A friend who’s a year ahead of my son spent 2 years at a cc followed by 2 years commuting to a state school. Before he graduated he had a job lined up in Manhattan that pays $90k/year at a company that offers similar benefits. He has zero debt so he’s very happy.
Are you willing to pay or loan for the expensive ivy or top 20 schools instead of cheap state Univ.?
Wonderful. I am glad there are so many lucarative opportunities for all the college graduates, well most anyway. In my community I haven’t heard of such good fortune for the majority of graduates. I continually hear about students taking on massive debt and being unable to pay it down or having to work three jobs to keep current. This includes attending both privates and publics. In my state many people take loans for public schools too.
Like others full pay over $250k plus student responsible for food, books and incidental expenses. Used all the institutional resources intended and more, achieved at a very high level and very much enjoys undergraduate experience albeit a difficult curriculum path.
Applying to funded PHD programs. Looking at the PHD application list D compiled from academic publications and industry partnerships, there are 0 cheap out of state undergraduate programs at any of these institutions (for us even the undergrad state programs add $25-$30k/yr for out of state students)
Agree that it depends on student, residence location, major and next step. No regrets, more common on east coast, next 5 years are necessary for career path and fully funded.
No one knows if a particular kid would have had what s/he did had college been different.
But, my elite-LAC kid just started a terrific job. A friend of hers has the exact same job (they met at one of the interviews). Friend went to “big state U”. I imagine they are both very accomplished go-getters who worked hard, took chances and made opportunities for themselves.
The order of importance of the factors influencing your kid’s success:
- Herself/himself
- The field s/he has chosen
- The school environment
The school only has tertiary effect. The extra money on schools may not be well spent if there’re pronounced deficiencies in the first two, as the school itself won’t compensate for those deficiencies.
Parental circumstances and restrictions are probably #0 here. For example, if the parents cannot or will not pay for college, then the kid will not be able to pursue goals that require college, except possibly in a delayed fashion. Other parental factors are whether the parents can live in a place with good public K-12 schools, or have the money to send the kid to private K-12 schools if the public ones are not good. Or which types of extracurriculars the parents will steer the kid to or be willing to spend money on if needed.
Conversely, if you have a kid that has both #1 & 2 and you put him/her in an amazing “school environment” they will excel and grow exponentially. Close friend’s kid who is brilliant is full pay at Harvard and it’s the perfect college for her. Going to a “cheap state public college” say San Diego State University would not be the exact same environment she is getting at H (even if they happen to end up in a similar job years later). It’s just not. The difference is this family is not taking out 250K of debt to finance this elite education as they have the assets to easily afford a private college. For the OP, on a school teacher’s salary, it’s very unwise to take on 250K of DEBT to go to an elite college, which is the real issue here.
The OP seems to have disappeared…
I have long avoided these financial discussions for this very reason – but I will chime in to say that I wish @blossom 's quote above could be auto-posted at the top of every one of these common threads.
“Dumb”, “Foolish”, “Stupid”, use of these terms helps no one and angers many.
Great quote by blossom.
Definitely true. #1 factor I suspect.
I just have to comment on the remarks some people made about elite colleges being more like boarding schools socioeconomically. I do not think that is true. The top private colleges have wonderful diversity in all ways (except intellectual ability).
Looking at the stats, our state’s top ranked public university is less diverse by race and certainly by geography of students’ homes than is my son’s small private college. And in terms of finances, many of my son’s friends at college have said that they are paying less there than they would have for their state universities (including his roommate, who is from our same state that offers free tuition for families earning under $125,000, but NOT free room and board. He applied to both, and the private college cost less for him than the state u would have). The top privates can afford to give amazing financial aid.
One poster frequently remarks that often around 40% of the kids at top privates are full pay, so the colleges skew rich. That is probably in part a result of the lifelong inequities that lead to richer kids getting higher test scores, etc. But that 40% at full pay includes kids like my son who is full pay— and I am an employee of a public school system on a public school teacher’s salary scale, and my husband earns less than I do.
Many of my son’s friends are from a lower financial bracket than we are. He also has a couple of friends at college much wealthier than we, but most of his friends are on financial aid. Almost all his friends attended public high schools (although my son can now name the top private schools— none of which he had even heard of before college!). His friends come from all walks of life and their parents hold a wide range of jobs from minimum wage level to working class to middle class to upper middle class to decidedly wealthy.
