You don’t get to know for sure what college will cost until you apply and get in. Colleges provide tools that help you guess what kind of financial aid they might offer, if any, but the numbers are often off by many thousands of dollars.

The fact that this real price is a mystery for most people at most schools is disgraceful. It also presents an opportunity.

A few weeks ago, Brandeis University quietly introduced a new tool for college shoppers called Faye. It asks questions like a person would, digests high school transcripts and tax returns, then tells you “what your Brandeis cost will be” if you get in, including both need-based and merit aid.

“Will” suggests certainty. And certainty is decidedly not what colleges offer with the net price calculators that federal law requires them to provide applicants. Those calculators are the tools that lead to sticker shock when an admission offer arrives with an actual price that is far higher than the calculators’ estimates.

I don’t know of any schools that do what Brandeis is trying. It may not work, and it may backfire in a couple of different ways. But the fact that the school is even trying it is a kind of victory for anyone who has ever wailed in agony over the complexity of college pricing and the futility of trying to figure it out.

The person who signed off on Faye (as in F.A., or financial aid) is Arthur Levine, the Brandeis president. The son of a South Bronx mailman, he was able to attend Brandeis himself in the late 1960s only because a well-off relative helped.

Dr. Levine did not come up with Faye. He has long been pals with John Katzman, whose name will be familiar to Gen X-ers who took his Princeton Review SAT classes. Mr. Katzman’s punk-rock approach to test preparation over the years, which included trying to trade his archrival’s internet address for a case of beer, made him a folk hero to students and an irritant to people in power.

I first met Mr. Katzman in the 1990s when Random House republished, under its Princeton Review imprint, an out-of-print book about gap years that I had co-written. But we hadn’t spoken in about 25 years until he emailed about Brandeis. He’s no longer affiliated with Princeton Review and started a higher-education company called Noodle in 2013.

He shopped the upfront pricing idea around for a while before trying it on Dr. Levine. But it was slow to gain traction because real pricing, pre-application, is just not how things are done in the residential undergraduate education industry.

To get any kind of a binding price under the current system, you generally must apply and get in. Then, perhaps you appeal for a better offer, if the school can digest your appeal in time. This year, Northeastern could not for some students.

And then, more! Maybe a different college surprises you with an even better offer — even after the May 1 decision deadline.

To call it a goat rodeo is to engage in a kind of goatism.

Brandeis’s enrollment team was well aware of this mess. But its members weren’t sure there was any overarching fix, given regulatory and other constraints, and they greeted Mr. Katzman with arched eyebrows.

“We thought he was nuts,” said Sherri Avery, assistant vice president of student financial services at Brandeis.

“If it could be done, someone would have been doing it, right?” said her boss, Jennifer Walker, vice president for enrollment management.

“And we wanted to do it,” Ms. Avery added.

Mr. Katzman’s premise was simple. Most need-based and merit aid calculations are formulaic and algorithmic, even if they differ at least a bit from one another. Ever-evolving technology ought to be able to handle it.

Faye is simple to use, and the price quotes it produced in my tests were easy to understand. What gave me pause was that the word “guarantee” did not appear anywhere near the dollar figure. One recent test triggered an email that was supposed to confirm Faye’s “will pay” price, but it referred to the number as a “projection.”

In my first meeting with the Noodle team, the G word came up repeatedly. Since then, however, the Brandeis and Noodle wordsmiths struggled mightily before they settled on the “will pay” language.

Why no guarantee? Blame the lawyers, who demanded asterisks that the team thought would be off-putting.

Indeed, there will be situations — estranged parents who won’t submit tax returns, small-business owners in various circumstances — that will require human intervention. A “will pay” offer could still come, but from humans, later, and not from Faye right away.

Then, there’s Faye’s garbage-in, garbage-out rule: If you make an error, it’s on you. If you lie, Brandeis won’t honor the quote. And if the software messes up, Brandeis reserves the right to re-price your deal.

There’s more. If your child is a high school sophomore or younger, the “will” does not apply, since your finances may change and Brandeis’s list price will for sure.

Brandeis may also change its merit aid formula if the school becomes more popular. It received 40 percent more applications this year, which may give the school enough marketplace power to offer fewer merit aid discounts. (Merit aid for current students doesn’t change from year to year as long as they keep their grades up and finish within eight semesters.)

And finally, if your household income or assets change drastically during your time at the school, your net price might, too, if you receive need-based financial aid.

So much throat clearing. So many maybes. All these asterisks make the whole endeavor seem asterisky, and it is.

If you’re a school, any big change in how you sell can alter who will matriculate and what they can and will pay. If net tuition revenue per student then plummets, you have an enormous problem. Competitors will scrutinize Brandeis’s tool, and some of them may undercut its prices.

