Oh, no. Times were completely different in the 1980s before tuition inflation hit. My dad was a public middle school teacher. My mom was an RN who worked nights part time at the local hospital so she could be home days for my younger brothers. They were solidly middle class, probably somewhat above the median household income for the time in Oregon. Maybe equivalent to $75-80k per year today. They had a mortgage on an ordinary middle class suburban home and retired comfortably with two pensions, two social security, a paid-off house and modest savings.
At the time, Reed tuition was about $8000/year. I remember my senior year in 1985/86 it had risen to $8,900. Reed covered about half that with a $4,000 grant. The remainder I split with my parents. I took out $2000/year in Stafford loans, they kicked in roughly $2,000 per year just by saving about $200/mo while I was in college. No 529 plan and saving for college since I was a toddler. None of that. Just paying as you go out of a teacherâs salary. Room and board I paid myself through working part-time in the campus boiler room at night and doing construction in Portland during the summers. Off-campus rent in a shared house was about $200-250/month. After I graduated I retired my $8,000-ish student loan in 3 months by working on fishing boats in Alaska. I had enough extra money to own a beater car through college. It seemed expensive at the time but it was nothing like the life-shattering debt or sacrifice required today.
For comparison sake I looked up the tuition at the UO for the same time period. It was about $1,400 per term or $4200 per year. They offered me no financial aid so my costs of attendance at the UO would have been almost identical to Reed. https://ir.uoregon.edu/sites/ir1.uoregon.edu/files/tui1213.pdf
Contrast that with the roughly $50,000 per year difference we are looking at for my daughter. Yes we are upper middle class but that is a recent development in this decade. I have a minor teaching pension because I havenât been doing it that long. My wife has none. So like most Americans, retirement is mostly what we manage to save. Can we pay full freight plus room and board to send her to UW? Sure. Weâve been doing it for the older daughter for the past 4 years. But tossing an additional $50k per year on top of that puts in an entirely different sort of bite than my parents ever experienced. Best case scenario is likely deferring retirement and possibly needing to tap retirement savings. Even subsidized Stafford loans are not available. Worst case scenario if one of us loses our income stream, or my wife needs to take an extended leave of absence to take care of elderly parents in South America? Then we are in a real pickle. I know plenty of families just go ahead and do that. But you shouldnât have to. And with another child still on deck we canât afford to blow everything on the middle one.
Yes I know these are first-world problems and we will be fine. But it feels like there is a real bind for families whoâs income just barely pushes them into the $75k+ range for EFC. Full price-private universities that donât offer merit aid just feel out of reach no matter what sort of qualifications your child has.
So yes, after tossing everything around in my head and reading everyoneâs comments. The answer is clearly no. Itâs not worth an extra $50,000/year to send her to a posh LAC that doesnât do merit aid. Maybe if it was Stanford, but thatâs unlikely. If she does decide she wants the LAC experience over UW then we will just need to find an option that has reasonable merit aid to bend the cost down closer to what we face with UW. That seems doable. It just wonât be my alma matter.
FWIW, my S20 received quite nice merit offers from UPS, L&C, and Whitman and his stats are nowhere near as impressive as your daughterâs.
I also have a D17 at Pomona and she is having a wonderful experience and absolutely thriving there. Would she have been just as happy at another school which wouldnât have cost $280k? I am quite certain the answer is yes, so I absolutely agree that paying $200k more for an LAC is not worth it.
But both my kids chose or will choose (in S20âs case as he is really pushing his decision to the wire!) a smaller LAC because they wanted the smaller class sizes. I went to my large state flagship many moons ago and for me, the small class sizes was a benefit worth paying for. They are both very independent and self-motivated, so I would disagree with the sentiment stated earlier in this thread that LACs are just for kids who need handholding.
Regardless of whether she finds she prefers a large or smaller school, I am sure that your daughter will have a lot of great options!!
