s home within a set radius.
Ask about the requirement and the exemption rules before you deposit, not after. My standing advice is to price the full four-to-five-year cost of attendance with 5% to 8% annual increases on every line, then decide if you’re willing to pay that number. For most families, the dorm line is where the number changes most.
Enter a school’s yearly tuition and housing, then stack the three levers that actually lower the cost of a degree: credits earned before college, a shorter degree, and years spent living off the campus meal-and-housing plan. Defaults are the College Board’s 2025-26 public four-year averages.
In-state public average is $11,950. Private nonprofit average is $45,000.
Public four-year average is $13,900. Use the school’s cost of attendance page.
Dual enrollment, AP, IB, or CLEP credits the school will accept. 30 credits is one full year.
Three-year degrees exist only at schools that built one. Ask before you count on it.
Living with parents, a co-op, or a cheaper apartment. Check the school’s residency requirement first.
UF estimates $4,600 for a student living with parents. A Berkeley co-op runs about $9,276 with food.
Most colleges charge the same price online. UF Online charges 75% of the campus rate.
Percent off the per-credit tuition for online credits. Leave at 0 if the school charges the same.
Four Years, Full Bundle
$0
Your Stacked Plan
$0
You Save
$0
Lever
How It Changes The Plan
Savings
Credits Earned Before College
0 credits, 0 years saved
$0
Shorter Degree
120 credits
$0
Skipping The Campus Plan
0 years off the plan
$0
Discounted Online Credits
0% of credits
$0
Total
4.0 years on campus
$0
Baseline is four years of tuition and campus housing and food at the amounts entered, with no aid. Years are credits remaining divided by 30. Savings from a shorter degree are counted only for credits you would otherwise have paid for. Prices rise most years, so treat the result as a floor. Source: College Board, UF, UC Berkeley. The College Investor.
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var root=document.getElementById('tci-stack-calc');
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function g(id){return root.querySelector('#'+id);}
function n(id){var v=parseFloat(g(id).value);return isNaN(v)?0:v;}
function money(x){return (x<0?'-$':'$')+Math.round(Math.abs(x)).toLocaleString('en-US');}
function calc(){
var tuition=n('tsc-tuition'),housing=n('tsc-housing'),credits=n('tsc-credits'),degree=parseInt(g('tsc-degree').value,10),homeYears=n('tsc-home-years'),homeCost=n('tsc-home-cost'),onlineShare=n('tsc-online')/100,discount=n('tsc-discount')/100;
var perCredit=tuition/30;
var baseYears=4;
var base=baseYears*(tuition+housing);
// Lever 1: credits earned before college reduce credits owed against the 120-credit baseline
var afterCredits=Math.max(120-credits,0);
var yearsAfterCredits=afterCredits/30;
var s1=(baseYears-yearsAfterCredits)*(tuition+housing);
// Lever 2: shorter degree reduces credits still owed
var owed=Math.max(degree-credits,0);
var yearsOwed=owed/30;
var s2=(yearsAfterCredits-yearsOwed)*(tuition+housing);
if(s2<0)s2=0;
// Lever 3: years off the campus plan, capped at years still enrolled
var offYears=Math.min(homeYears,yearsOwed);
var s3=offYears*(housing-homeCost);
if(s3<0)s3=0;
// Lever 4: online discount on a share of the credits still owed
var s4=owed*onlineShare*perCredit*discount;
var total=s1+s2+s3+s4;
var stack=base-total;
g('tsc-base').textContent=money(base);
g('tsc-stack').textContent=money(stack);
g('tsc-save').textContent=money(total);
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g('tsc-s3').textContent=money(s3);
g('tsc-r4').textContent=Math.round(onlineShare*100)+'% of credits at '+Math.round(discount*100)+'% off';
g('tsc-s4').textContent=money(s4);
g('tsc-r5').textContent=yearsOwed.toFixed(1)+' years enrolled, '+Math.max(yearsOwed-offYears,0).toFixed(1)+' on the campus plan';
g('tsc-s5').textContent=money(total);
g('tsc-credits-v').textContent=credits;
g('tsc-home-years-v').textContent=homeYears;
g('tsc-online-v').textContent=Math.round(onlineShare*100)+'%';
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How Families Can Use This To Pay Less
Stop waiting for colleges to cut costs and stack the four levers yourself.
