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<p>Yes, thank you. Exactly–there’s that element of choice again–people with lower incomes don’t get to choose the high quality schools or not–the kind of schools that are more likely to make those high priced privates possible.</p>
<p>Most of us get by with “good enough” schools, not “high quality” schools.</p>
<p>More money just about always equals more choices.</p>
<p>families making $150k complaining that they can’t afford college for their kids simply did not save enough or chose to live beyond what they could have…bigger house than needed, more expensive cars than needed, ect.</p>
<p>My family takes home $100k after taxes and we are able to put away $20k in retirement and $20k-25K in college fund(2 kids) and live comfortably on $60k. I realize every situation is unique…I also realize many people spend a lot more than they should and probably don’t even realize they are doing so.</p>
<p>murrowmom, I am pretty sure that the fafsa does account for differences in the cost of living in different areas, but IMO it does not really reflect those costs accurately (no I don’t have research to reflect what I am asserting, but living in a higher cost area, I feel it).</p>
<p>@geeps20</p>
<p>I think you nailed it. Almost all of us spend more on luxuries than we realize, whether they are nicer neighborhoods, nicer cars, etc. </p>
<p>@Miami
I’d agree that even at 150k you still couldn’t afford full pay at a private university. I wouldn’t consider someone of this income “super-rich” by any means, though definitely rich. Even rich people can’t afford expensive private schools. 150K is at least top 5%, by definition nowhere near “middle”. Even after taxes you would still have more money to spend than the vast majority of the population. A person with this income may not “feel” rich, but they most definitely are by every objective measure. </p>
<p>As evidenced by the large number of lower-to-middle income families, practically any family could get by with a lower-middle income after making some sacrifices. I would argue that people have less incentive to make these sacrifices as their incomes go up.</p>
<p>At least this was the case with my family when I was growing up. Up until I graduated from elementary school we were a family of four living on 30 to 35K in NY. One of my parents finished college and the other started working, and by the time we finished high school we probably had a take-home income of around 80k. We were obviously better off than before (newer home in a nicer neighborhood, second car, etc) but we certainly didn’t “feel” rich. Over time we just grew less willing to settle for the bare minimum and accustomed to thinking of luxuries (multiple computers, two cars, etc) as the norm. We didn’t <em>have</em> to live in a nicer neighborhood or have a second car, we just chose to do it because we realized that we wanted and we could. I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing, I’m just saying that how we feel about our situation doesn’t change the fact that we are wealthy and that we spend like a typical family of our income.</p>
<p>qdogpa…Based on what you said in your post, I can say the same thing about the state flagship and most undergrad private no name colleges. My daughter attends the state U and she had a better education at a CC than she is getting at state U. Compare the state U and no name private schools to the tippy top schools and IMHO there is a big waste of money for parents who really believe their kid is getting a real college education at anything other than the tippy tops. My daughter would be eligible for medical, law or graduate school with her GPA yet her education has fallen short. Most parents think their kid is doing well because they have a high GPA…when you attend anything other than really good schools I am not sure I believe the eduacation is the even close to what it was like back in our day.</p>
<p>My youngest goes to a small Catholic school in the NYC suburbs, about 25 miles from Midtown. The parents at this school all pay tuition for their kids to go there, many in addition to some of the highest property taxes in the country. But there are only a handful of families who fall in the wealthy range, and far more who are making under the median income range. Also some of the areas here do not have multi family dwellings, and no low income housing, so if they live in that area, they are in a million dollar house. So yes, there are families , not just a few who are not making 6 figures here. I know them personally. I chose to live in a high cost area in an expensive house and put my child in private school. But when I looked around here some 10 years ago or so, if I had to, or were so inclined, I could have brought the cost down waaay low. It was our choice and we realize that fully and keep a stiff upper lip about what the costs are to us. I have no pity for my family in this regard, nor for anyone else in our situation. There are plenty of places that are reasonably priced with respectable schools within commuting distance of NYC. We CHOSE not to take those options and pay for these amenities which we have enjoyed and do enjoy. Make no mistake about it, there have been plenty of advantages, enjoyment, etc and I could make the argument that it was a choice anyone would have made, but it was and is not. It was purely choice.</p>