Thanks for the update. Iâm happy we have options. Those are all schools on the list. Pomona is probably a place we will visit and apply to as a reach school because why not. But then again, they donât do merit aid so back to that problem. So it will have to REALLY REALLY be worth it. Pomona or Whitman might actually be better fits than Reed for her because she isnât quite as academically âpretentiousâ as Reed was, at least when I was there in the 80s. She isnât they type to stay up until 2 am arguing about Wittgenstein or Sartre on a Friday night over cigarettes. Reed has a lot of super-bright students but sometimes I felt like some of them were really more in training to have really brilliant cocktail and dinner party banter when they returned to the upper east side. Maybe it has changed, but I sort of doubt it.
I didnât mean to imply that LACs were just for kids who need handholding. Obviously the intimate small class environment is of benefit to anyone. It is more a question of whether that kind of environment is really worth the enormous extra cost for a student who is independent and self-disciplined enough to probably not need it.
I think perhaps a really marquee school like Stanford, Harvard, or MIT could be worth the enormous extra price because of the doors that a degree might open. Iâm not sure that necessarily holds true for a Reed or Pomona when they are nearly equivalent options at a much lower price. So weâll probably apply to some of those reach schools just to see what happens and not make the tough decision until later.
BTW, what is the D17 and S20 short-hand? Is that the HS graduation year? So I have a D21?
I know you were not asking for additional schools - but if you are looking at Pomona - I would add Scripps College - all girls, share across the 5 school consortium and provide $'s. (or they used to - would need to confirm).
Any to answer your other question - D21 = daughter graduating HS in 21
Always happy for additional school recommendations! Pomona is the only Claremont school that I am familiar with because I long ago had a girlfriend from there. I keep forgetting that there are 4 more of them. We are 5th generation Northwesterners (on my side of the family) so I have a pretty good grasp of all the options here in the Pacific Northwest, such as they are. But California is something of a mystery. The only CA universities I have ever visited in my life are UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. The rest we are just exploring on paper until the world lets us visit in person. I donât think we are looking beyond OR, WA, and CA as staying reasonably close to home on the west coast is a criteria of hers. She has no interest in looking at any of the dozens or hundreds of midwest and northeast schools. And once you leave the west coast there isnât much else to look at until you get all the way to Colorado.
All things being equal, the Bay Area would probably be preferable as that is just a long-dayâs drive away for us while LA is a solid 2-days. So for that reason alone, Santa Clara and Stanford would be preferable. But if there is the perfect school for her in Southern California that is worth the extra distance because she just loves it so much more than any other option then so be it. Iâm not going to tell her not to apply to need-only schools like Pomona and Stanford which would both be reach schools or big stretch R-E-A-C-H schools. But we will have a really hard discussion about it if a school like that happens to actually be an option.
But if you and your wife made about $80k per year (what you said your parents made in todayâs dollars), Reed would consider you lower income (for its tuition purposes) and your daughter would have most if not all of her need met.
Thatâs what I meant by you could afford it if you were a school teacher and a part time nurse.
I guess you are right. I ran $80,000 AGI through Reedâs Net Price calculator and got this: $63,000 Reed need-based grant. $6,060 parent contribution. Wow. Inflation-adjusted that is probably about what my parents kicked in back in 1982.
Estimated Cost of Attendance
Tuition & Fees $58,440
Room & Board $14,620
Books & Supplies $1,050
Transportation $250
Personal Expenses $900
Total $75,260
Estimated Grant/Gift Aid
Reed Grant $63,700
Estimated NET PRICE
$11,560
Potential Self Help Opportunities
Student Loans $3,500
Student Work $2,000
Total $5,500
Estimated REMAINING COST
$6,060
Have her apply to Puget Sound. They give very generous merit scholarships and stack for music, art, and/or theater. She would do very well there financially speaking and itâs a terrific little school.