And if enough people use the tool but can’t get sensible offers, the university loses them before they even apply. Application numbers could fall as quickly as they rose.

“That’s hard,” Mr. Katzman said. “But it’s the same hard as every airline and hotel and everyone in the real world has to deal with. I have to set a price, and I have to tell people what it costs.”

That’s the other reason there is no “guarantee.” College-pricing nerds like me think the word is a solution to what ails higher education. But in Faye’s testing, the word generated more questions than excitement among parents and students, and there was a risk that it might sound gimmicky.

So if you are a college shopper, test Faye mercilessly. If your finances seem broken, try to break Brandeis with your complex situation.

And save that “will pay” price quote. If you apply to Brandeis and get in, send me a note and let me know if the price changed.

But before then, ask this when you talk to other colleges: Why won’t you tell me what you will charge, pre-application? Heck, do it in the group information session in front of 100 other people. Maybe the school will surprise you.

Some institutions will make this work eventually, even if it isn’t Brandeis. And hats off to Cornell College, Whitman College and the College of Wooster, which have their own transparency initiatives.

Ms. Avery and Ms. Walker no longer think Mr. Katzman is crazy. And over lunch in March, they talked about the risk that their price quotes could scare people away.

Lost Science is an ongoing series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding after cuts by the Trump administration. The conversations have been edited for clarity and length. Here’s why we’re doing this.

Kirsten Beyer: We had a three-year study, funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, focused on environmental health among children. We had two main aims. The first was to develop a curriculum so that Milwaukee Public Schools teachers could teach about environmental health, environmental health disparities and climate change.

The second aim was to look at the impact of schoolyard greening on health and environmental outcomes. There’s this greening initiative in Milwaukee to redevelop schoolyards. Many of them were sheets of asphalt. A lot of them were in disrepair. The redevelopment plans included things like planting trees, adding outdoor classrooms, improving storm water drainage with green infrastructure and improving sports fields and natural play spaces.

We built a study to collect data before and after. There are lots of schools around the country that have similar situations, so we were excited about sharing our results and informing other jurisdictions about the impact of this redevelopment.

We had the kids complete surveys. We measured things like social and emotional health, environmental health literacy, attitudes toward outdoor play. We also had sensors that measured their physical activity levels, time spent outdoors and where they spent time in the schoolyard. We went out and observed recess. How are kids playing? How is conflict being resolved? How engaged are the teachers or monitors? We measured air pollution and how hot those schoolyards were before greening.

We were in the field in May 2025, collecting our final post-redevelopment data, when the grant was canceled. It was a shock. We had hired people as data collectors and had a month of data collection left.

I decided to rustle up some other resources just to get data collection done. But then we had no more money to support our community partners, staff or graduate students. We had to take people off this project.

Now we’re trying to do something with all of this data that we’ve collected: process it, analyze it and, importantly, share it.

We have just piles of data. There are papers that won’t get written and data that won’t be shared because this happened.

But I can’t just abandon this work. This is important to my community partners. This is important to other schools. And this is important to all of the kids who gave us their time, all the parents who allowed us to do research with their kids. There’s a moral imperative to continue the work, albeit slowly.

Kirsten Beyer is a health geographer at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

The Princeton University Art Museum recently made Time magazine’s top 100 list of The World’s Greatest Places of 2026. James Steward, director of the museum that reopened on Halloween in an acclaimed new building designed by Adjaye Associates, said of the ranking, “It normalizes the idea that we are a world-class destination.”

In its first five months alone, the museum has received 250,000 visitors — more than half from outside campus (Princeton’s old museum averaged 200,000 annually).

The surge of public interest in the Princeton museum’s new home, spotlighting a global collection of more than 117,000 objects, is a timely reminder that university and college art museums are filled with unexpected treasures — often showcased in architecturally significant buildings — and are free and accessible to all. Here are several standout exhibitions at academic museums in range of New York City that are worth a visit this month, when campuses are looking their spring best for reunions and graduations.

The glorious modernist home of the Yale Center for British Art — Louis I. Kahn’s last design, completed in 1977 after his death — reopened in March 2025 after a two-year architectural conservation. In the year since, the museum has welcomed 100,000 visitors and almost 300 class visits to study its collection of more than 100,000 works from the 15th century to today that present an expansive understanding of British art and its imperial history.

“British art isn’t an island story, it’s a global story,” said Martina Droth, the center’s director. A contemporary installation by Rina Banerjee, a recent acquisition on view for the first time through Sept. 13 in the museum’s entrance court, and the exhibition “Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850,” up through June 21, both speak to a deep connection to India.