Life at a top private lets you become friends with people from more states, more nations, more races and ethnicities, more socioeconomic backgrounds, more religions, more quirky interests, etc. than many students may ever have encountered before in their lives. I love that aspect of my son’s college!
I am NOT saying you can’t have as much diversity at some public colleges. You can! I am just saying that top privates are not populated solely by a bunch of rich students.
Not solely, but disproportionately. If 45% of the students come from top 3-5% income/wealth families (no FA), but only 20% come from the bottom half income/wealth families (Pell Grant), that is certainly a strong skew toward students from high income/wealth backgrounds.
“I am just saying that top privates are not populated solely by a bunch of rich students.”
Well when the average income or wealth of selective privates is at $500K, the college oozes wealth, there is no doubt about that. All the students aren’t wealthy of course but the wealthy students basically subsidize the rest of the class.
Regarding this statement, this is generally true, but not exclusive to “top private” colleges. Diversity tends to increase as one goes to higher grades in school. I.e. middle school tends to be more diverse than elementary school, high school tends to be more diverse than middle school,. and college tends to be more diverse than high school. This is simply because the higher grade level schools draw from larger regions that have more diversity than smaller regions like the attendance zone for an elementary school.
Even a relatively low diversity college may be more diverse than the local neighborhood that the student grew up in, since most neighborhoods are highly segregated by SES (and SES outliers living there may try to “blend in” rather than advertise that they are much richer or poorer than most of the neighborhood), and many are segregated on other attributes like race, ethnicity, or religion, or the parents may bring the kids to activities that tend to attract people of similar race, ethnicity, or religion.
The first question one asks is "what’s “diversity”? Is it considered to be “diverse”, if it includes the top kids by income from across the USA and the world, who all went to a handful of expensive elementary schools, all went to the same handful of expensive private high schools, whose parents have the same narrow set of occupations - law, business, and politics. The fact that their country of origin and even ethnicity may differ is dwarfed by the commonalities of a wealthy and privileged childhood.
Time and again, the income diversity in the most expensive and popular colleges has been demonstrated to be extremely low, so the claim that they are diverse because their 26 students accepted from an exclusive private boarding school for the wealthy are super wealthy kids of Chinese, Indian, and White American origins is simply “gaming” the system. Those kids are more similar to each other than any of them is to a poor person of the same racial/ethnic origin.
@TheGreyKing Large public colleges in mostly White states are going to be mostly White, so the public universities of New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, or West Virginia are going to be less diverse the public universities in, say, New York, New Mexico, or California. As for geographic diversity, the entire point of public universities is to serve the people of THAT STATE. The University of ILLINOIS was established primarily to serve the people of ILLINOIS, not the people of New York, Connecticut, or the UK. Same for the University of Indiana, the Ohio State University, and Texas Tech. The fact that between states defunding their universities and universities preferring OOS dollars to serving the people of their state (I’m looking at YOU California and the UCs!!) this is not the case for some public universities does not change this fact.
High geographic diversity is many public universities is an indication of the failure of the public university system, not an indication of of anything truly positive.
Offhand, I could think of a dozen ways in which a college experience at SDSU would be BETTER to that at Harvard.
What seems obvious isn’t always true. Vermont actually has 80% of freshman from out of state.
Private colleges are often more diverse geographically, but less than you might think as the interactive graphic The Chronicle for Higher Education created a few years ago: https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/freshmen_insts#id=130794 (This isn’t working for me now, you may need to be a subscriber, but the link will show you Yale.)
Having diversity is better than having no diversity, but more diversity isn’t necessarily better than less diversity. Similar to your stock portfolio, there’s diminishing return, perhaps even negative return due to some side effects, from more diversity, once some threshold of diversity is achieved.
“The fact that between states defunding their universities and universities preferring OOS dollars to serving the people of their state (I’m looking at YOU California and the UCs!!)”
I mentioned this on another thread, the UCs have a 81% in-state enrollment, higher than UVA and and about the same as UNC, both of which have quotas on OOS applicants. In fact UVA’s quota is 33% and that’s where they are with OOS, UNC’s is 18% and they’re known to be the toughest for OOS applicants. But UC’s are also very tough for OOS, they don’t accept anyone OOS just because they have money. If your argument is that all state schools should have 100% in-state enrollment, that’s fine. If your argument is that UC love full-pay OOS, that’s pretty far from the truth. In fact the UCs and CSUs do a very good job of providing economic mobility for low-income CA students, probably better than any other state for their residents.
Note that some forum favorite state flagships have high OOS enrollments:
66% University of Alabama
47% University of Michigan