Yep, it is on our list. The only LACs we had time to visit before the virus shut things down were Reed and Lewis & Clark right here in our back yard. On the list of schools to visit when the quarantines lift are Puget Sound Whitman, and Gonzaga here in the PNW as well as the comparable schools down in CA. Based on reading the admissions threads for UPS it sounds like a lot of kids were getting merit awards in the $25,000 range this year so that makes it a good choice.
Like many Northwesterners we pass by Tacoma frequently when driving between Portland and Seattle but never actually get off the freeway to see it. It sounds like the school is in a nice residential part of Tacoma. She could theoretically zip up there on Amtrak and not need to take a car to college if she wanted. There is surely some sort of public transit between the college and the downtown train station.
I grew up near Willamette and had friends go there. By reputation it is more of a school you go to for pre-professional programs in law or business as they have both a law school and business school. They are strong in things like public affairs and non-profit management as well as the usual liberal arts. And they are very tied into the state government with a campus that borders the state capital grounds. A bunch of Oregon judges, legislators and politicians went there as well as MBA types in business. That seems to be their strength.
The downside with Willamette is that they donât seem particularly focused on basic sciences and research. A small school canât do everything. By contrast, Reedâs professors are all heavily engaged in research and basically use undergrads as research assistants in the same way that programs at a big university use grad students for research assistants. Compared to Willamette, both Reed and Whitman seem much more tilted towards basic science. Willamette just has a basic biology degree, for example. And students in review sites say the lab facilities and research opportunities are lacking. By contrast, Whitman has dedicated programs in molecular biology and biochemistry and joint 5-year programs with UW and Duke in marine sciences and environmental management. They also have a program in molecular/geomics which interests my daughter. And seems to have a higher percentage of students in the sciences. Reed puts out a higher percentage of students into science PhD programs than just about any other school in the country except CalTech so it is in a different league.
UPS and Gonzaga seem sort of in the middle. Gonzaga is 2x or 3x larger so has the resources for both. But then these are exactly the sort of things we look to explore during in-person visits that one canât really entirely discern simply by looking at web sites, virtual tours, and reviews. As a science teacher and former marine biologist for NOAA I can spend 5 minutes in a university life sciences building and know right away whether they are doing real science or just mostly teaching undergrad science to non-science majors and supporting professional programs like nursing and public health. But I canât do that by looking at a web page with pretty pictures.
Some things you might consider in light of the current pandemic is:
the solvency of these colleges?
will some lower their financial aid and merit next year?
endowment size?
do they guarantee housing freshman year and beyond (the CA state colleges have intimated that freshman may not get on campus housing) Are the WA colleges in the same boat?
do you want to stay more local for college if no vaccine is available a year from now?
by year end, we should have a pretty good handle of which colleges are handling the pandemic well on campus and which ones are not. Pay close attention.
Any college that wants to de-densify its dorms (or add a âquarantine dormâ) could be facing similar problems. If there are empty inexpensive hotels nearby to rent out, that would make it easier on such a college.
I have not looked into this as we are still a year out. But this is daughter #2. Our first born is just finishing college at a big SEC school and coming home next week. In her college career she went from big traditional freshman dorm with roomate to private quad-apartment dorm with 3-roommates and individual private baths, to renting an off-campus 3 br apartment with two friends.
I expect the quad type dorms with private baths are going to be much more popular next year than the traditional dorms with shared bathrooms. and roommates in the same room. The quad type dorms always charged a premium. I wonder how they are going to do that if they become a LOT more popular. Perhaps a lottery.
Depending on the location and circumstances, I might be tempted to buy a nearby off-campus house of some sort for the kid to use during her college career. We donât have that kind of cash laying about. But it is something I might be able to talk the grandparents into funding as an investment. Especially if housing prices drop during this economic crisis. That is obviously something that will be easier to do in say Spokane or Walla Walla than central Seattle.
