Been thinking about the LMU visit and can’t stop remembering how much it felt like a sales pitch. Mostly, because it was a sales pitch! But I’m NOT sold.
I want my S18 to have a great education and I can pretty easily afford it without dipping into my retirement, etc. But I haven’t always had money and I remember what it’s like to live check-to-check and barely scrape by. And I still try to get the best prices for any travel, major purchases, etc. since those types of life skills don’t just go away. But, why in the hell is college so expensive and getting more so despite major educational loan repayment problems?
It seems to me that a lot of the problem is the super-competitive and over-scheduled kids coming out these days. What happened to flying a freakin kite or riding your bike around the neighborhood until the street lights came on? Getting your license and cruising during the weekend all night with your friends? You remember, wasting time to a point you were actually ready to go back to school at the end of summer?
Are we, the parents, responsible for creating the appetite for these schools such that they can charge whatever in the heck they want? Are we pushing our kids too hard? Expecting too much? Why?
If the college is going to cost $250,000+ for 4 years, why aren’t we just setting our kids up in a business. Does anybody else out there really think this is a sound investment? It definitely seems like what is required for our kids to move on to a reasonable career and financial security, but is it logical? Really? The price of an actual business! Think about what an annuity funded with a quarter million dollars would pay and how that’d supplement a “normal” job.
So, “NO,” the sales pitch is sounding pretty damn hollow to me.
I’m relatively new to CC and suspect this post has been done previously to death, but I still feel like a lost voice in the CC community?
To quote Pink Floyd: “Is there anybody out there?”
:-q
This has been beaten to death, but I’ll recap the arguments.
Some posters say college is about the “life of the mind.” Any discussion of ROI misses the point of a college education versus a trade school.
Someone else will bring up the Krueger studies, claiming where you go to college makes no difference in future income.
I’ll bring up the fact the first Krueger study found going to schools with high average net tuition did increase earnings. The second Krueger study, which found applying to elite schools, even if you got rejected, would increase lifetime earnings, seemed to defy common sense, and raise doubts about their methodology. I have a lot of problems with their methodology, but that’s a rant for elsewhere.
Someone will claim that on $250k/year, you should easily be able to pay for your kid’s college out of pocket. After all, the median household income is only $52k.
Someone else will claim that $250k in the Upper East Side feels like $50k anywhere else.
I think there are at least two things wrong with university in the US, perhaps three: It is too expensive; It is too stressful on our kids. The third thing that bothers me is that admission to the very top ranked schools seems broken and emphasizes things that either add too much stress or are beyond the control of any kids that happened to be born into the wrong family.
The two expensive part was discussed at great length in a recent thread.
The two stressful part is something where I don’t think that there is complete agreement. To me part of the stress comes from the fact that just being a straight A student is not enough. Our kids have to have great ECs, and have to take rigorous schedules with a lot of AP or even IB classes (not that I am quite sure what an IB class is). Thus we have kids getting up at 6 or 6:3am, getting to school by 7, taking a full day of classes, running track or playing a sport for 2 or 3 hours, then getting home exhausted with 8 or 10 hours of homework ahead of them. This just isn’t right. People who make a great difference to the world in most cases didn’t do it by trying to do too many different things all at the same time, and we shouldn’t expect this from our kids either.
“the sales pitch is sounding pretty damn hollow to me”
It sounds hollow to me also, and also sounds hollow to my younger daughter. She seemed to be as turned off as I was whenever a school talked about how prestigious it is. Her immediate reaction to floods of ads in the mail (physical mail and email) was “they want more applications so that they can reject more students to pump up their apparent selectivity”. She ended up applying to affordable academically great schools that you can get into with just straight A’s, great references, and not much else (she had great SAT scores too, but wanted to apply to small schools that happened to be SAT optional).
I think that the lower ranked expensive schools are in trouble. I think that the highly ranked schools can keep up this game for a very long time, but that we don’t have to play along if we don’t want to.
I think that the vast majority of Americans who have kids who are academically strong enough for university (which is slightly less than half) are looking for an affordable academically good fit and are not caught up in this game. There are lots of kids who get good educations at local community colleges or in-state public universities. The mad game that we put our kids through really only applies to a minority of us.
I can totally relate. The whole idea that 'everyone should go to college" is seriously misguided in the first place.
Work experience (and volunteering, interning) can do a lot for job preparation. College used to NOT be vocational, but now it is all about jobs. The humanities are declining.
Doing nothing is a lost art. The ubiquity of screens and overscheduling are both factors.
As for the money thing, if you can afford it great. If not, community college then state U. unless merit aid is available.
