2013 Best Colleges Preview: Top 10 Best Value Schools

College Search & Selection
1

<p>2013 Best Colleges Preview: Top 10 Best Value Schools</p>

<p>2013</a> Best Colleges Preview: Top 10 Best Value Schools - US News and World Report</p>

2

<p>the usual suspects</p>

3

<p>Those are all very expensive private universities. Hardly “best values” in the common man’s sense.</p>

4

<p>They are including fin aid</p>

5

<p>

</p>

<p>[Household</a> income in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States]Household”>Household income in the United States - Wikipedia)</p>

<p>The “common” household’s annual income is ~$50,000.</p>

<p>[Financial</a> Aid Office](<a href=“http://www.fao.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do]Financial”>http://www.fao.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do)</p>

<p>At Harvard College, “families with incomes currently below $60,000 are not expected to contribute to college costs.” Its peers make a similarly generous commitment to making higher education affordable for the “common” family.</p>

6

<p>

</p>

<p>What percentage of the applicants who are admitted to Harvard college actually belong to the “no-fee” income bracket ?</p>

7

<p>65% qualify for fin aid</p>

<p>most of the rest probably come from families that can easily afford the price</p>

8

<p>Of the 1,657 freshman who entered Harvard in the Fall of 2011, 1,046 were awarded financial aid, with average scholarships and grants of $44,053 each:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.provost.harvard.edu/institutional_research/CDS_2011-2012_Final.pdf[/url]”>http://www.provost.harvard.edu/institutional_research/CDS_2011-2012_Final.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

9

<p>

</p>

<p>I didn’t ask how many students qualified for ** any kind of financial aid **. I asked specifically what percentage of the admitted students qualified for ** full tuition exemption **, which is often used as an argument to illustrate how “inclusive” Harvard and other top universities are. </p>

<p>If I am not mistaken, at MIT for example, the number of students (all years) in the 0-50,000 family income bracket in the year 2010-2011 was about 832 out of a total undergraduate enrollment of 4,384 meaning about 19 %. Although that is already probably more than I would expect, I still think it is a little bit of a PR stunt to say that you encourage low-income kids to attend your institution by offering them full tuition exemption when the percentage of admitted low-income students who would qualify for that kind of financial aid is actually relatively small.</p>

<p>For middle-income families on the other hand, who get some kind of financial aid though not a full ride, the schools listed on the USN&WR ranking may or may not be a “good value”, but, in many cases, they might get a better value from their local flagship state universities, especially if they live in states with top public university systems like California.</p>

10

<p>Private colleges can a lot of time end up costing less.</p>

11

<p>Read Dadinator’s last post</p>

12

<p>According to the latest available IPEDS (2010) Harvard gave aid to students in the following categories
0-$30,000: 80
$30,001-$48,000: 90
$48,001-$75,000: 69
$75,001-$110,000: 35
$110,001 or more: 66</p>

<p>Schools that had significantly more people in the highest income bracket receiving aid than those in the lowest included:
University of Notre Dame
University of Pennsylvania
Northwestern University
Washington University in St Louis
Duke University
Brown University
Tufts University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Georgetown University
Oberlin College
Carleton College</p>

13

<p>Wow, the upper-middle class really got screwed over.</p>

14

<p>

</p>

<p>Yeah, they may have to sell the summer house on the Cape to afford to send thier kids to college.</p>

15

<p>Most people that make 100-300k a year (Upper-middle class)don’t have a summer house on the Cape</p>

16

<p>I meant the ones in the 75k to 100k range.</p>

17

<p>

</p>

<p>What a silly statement. that’s akin to saying, underrepresented minority students are not encouraged to attend top schools because, look at it, the percentage of these minority students is so small at those schools.</p>

<p>Correlation =/= causation. low income students perform comparably worse on standardized tests than their middle and upper class peers and have less access to and less cultural focus on extracurriculars, all of which are the factors that make students attractive to any college. if anything, low income, high achieving kids are sought after by the top schools, not the reverse. the generous financial aid is just one of many enticements colleges are currently using to diversify their student body.</p>

18