I wouldnât expect colleges to rent out hotels as they arenât really set up for long-term occupancy without kitchens. But maybe buying up or leasing a nearby apartment complex. But I expect most colleges and universities are going to be loath to get involved in off-campus housing that they donât directly control. Too many issues and not really their expertise.
âIf there are 200 students in their Chem 101 class, shrug.â
I have mentioned this before, but by and large, STEM classes do not need to be smaller, discussion based as the way you learn engineering, or chem, is by solving problems, lots of them.
âI ran $80,000 AGI Estimated REMAINING COST $6,060â
That sounds about right for your parents in todayâs world, for that agi, colleges try to limit parents out of pocket to about 10% of income.
But if there is the perfect school for her in Southern California"
As others have posted, Claremont consortium is excellent, and Cal Tech is in Pasadena, lots of reaches of course.
@theloniusmonk not arguing with you as Iâm not an engineerâŠbut regarding large lectures vs smaller classes and the focus only being on doing lots of problemsâŠif thatâs the case, why do any engineer majors go to traditional colleges? Why donât they just take online instructional lectures with large numbers of problem sets to get their degree? Maybe thatâs where weâre headed.
Again, not being an engineer, but I would think there would be lots of value in discussing solutions to problems, why they work, how they work, why alternatives are wrong or even dangerous. And I would think there would be value in discussing this with actual professors who have âbeen there and done thatâ vs a TA who is just cutting his/her teeth.
I expect everyone can benefit from personal attention and an expert looking over your shoulder in every field. but I think theloniusmonk may have a point. It is true that in the liberal arts such as literature and philosophy you are developing your ability to critically think and express yourself orally and in writing. Being in a small seminar environment with equally bright peers and top instructors is is likely to be of great benefit. But if you are studying say organic chemistry then it is a LOT of tedious memorizing and conceptualizing of molecular structures and working out reactions. You just have to put the nose to the grindstone and put in the time. Having bright peers to work with is a plus. But there is a right and wrong answer. It isnât about developing your own personal interpretation of an organic molecule.
I have been degrees in both political science and biology. Political science was a lot of late night bull sessions and free wheeling discussion seminars. Biology was a lot of solo time with the nose in a book mastering concepts. And studying with others was often annoying and counter-productive if they werenât exactly at your level.
As for why not study engineering online? Have you been in an engineering lab? If you can drop $10 million dollars into your own personal engineering lab to play with then maybe you can teach yourself at home. But most sciences require enormously complex equipment.
Most engineers donât go to traditional education schools, only a few LACs have engineering and the others just donât have established programs in engineering. Of the top-50 colleges that produce engineering graduates, only 2 are private, Cornell and Stanford, and both have larger lectures for their freshman classes.
âdiscussing solutions to problems, why they work, how they work, whyâ
Then youâd have to fundamentally change engineering and science education in the US, because there are two principles in stem education - every problem has one solution with a cut and dried way to get to it and you can only solve that problem by yourself. This was from an article a few years back on engineering education, that I think generally holds. There are some exceptions of course, and collaboration is becoming more prevalent.
Also depends on what type of engineering. My son has classes that are discussion based as an integral part of his learning. @rickle1, what you are suggesting is happening as part of the learning process. But yes some things are very cut and dry also. He is at Michigan and even with engineering he had very few 100 plus kids in the class. Most classes had between 12-40 people in a class and heâs a junior now. His major engineering discussion class has like 15 kids in it.
While that may be true in some lower level courses, that is not true in many other situations.
For example, in a computer science course that assigns programming tasks and projects, you will not see exactly the same solution between different students (or groups of students for group projects). In an engineering design course, students or groups will not necessarily have the same solution for a given specification. In math, there may be more than one way to prove a theorem. In sciences, some things are not fully known, and scientists may disagree on how the blanks are likely to be filled in. Applications of science to a real world problem may produce multiple solutions. For example, there are multiple types of vaccines for polio, influenza, and shingles, and various scientists are trying multiple methods of making a vaccine for COVID-19.