A student who enters with 30 credits from dual enrollment, AP, or CLEP, finishes in three years, and lives at home for two of them cuts a public four-year degree by about $44,000 against the College Board’s averages (one year of tuition at $11,950, one year of housing at $13,900, and two years of housing replaced by UF’s $4,600 living-at-home estimate).
A discounted online term adds a little more. That’s more than any administrative cut, athletics cut, or state funding increase in this article would deliver, and it doesn’t require the FAFSA to go your way.
Three of the four levers need something from the college. Transfer policies decide whether your high school credits and your community college credits count, and selective schools are stingier than public ones. Residency requirements decide whether you can skip the dorm, and the list of schools requiring two years is growing. Three-year degrees exist only where a school built one.
Ask those three questions before you apply, because the answers change the price more than merit aid usually does.
The one lever that is entirely yours is time. Dual enrollment and exam credit happen in high school, and a 529 plan can pay for dual enrollment in most states. Commuter schools and co-ops exist in every metro. The FAFSA, Pell, and state grants still apply to a student living at home, and a cost of attendance built on a parent’s address is a smaller number to borrow against.
College didn’t get more expensive, the bundle did. Buy less of the bundle.
Frequently Asked Questions
Has College Tuition Actually Gone Down?
Net tuition has. At public four-year colleges, the real net tuition and fees paid by first-time students fell from a $4,450 peak in 2012-13 to about $2,300 in 2025-26, per the College Board. Sticker prices kept rising, and housing, food, and fees rose faster than tuition, so total cost of attendance still went up.
How Much Would Students Save If Colleges Cut Sports?
At a typical Group of Five public university, students subsidize athletics at about $1,300 to $1,700 a year through fees and university support, per GAO’s 2023-24 medians. At an FCS school it’s $840 to $1,120. The savings only reach students if the school cuts the athletics fee, which no school in the record has done after a downgrade.
Why Can’t Universities Just Cut Pensions And Benefits?
Pension and health costs are the fastest-growing part of college compensation, but campuses don’t control them. Public pension rates are set by state systems like CalPERS, accrued benefits are protected by state law and court rulings, and the benefits cover faculty as well as administrators. A university can freeze hiring. It can’t cut what it already owes.
Can A College Require You To Live On Campus?
Yes. Most four-year colleges require first-year students to live on campus, and a growing number require two years, including Cal Poly, Michigan State, San Diego State (for non-local students), and Sacramento State starting in 2026. Exemptions usually exist for students commuting from a parent’s home within a set distance. Ask for the exemption rules in writing before you deposit.
Is A Three-Year Degree Worth Less Than A Four-Year Degree?
Accreditors have approved 90-credit bachelor’s degrees at Merrimack, Johnson & Wales, BYU-Idaho, Weber State, and others, and the degree carries the same title. The programs are new and small, they cut electives rather than major requirements, and graduate schools and licensing boards haven’t issued clear acceptance policies yet. Confirm your target graduate program or employer accepts it before enrolling.
Sources
College Board, Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2025
SHEEO, State Higher Education Finance FY2025
NCES Digest of Education Statistics, Tables 330.10 and 334.10
Delta Cost Project, Labor Intensive or Labor Expensive (2014)
NACUBO 2024 Tuition Discounting Study (via Higher Ed Dive)
California Legislative Analyst’s Office, UC and CSU budget analyses 2025-26 and 2026-27
GAO-26-108640, College Athletics Finances (July 2026)
Cardinal News, Athletic Business, and Knight-Newhouse athletics finance data
Indiana Capital Chronicle, Chronicle of Higher Education, Higher Ed Dive on program cuts and mergers
University System of Georgia Business Procedures Manual
EdSource, Hechinger Report, Mustang News, WKAR, ASMSU on housing costs and residency requirements
Jacob, McCall, and Stange, College as Country Club
Webber (2017), Economics of Education Review
Florida Board of Governors Efficiency Study (November 2025), UF Student Financial Affairs, UC Berkeley Financial Aid
NBER Working Paper 35226 on Tennessee Promise
Cellini and Goldin (NBER), NPR interview with Robert Kelchen
Yale, Harvard, MIT financial reports FY2025, NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments FY2025, Christian Science Monitor, Chetty, Deming, and Friedman
CCRC, AIR, College Board CLEP, UF Online, WGU, University of the People, WCET 2025, Bettinger et al. (AER 2017)
Berkeley Student Cooperative via EdSource
The post Why Colleges Can’t Just Cut Costs: The 3 Things That Actually Lower The Price appeared first on The College Investor.