<p>I agree that some cost of living factor should be in the financial aid calculations, but I don’t think it would make that much of a difference to the vast majority of kids. It’s only a tiny number of schools that guarantee to meet full need, even fewer who define need generously, and fewer still that meet it all with grant money. Take out the need aware schools and you really don’t have a much left here. </p>
<p>The families I know are so far from getting a lot of need based aid, that a COLA isn’t going to help. The formulas for aid are really quite stringent and even families getting some need based aid have to stretch a lot. Mini’s younger daughter got financial aid, but the real cost saver was the 25% saved by graduating in 3 years. and the great jobs she got that really brought down the cost. Financial aid alone is rarely that generous.</p>
<p>What truly scares me are the loans these young people are taking. I don;t see how many of them are going to be able to pay them. I just don’t.</p>
<p>momma…So, you know that most all no name privates give a bad education…really</p>
<p>Momma-three, I don’t agree with your generalization at all. There are many private schools that are not well known that can give a child an excellent education. A good match between some students and schools can really optimize the processs. The problem is that the cost of some of these options are just getting so high that more families are finding that they cannot afford it. </p>
<p>I would love, love, love to be able to pay for my son to go anywhere he wants without looking at costs. And I probably could, if I made it the family’s top priority. But as it stands, he is only one of a number of issues we have to consider. Should we sell our house, move into something a lot cheaper, smaller and in a different area, get rid of a lot of our things so that he can got a $60K per year college for the next 4 years? Should we cash in what is left of our retirement money to give him this? Should we borrow that amount when we know it won’t work in the budget as is and would have to come from retirement money or sale of the house or something not yet defined to pay back such loans? We are talking about the expenditure of a quarter million dollars. More than we paid for our last house that we committed 30 years to pay off as our main expense and that benefited ALL of the family every single day. </p>
<p>I would also love, love, love a brand new car. I wish you all could see the junker I’m driving right now. And yeah, I could buy a new one, but something else has to go.</p>
<p>
The <em>only</em> area FAFSA accounts for location is in the credit they allot for state income taxes. There is <em>nothing</em> that accounts for cost of living.</p>
<p>
I reject the contention that living in anything nicer than a tent is a luxury, or that anything better than a 15 year old car with 200,000 miles is a luxury.</p>
<p>In my state, the cost of housing is almost directly correlated with the quality of the schools. And I have 26 years of other schooling to consider for my kids. I have to think about the health and safety of my family. I have the quality of life of the other members of my family who aren’t going to school to consider. I have two people’s retirement to fund, with no pensions and a shaky SS system. There’s a lot more to life than just college.</p>
<p>At current rates of increase, in two or three years, privates will hit $60K/year. Three or four years after that, $70K. Three years after that, $80K. How much are you willing to sacrifice your quality of life so that you can turn your life savings over to a college?</p>
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This didn’t used to be true. But then college costs started spiraling out of control, and somehow we were given this bill of goods that paying for college is a lifetime commitment, and like the suckers we are, we bought it. People are waking up to this, it seems, and voting with their wallets.</p>
<p>So yeah, you can say “everything is a choice”. My family made our choice - full pay is off the table.</p>
<p>
Pretty nice for you, but when my kids were born I don’t think my total income was much above the $40-45K you are saving every year. We haven’t had 15 years of high income like that to save at those levels. If someone was at that income level for 15 or 20 years you’d have a much stronger case for arguing they are “rich” enough to be able to afford full pay, but for me (and I suspect most people) we haven’t had that income the entire time.</p>
<p>The financial aid calculators do not take COL differences into consideration other than in nominal amounts as mentioned above. If you can find a job making $100K a year in Podunk where the median family income hovers at poverty level, you are a heck of a lot wealthier in terms of money than living near NYC with that income. FAFSA isn’t going to qualify you for any grants at that level anyways, just some subisidization of loans, So it is going to be tougher for the NYC family who is trying to live the same standard of living as his peer in a less expensive area to come up with college money. </p>
<p>The other thing that is a big issue is that the calculators do not take into account prior income history. A family who struggled for many years and finally found a good paying job and mom went back to work is not going to have the savings that a family who has been at that level for years. It also doesn’t take into account prior years’ misfortunes. I know one family who had a child who was ventilator dependent and had a host of special needs that really drained family resources including the ability for both parents to work. Though the child had died a few years before the college process of the siblings, that was a crucial issue in that family’s inability to save much for their other kids’ education or for much of anything. Too bad in terms of financial aid for college. Current income is the biggest indicator to any calculator on what you should be paying. </p>