OK, what is LMU? Sorry if that’s a common acronym I missed.
@roethlisburger summarized much of the discussion but I’ll add one aspect. Anyone paying full freight at a private is in a high income bracket and thus $250,000 total bill has a different dimension than it does to the average joe.
Anyone paying $60,000 to go to a UC out of state can’t do math or has money to burn.
The rest pay somewhere in between. There is a strong argument to take the merit aid and honors college at the state flagship for the top students but the financial aid may be enough at a top school to come out of pocket for some figure.
Sorry guys. Yep, Loyola Marymount in LA. Just did a tour and wrote about it in another thread re avg hs students 2018. Basic middle of the row University charging what the top dogs charge. Why? that’s what got me going.
I’m actually wondering if somehow our pushing our kids is enabling the 2nd, 3rd etc tiered schools to charge so much. I get the whole Ivy, high ranked thing.
@rwmannesq I agree with that but that’s why all such schools were forbidden from my '17 grad’s list. Private’s that give substantial aid, privates that offer merit with decent odds (Tulane), and flagships. We saved a lot of heartache by not applying to schools we couldn’t afford based on NPC.
I think the over $50k plus colleges charge that because that is what it costs them. A professor teaching at LMU wants to be paid the same as the professors at Harvard and Yale. The electricity and food and mattresses and grounds upkeep costs the same as at USC ad Stanford. LMU saves on snow removal costs that they have at Yale, but the water bill is probably higher.
We couldn’t afford the $50k schools without aid. I really had no intention of looking at them, but one daughter was recruited and through lots of negotiation and luck, she does attend such a school.
It really doesn’t bother me that schools charge that much, but it does bother me that students borrow too much to pay for them. If the family has the money, great. If the student gets aid, great. If the student or family borrows the money, not so great.
I guess won the financial aid lottery. Fifteen years ago I figured on in-state public colleges only. Then S1 got high test scores and I learned about merit aid. I negotiated and said that I just wanted them to be equal to our in-state university… Bingo. Then came colleges that that met 100% of need met. I no longer pay tuition. Gotta findyour path. A middle class guy can do this. No NYU. No out-of-state public schools. Take the SAT/ACT umteen times … that’s all the merit aid schools care about.
@twoinanddone that works for the costs betweeen various schools in LA, Bay Area, NYC, Boston, etc. as high cost living expenses. What about schools in Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans, or rural schools. The cost of living in New Orleans for a Tulane prof is far less than Cambridge, Palo Alto, or LA.
Increased overhead, compliance, and student expectations on advising, gyms, etc. is part of it but I’m not sure it’s $65,000 per year worth.
But now we’re rehashing old issues - not that there is anything wrong with that. That’s why we have discussions.
Hmmm, I think I should have given this more thought before posting. If I were to re-do I’d name the thread “How do average universities dare charge so much and are we to blame?” I’ve got an average S18 with decent grades, average (I mean general population avg) SAT, little to no real EC’s or honors beyond grade based or hobby related, and we’re shooting for the average universities. So UOP (Stockton), USF (SF CA), etc. He isn’t going to get merit based assistance or loans. He’s just an average kid. UC’s are way too big and impacted, CSU’s are a possible consideration but generally also too large, etc. And I just keep coming back to how in the heck do these middle tier schools charge the same as Stanford, USC, etc.? It’s obviously because they can, but is that our fault? And their sales pitches are pathetic. I’m paying Lexus prices for a Toyota package?
And now my mind wanders along the analogy of car buying and whether it’s similar to credit worthiness having to pay more for less? But I digress…
The 2+ month summer vacation is mostly unique to the US. Most international students and my immigrant parents/older relatives find it surprising US K-12 students have such long summer vacations. Not to mention the factor that some countries have/used to have school more than 5 days a week.
My parents/older relatives had longer school days(School days started ~7-8am and went till 5 pm and had )to attend classes on saturdays in their country of origin in addition to monday-friday when they were doing K-12 though the latter was done away with sometime in the late '60s or early '70s.
Also, a lot of American kids didn’t have the chance to do most of those leisurely activities during K-12 because we didn’t have the money and needed to spend the free summer months and afterschool/weekend working summer/part-time jobs to contribute to the family till.
The only kids in my old NYC neighborhood who stayed out playing outside till the street lights came on were those who were getting a head start in joining the local drug gangs or otherwise up to no good. Most of them ended up dropping out of HS with criminal records.
A few are still serving long sentences in prison after being convicted of multiple felonies. Most neighbors with aspirations of their kids to even graduate HS did their utmost to discourage them from playing outside…especially with the kids who did so on a regular basis.