No direct link to offer, sent out via e-mail. Subject line is ‘Give your cash a 7% APY boost.’
Robinhood has sent out an e-mail to some gold members offering 7% APY on balances up to $10,000 for 60 days. Deposit must be made by November 19, 2026
Our Verdict
Bonus rate is offered on funds sitting in brokerage cash. Better than other standard rates but only valid for 60 days so not worth getting too excited over.
A dozen of the digital asset treasury (DAT) companies that started buying and holding Bitcoin(BTC +2.40%) last year have already sold all their coins. According to Bitwise’s October 2026 market report, the sales were mostly performed to repay debt or return cash to investors after their stocks fell.
Although this might seem bearish for Bitcoin, the reality is a bit sunnier, so let’s analyze the impact of these treasury companies cashing out.
BTC – Bitcoin
$81,417.00+$1,905.37 (+2.40%)
CRYPTO · As of 6:27 AM ET 10/28/26
Corporate buyers absorbed about 18% of new Bitcoin supply in Q3
The 2025 class of DATs all followed the same game plan, which was pioneered by Strategy(MSTR +1.13%). That plan was to sell their shares or new debt to the market, use the proceeds to buy more coins, and then repeat while their stock traded above their coins’ value; once that premium vanished, the script ran backward.
Sequans Communications, a chipmaker with a Bitcoin treasury, is an illustrative example. It launched its plan in June 2025, subsequently accumulating more than 3,200 coins, and by Sept. 24 of this year, it had sold the last of them after Bitcoin sales had already been used to eliminate its convertible debt.
Most of the sellers among the DATs probably took steep losses, as Bitcoin was in a bull market until October 2025, after which it entered into a bear market that sent its price below their cost basis. Public companies held Bitcoin at an average cost of $80,500 in September 2026, and that average includes the $75,412 per coin paid by Strategy, the biggest and first DAT.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
So the rest paid more for their coins during the bull market, and then sold them in the bear market, when the price was lowest. It’s often been said that the best approach is the opposite course of action: to buy low and then later sell high. That’s easier said than done, apparently.
The more important point here is that all the selling those holders did ended up barely denting the coin’s price.
In the third quarter of this year, Bitcoin’s miners produced about 41,400 coins, so corporations absorbed a net of about 18% of new supply in that quarter. Meanwhile, other big buyers, like spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), acquired $6.4 billion worth of the crypto.
So the sellers never controlled much of the supply anyway, and now they’re out of the market. That suggests the future impact of their sales is nil.
Can the biggest Bitcoin treasury company move the price?
The impact that smaller digital asset treasury companies had on Bitcoin’s price is a different matter from the impact that Strategy has.
It held 848,517 coins as of Oct. 26, which is about 4% of Bitcoin’s 21 million total supply limit. Although it has sold small portions of its coins from time to time, it controls enough of the supply that if it became a big seller, it would be a very big detriment to price.
MSTR – Strategy
$141.40+$1.58 (+1.13%)
NASDAQ · As of 4:00 PM ET 10/27/26
Nonetheless, Strategy’s size alone hasn’t been able to impact the price via its purchases in instances where the market was already moving in the opposite direction. For instance, Strategy added 83,901 coins in Q2 2026, but Bitcoin still fell in June to its bear market depths, about 52% below its $126,080 peak. That doesn’t particularly matter in the long run, as locking up more coins is still an upward pressure on price because it makes new buyers compete with each other to gain control of a portion of the supply.
A future DAT capable of moving the coin’s price directly would need a huge stack, and, critically, it would need the nerve to keep buying through bear markets and dips, which Strategy has shown more consistently than its rivals. And matching Strategy’s hoard would cost about $69.2 billion, which makes a new giant among cryptocurrency stocks unlikely anytime soon.
Discussion 13
Investments in Equity and Debt Securities
_________________________________________________________
Kevin Troy M. Chua, CPA
*Certified Public Accountant, October 2014
*CIPP UK Certified Payroll Professional®, October 2020
*Certified Tax Technician, November 2020
*BS Accountancy
*Master in Accountancy, Major in Management Accounting
*NC-III Bookkeeping, TESDA
*Content Developer for Accountancy – Course Hero
*Accounting and Finance Lecturer
*Formerly from PwC – Isla Lipana & Co. and SM
_________________________________________________________
For comments and suggestions, you may put them down respectfully in the comments section below.