“If British art is shaped by movement and exchange, then in ‘Painters, Ports, and Profits’ you see British artists who traveled to India because of the East India Company and found themselves working alongside Indian artists,” Droth said. “New things happen in terms of the aesthetics of the work, and you can really see that in the exhibition.”

The 115 works are mostly drawn from the collection and almost half are by Indian artists and workshops, including “Lucknow from the Gomti,” a 37-foot panoramic scroll of life along the river in that city in Northern India and a star of the show.

Banerjee, who was born in Kolkata and lived in London before moving to New York, has remade the form of the Taj Mahal in hot-pink semi-translucent plastic. Visible from the street through the glass doors and dangling from the ceiling, her playful floating sculptural palace allows visitors to enter and discover all sorts of colonial relics and commercial baubles embedded within.

The Johnson Museum opened in 1973 in an I.M. Pei-designed building, which rises seven stories and frames spectacular views of the landscape with its expansive vertical and horizontal windows and fifth floor cantilevered over an open porch. The global collection numbers more than 40,000 objects, with particular strength in Asian art, and college classes made 335 visits in the last academic year.

Students from Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences have spent considerable time with the exhibition “Naples: Course of Empire,” a series of seven panoramic canvases by Alexis Rockman on view through June 7, according to the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Andrea Inselmann. Over the last four decades, Rockman has been a leading voice in the art world raising awareness about climate change through his paintings focused on all forms of life on Earth.

The works in this show were “inspired by Thomas Cole’s 19th-century cycle ‘The Course of Empire’ about the rise and fall of civilizations,” said Inselmann, who organized the exhibition. Taking Naples as a case study of a port city vulnerable to rising waters, Rockman used his signature style of deeply researched and lyrically rendered history painting to reimagine this landscape over geologic time starting from the Mesozoic Era. Paintings depict animals fleeing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.; a rat flying over Naples spewing a noxious plume during the bubonic plague of the 1650s; and a whale breaching before the ruins of the city in a speculative post-human future.

“I thought this would be a very appropriate show for a college context,” Inselmann said. “Especially for younger generations, I think it provides a context and an environment to talk about climate change and to express their anxieties or their hopes for the future.”

On Skidmore’s campus in Saratoga Springs, famous for its horse racing and natural mineral springs, the Tang punches above its weight for a small liberal arts college museum with an ambitious exhibition program in a striking building designed by Antoine Predock. The museum generates about a dozen shows annually — often from its collection of nearly 20,000 objects, with strengths in contemporary art and photography — and drew more than 220 class visits from across disciplines this school year.

Anchoring the Tang’s 25th anniversary season this spring is “Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes,” a three-decade retrospective of the artist’s playful, inventive and sometimes jarring small-scale ceramic sculptures on view through July 26. “Kathy bridges the generation of Robert Arneson and Viola Frey, who were her teachers and innovators that moved ceramics from a purely craft environment to a museum and art conversation, and the world we’re in today where we see ceramics in lots of different ways all over gallery exhibitions,” said the Tang director Ian Berry, who organized the show. “Kathy is a real inspiration and key figure for this current moment.”

Forty-five of her eccentric vessels — miniature three-dimensional canvases for experimental glazes and textures, often crumpling expressively on their bases — are grouped chronologically across three huge platforms serving as the “rooms” of the show. Within the constraints of small shifts in scale, from four to eight inches say, “an entire universe changes,” Berry said. The title of the show comes from one of Butterly’s works. “‘Assume’ adds a little twist to the exclamation point of ‘Yes’,” he said. “It’s optimistic, it’s upbeat, but also it has a complexity to it.”

Alongside Princeton’s encyclopedic collections, displayed throughout the museum’s stunning complex of nine interlocking modernist pavilions, is “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945-50” — the first temporary loan exhibition in the new building — on view through July 26.

The show is built around Princeton’s own 1948 painting “Black Friday” — exhibited that year in de Kooning’s debut show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York after he had struggled there in poverty for 15 years.

“It emerged as one of the essential pictures in de Kooning’s career,” said Steward, Princeton’s museum director, who agreed to loan “Black Friday” to the Museum of Modern Art for its major de Kooning retrospective in 2011 organized by the chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield.

Now, in turn, Elderfield has co-curated this exhibition of 18 paintings, drawn from more than a dozen museums and private collections and focused on the pivotal period when de Kooning found his artistic voice and helped to pioneer Abstract Expressionism.

“It is just such an incisive project that is physically modest in scope, but not modest at all intellectually or artistically,” Steward said. “That’s a sweet spot I really want us to occupy as a great academic museum.”