Whewlad, hoping you’re not a forbiddenword:
No there aren’t tons of scholarships that significantly impact costs; only about 80 colleges out of 3,700 meet financial need; if you’re lucky and you live in states such as Florida or California, public universities are affordable, but if you’re unlucky and you live in Pennsylvania or Illinois, forget it; you can’t just 'join the National Guard ’ and ROTC now has fewer scholarships for freshmen because joining the military should be a vocation not a scholarship program.
The average American family makes 56k a year. The typical public university costs 24-30k. The system is simply unaffordable for a vast majority of people.
Even ten to fifteen years ago people would have been aghast at the thought getting into debt for undergrad should be considered 'normal '.
Our experience more or less bears this out. My daughter had the choice between a SLAC (for $250K) and U Cambridge for about 1/4 that. My son got French citizenship in order to get Canadian tuition rates in Quebec, about $5K per year.
My advice is, forget about tax hypotheticals and investigate whether there are options that would work better for you.
@WhewLad you are spewing callow nonsense. There isn’t enough scholarship money to go around, given US tuition rates.
@WhewLad: Joining the National Guard doesn’t get you a full ride and only in 2 states (that I know of) does joining the National Guard take care of all tuition costs at that state’s publics (NJ and IL).
Be careful what you wish for. Whenever I hear Americans pining for everything European or Canadian, it is often without a real understanding of the underlying fundamentals. In Canada the taxation on alcohol and gas is excessive, income taxes are high and sales tax is 13% (at least in Ontario). Cost of living is higher (food costs are substantially higher - due to some co-operatives that act as monopolies) and competition is generally less (thus prices are higher). And the weak currency kills us when we travel (and all products are inherently more expensive).
So we do have less expensive college (relative to private US schools), but the resources are substantially less as well. So there is an element of you get what you pay for. It is no accident that Canadians will send their kids to US colleges if they can afford it.
I just come back from 10 days in the UK. The only items which if found more expensive were gasoline and car hire. Food and drink about the same (as in the Mid West) hotels I would say were cheaper. My daughters college tuition is substantial cheaper than an equivalent US institution.
@elguapo1 - have you looked at the cost of housing in London? Whether purchasing or renting. It is nothing like the Midwest.
When it comes to higher taxes, in Europe, they get more social services. In the US, the Federal government receives a lot of revenue but more than half goes to the military industrial complex. While Defense is our number one priority, we spend TOO MUCH on defense. More than half of our discretionary spending goes to the military, and our defense budget is greater than those of the next top 8 countries, and most of those countries are our allies.
@elguapo1: Well, Brexit has really weakened the pound.
@cdndukealum: Well, the Canadian unis are publics and many Americans who can afford it send their kids to privates as well. Though in Canada, all publics are reasonably priced for Canadians while in the US, only residents in a handful of states get to attend publics as good as McGill/Toronto at prices close to what Canadians pay for their publics.
And there’s no deal like CS@Waterloo for Americans unless you qualify for substantial fin aid.
Yes, in Canada we have no private colleges. The collegiate system is dramatically different than in the US - no massive focus on athletics and, due to a population one tenth the size, less choice among schools. The level of competition to get in schools (at least for undergrad) is not comparable. If you are a good high school student, you get in every college that you apply.
Colleges in Canada are like everything in Canada relative to the US - we do not have the extremes. Nothing great like Yale, Stanford, Amherst, etc., but nothing terrible (well, clearly some are worse than others - but not to the same extreme as you can find in the US).
If money is not an issue, clearly American colleges are better. But for most people, money is an issue and in those circumstances Canadian colleges are a good choice. I get the impression that there is sizeable financial aid available for US colleges, but it is not clear how many students get aid and how much.
@cdndukealum There is more to the UK than London as there is more to the US than New York. College in the UK is very competitive price wise with even US state schools. However, the over riding advantage of UK schools is they are only interested in academic achievement in a desired discipline for admission purposes. The brightest kids get into the best schools ALWAYS! Non of the holistic admissions nonsense.
@cdndukealum: the university system in Canada isn’t dramatically different from the US at all.
Take the American publics (flagships and public LACs), take away the sports, and you essentially have the Canadian university system.
Holistic always for social engineering. Which means that you do not have to be accountable for why a kid with an 80 average is accepted whereas the kid with 90 is rejected. Holism essentially means that you can make decisions that appear to make little sense on merit without having to explain or justify the decision. When a school says that they have a holistic approach to admissions, it essentially means that they admit people outside of objective criteria.
I have no doubt that this topic can get very philosophical with many differences of opinion. We largely do not have that in Canadian schools - which I am personally fine with.
@cdndukealum; We largely don’t have holistic admissions at American publics either (at least when it comes to in-state kids). UT-Austin fills the vast majority of its entering class solely by class rank, for instance.
BTW, CS@Waterloo is holistic.
@ Purple. I beg to differ. Public’s are now getting holistic as they chase OOS dollars, ask the parents of high achieving kids from California and Virginia for example.
It is actually much more true in Europe…especially Germany considering the robust vocational educational/apprenticeship systems they have there.
In fact, only a minority of such students end up going onto the college track or even if on the college track, continue onto university because one can get a well-paying upper-middle class/middle-class job without going to college. 'And many do and find fulfilling and highly respectable careers/lives on this path.
Incidentally, this is one reason why many European and other countries around the world can offer exceedingly nominal cost/free tuition for college education. Only a top proportion of middle school aged students(estimations vary from the top 20%-50% of middle school students are allowed to continue on the HS track) are allowed to continue onto the college track in those societies.
There’s also a greater expectation that college-track/first-year students already have a good idea of what they want to study and being more independent about managing their studies as shown by the sink-or-swim atmosphere in many German/European universities.
@elguapo1: Does every high-achieving kid in the UK get in to Oxbridge? If not, I’m not sure how high-achieving kids not getting in to the top publics in CA and VA shows that they are holistic.
That said, yes, the top publics are also becoming more holistic especially as state funding for those schools has dropped. The percentage of UVa’s budget that comes from VA is in the low single digits now, I believe. Still, it’s typically still harder (or at least as hard) for OOS/Internationals to get in to top publics compared to in-state kids. In-state acceptance rate for UVa is quite a bit higher than the UVa OOS/International acceptance rate.
Compare with the Ancient Scottish unis where it’s much easier for full-pay Internationals to get in compared to Scots/EU who pay almost nothing.
@ Purple. No, but every kid who gets into Oxbridge is a high academic achieving kid because that’s the overwhelming criteria for admission, not the same in the US. Routinely 10-15% of the graduating class from D’s high school end up in the Ivies…of those probably 50% fall outside the top 20% of the graduating class in terms of GPA, that’s holistic admissions. Chasing high $$$ admits is another form of holistic admission. Scotland is a different case as numbers are dictated by the government.
@cobrat- Exactly this. The US sorely lacks in vocational education, there is this mentality here that everyone MUST go to college to be successful, when in reality it’s only the right fit for a minority of people. Likewise, our retention rates and 4-year graduation rates are atrocious.
Germany has a far lower percentage of students going on the 4-year university track but far higher retention and graduation rates, largely because of the vocational education programs.