_________________________________________________________
For speakership invites, please do not hesitate to shoot an email at kevintroy.chua1994@gmail.com
_________________________________________________________
“Renters, this is your year,” Zillow senior economist Kara Ng recently told NPR. It’s apparently a good time to be a tenant, as nearly 40% of listings on the market were being offered with a concession from the landlord as of June, according to a recent report from Zillow.
However, before landlords wring their hands in despair at the idea of a free month’s rent and lost revenue, it’s worth drilling down into the data—as the numbers can be misleading.
According to Zillow’s June rental market analysis, the typical U.S. average rent reached $1,965, a 2.2% increase from a year before. However, with concessions up nearly 5% from the previous year, the cost of getting into an apartment could look good from a tenant’s perspective.
For smaller landlords, analyzing which markets are offering the most concessions and why, and where rents are increasing, can help you determine how to price your units and whether to jump aboard the concession cavalcade.
A Highly Nuanced Rental Market
The cities offering the greatest number of concessions are those where new apartment development has been most robust and supply has increased. Zillow found that 67.1% of listings in Charlotte offered concessions in June, followed by Denver at 65.9% and Dallas at 64.6%.
Rents were down in San Antonio (1.8%), Austin (1.7%), and Denver (1.3%). Much of the new inventory coming to market resulted from 600,000 new apartment units being constructed in 2024, the most in 38 years.
“There’s a lot of apartment buildings hitting the market all at once,” Ng told NPR. “And property managers are trying to fill it, and they’re doing it with freebies.”
For small investors looking for a city to buy in, the lesson is simple: Stay away from cities that are oversupplied, unless you’re prepared to wait a while to get your place rented.
Conversely, in low-supply, high-demand markets, rent growth is up, according to Zillow. Northern California’s pricey San Francisco (up 8.2%) and San Jose (up 6.2%) are enjoying an AI boom, with affluent tenants willing to pay ever-increasing prices in a tight housing market.
“The U.S. built more new units in 2024 than any year in the past half-century, but that boom largely bypassed the Northeast and coastal California, which is exactly why rental competition there is so intense,” Ng said in a Zillow press release.
Zillow says single-family rents were up 3% year over year in June to $2,320, double the 1.5% gain for apartments, now at $1,789.
Providence, Rhode Island, a small city with a population of 195,000 that is both pricey and has a housing shortage, made Zillow’s list of the hottest rental markets of 2026, with the lowest number of landlords offering concessions.
Best Places to Be a Landlord in 2026
The best cities to be a landlord in 2026 are likely to differ depending on who you ask, but most surveys end up saying roughly the same thing: The Midwest, with a few Southern cities thrown in, makes for the best place to invest your money if cash flow is a priority.
Top Cities for High Rental ROI
Landlord insurance specialist Obie Insurance took affordability, a growing job market, and population increases into consideration when compiling its list for cities likely to give you the greatest return on investment.
The Midwest
Cleveland, Ohio: Low prices and high demand have propelled Cleveland to the top of investors’ lists.
Indianapolis, Indiana: A diverse economy, growing population, and favorable landlord-tenant laws have made it a hot spot for investors in recent years. However, many investors have experienced foreclosure during the gold rush, investing in saturated areas with a less-than-stellar tenant pool.
Kansas City, Missouri: A strong economy and growing population, coupled with low prices and high rents, have made Kansas City a solid Midwestern investment option.
The Sunbelt
Despite the deluge of new construction and subsequent landlord concessions, if you prefer investing in a warmer climate, there are still some places in the Sunbelt where you can get a decent ROI.
Dallas/Fort Worth: This has been one of thetop investment areas for some time due to its surging population, relatively affordable housing, and diverse employment opportunities.
Jacksonville, Florida: Although the Jacksonville market isn’t for everyone due to its reputation for crime, Jacksonville also has a growing job market and has been a popular investment haven for institutional investors, who own over 22% of single-family rental houses.
Tampa, Florida: Tampa has had a bad investment rap in recent years due to extreme weather and high insurance costs, but it also has a strong tourism base, a high number of Fortune 1000 companies, and a high influx of new residents, along with its neighbor, St. Petersburg. It offers both a good short-term and long-term rental market.
Birmingham, Alabama: New development and a robust healthcare sector have helped make low-cost Alabama another investment favorite in recent years.
