The NoDegree Podcast – No Degree Success Stories for Job Searching, Careers, and Entrepreneurship · Jonaed Iqbal

Negotiate College Tuition with this Free App: TuitionFit—Mark Salisbury | EP 197

·42 min·1 clip

Only 1 in 10 students pays the advertised sticker price—the real secret is massive hidden discounts.

Mark Salisbury, founder of TuitionFit, explains the deliberate opacity of college pricing and how it harms student and family decision-making. Drawing from his experience in higher education and athletics, Mark describes how colleges maintain high sticker prices while secretly discounting them differently for different students—a strategy borrowed from luxury goods marketing. He reveals that only 1 in 10 students pays advertised sticker price, yet colleges maintain the fiction. The episode connects this to economic theory (information asymmetry causing market failure) and demonstrates concrete inequality: at Harvard and Columbia, very few middle-class students exist—only rich kids or heavily subsidized poor kids. Mark's TuitionFit project crowdsources actual pricing data to empower families with information colleges deliberately withhold.

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