Final Thoughts
Headlines are designed to get your attention, but the devil is in the details. There are good and bad markets within most metros.Detroit, Memphis, and Columbus are also mentioned as favorable rental markets, but good investments are very much a neighborhood-to-neighborhood, and sometimes street-to-street, proposition.
One important thing to distinguish from headlines that use the words “rental market” is that they often refer to large apartment buildings with amenities and funded by Wall Street. These buildings can afford to offer concessions because they have so many units and often factor them into their lease-up models to entice residents—a move often followed by rapid rent hikes!
As a small investor, you can afford to be a little more nuanced—renting for less, with moderate rent increases and no junk fees (parking, tech, and trash) to keep tenants in your rental. That’s a win-win. In that respect, every year can be a renters’ year.
Robinhood Gold: Earn 7% APY on Up to $10,000 for 60 Days
Robinhood is sending out a new offer to select Robinhood Gold members, giving them a chance to earn an impressive 7% APY on up to $10,000 in eligible brokerage cash for 60 days.
The regular Robinhood Gold cash rate is currently advertised at 3.6% APY, so this promotion nearly doubles the return for a limited time.
The offer was sent by email with the subject line “Give your cash a 7% APY boost.”
How to Earn 7% APY
Here’s how the offer works:
Check your email or account for the targeted Robinhood Gold promotion.
Make a qualifying deposit into your Robinhood brokerage account by November 19, 2026.
Earn 7% APY on the first $10,000 of eligible brokerage cash for 60 days.
Cash above $10,000 earns Robinhood Gold’s standard APY, currently advertised at 3.6%.
The offer applies to uninvested brokerage cash, so you don’t need to buy stocks or other investments to earn the boosted rate.
With the increased 7% promotional APY you can earn $112 on a $10,000 balance for 60 days. But that’s just a bonus of $54 compared to the regular rate.
Key Insight: Discover how Atlantic Bay Mortgage Group is expanding during an industry consolidation wave.
What’s at Stake: Whether regional lenders can scale into new territories without relying on merger agreements. Overview bullets generated by AI with editorial review.
While rivals buy their way into new markets, Atlantic Bay Mortgage Group is getting there through state licenses. The Virginia Beach, Virginia-based company announced retail operations in Ohio after receiving its license on Oct. 13, its second new state since September, following Louisiana.
Processing Content
The company’s arrival into Ohio and Louisiana last month points to the type of regional opportunities lenders still see for expansion in today’s challenging business environment, while presenting an alternative to companies for entry into new markets beyond full-on mergers.
Atlantic Bay, which said it would recruit Ohio mortgage bankers to join its team, is now licensed in 19 states located primarily in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.
“We’re excited to expand Atlantic Bay’s presence into Ohio and strengthen our ability to serve families and communities throughout America’s Heartland,” said Kevin Cooke, executive vice president and regional manager at the lender, who will oversee operations in the Buckeye State.
“Ohio is a natural extension of our growing footprint and completes our presence across the Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio tristate region,” Cooke added. In Cincinnati, Atlantic Bay’s new presence complements existing resources in Kentucky and Indiana, with buyers in the metropolitan market often searching in nearby suburbs across all three states.
In 2025, Atlantic Bay generated just over $4 billion in loans representing more than 13,000 units, according to an IEmergent analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data.
Various ways lenders are expanding
The news comes amid a mortgage industry consolidation wave, which has been characterized by scores of new mergers or acquisitions over the past year. While most companies seeking to grow their footprint have done so through merger agreements or asset purchases as their peers put out for-sale signs, Atlantic Bay’s recent approach has been marked instead through obtaining new licenses in potential growth areas, including the states it just entered.
The Midwest is regularly cited as a region seeing home price appreciation over the past several months, even as data shows a slowdown in the rest of the country. Meanwhile, Louisiana regularly ranks high on the list of most affordable states in the Mortgage Bankers Association’s monthly payments report.
On the retail lending front where Atlantic Bay mainly operates, rivals are also increasing their operational scope through channel or asset acquisitions this year. Companies like CMG Financial, Envoy Mortgage and Synergy One Lending all added to their teams in the past few months. Following its acquisition purchase, Synergy One itself agreed to a merger deal with American Pacific Mortgage.
![[Intermediate Accounting] Discussion 13 – Investments in Equity and Debt Securities](https://globalinvestmentstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/1793168175_maxresdefault-768x432.jpg "[Intermediate Accounting] Discussion 13 – Investments in Equity and Debt Securities")