<p>So the process is not fair, and there are some cases like the one above that do touch me terribly. </p>
<p>In this country, most kids have some public college, satellite branch, maybe, but some opportunity to take inexpensive college courses. Inexpensive enough so that they can be taken by borrowing Stafford money to pay the tuition, fees, books costs and if the student continues to live at home as he did in high school, it isn’t going to cost the parents much. That option is pretty much universally available… And for the poorest of our families, that cost is even pretty much completely covered by PELL so those kids do not have to borrow the money.</p>
<p>Any frills to that basic local college is the family’s responsibility. Just as the cost of any private options for high school outside of your local public school are on you. </p>
<p>It gets me how parents who are so pro public school and vocal about it, are then griping about the cost of private college.</p>
<p>I have one friend whose child is basically looking into only very expensive schools. He is her oldest. She is about the only one who isn’t cost conscience and it may very well be that they have enough money saved up. They did buy their home at least 16 years ago so at a much lower price. BUt other families are making major changes- encouraging military (either academies or ROTC), starting out in cc and then transferring (very popular), sending to state schools, and some are more adventurous and have kids apply to colleges that have good merit aid. I know one other family which is paying for a kid full ride at a private university but they also had him in a private school- the difference in cost was about double but again, they have owned their house for a very long time. So yes, private colleges will have to respond and many, many have already done so. I have no idea whether my d is just such an attractive candidate compared to my s (they had very similar scores and GPA) but she is getting more merit aid than he did. They did apply to only one school that is the same but overall, they applied to many similar type schools- top 100 schools.</p>
<p>By the way, the idea that people buy homes that are very expensive and median incomes don’t add up is common in many areas. I know when we lived in Florida, I kept wondering where all the people were getting money to buy 300K homes and up when median income was really quite low. I haven’t been back since we moved in late 2008 but I bet a number of those homes are in foreclosure. In other areas like here, the reality is that their is a sizable subset of people who drastically lower the median, These are people who don’t make much if anything and live in very overcrowded facilities. So if the median household income in our county is over 100K, in reality, in families like ours-two parents, only teens or older children, we are probably not doing well in comparison to that median.</p>
<p>cpt…I am sure there are. The school my daughter attends is not one of them. The school my best friends son attends in also not one of them and the schools that my daughters hometown friends are attending are not any of them. I am not impressed with our state system of education and the privates that are charging tippy top prices for a basically unknown school are priced too high. I don’t know what the answer is but I would not pay private school tuition for a no name private when state U’s are available…but than again our state U’s are not very impressive in regard to a receiving a good education. The work is so watered down that a really smart 9th grader could do it without a problem. I am dis heartened to say this.</p>
<p>I chuckle when I read “no name privates”. I have neighbors who consider Williams, Beloit, Lawrence, Reed no-name privates. Maybe because they don’t know anyone who went to those schools- or they’ve never seen a bumper sticker or football jersey? That hardly makes them no-name. Another friend who keeps insisting that Wash U is the same as GW-- as if DC and St Louis were just suburbs of each other?</p>
<p>Who knows. And you just can’t tell some people anything because they know it all.</p>
<p>This discussion is like the swallows at Capistrano. Every January we rant, every April some families feel good about the outcome (kid heading off to a school with appropriate academics at a cost they can afford with a little bit of pain) and some families either feel rotten, guilty, or both (Kid didn’t get into an option they can afford with that little bit of pain, or never applied to any options that would be academically appropriate and somewhat affordable.) And then we get the “told you so” crowd, whose kids get full rides, or have so many AP Credits that they’ve got sophomore standing plus significant merit aid, etc.</p>
<p>As an old and wizened CC’er, all I can advise is that paying for college needs to be a collaboration between parents and child; most behavioral research indicates that people don’t value things which don’t cost them much (hence the pricing strategies of many products and services); no college, even the cheapest, expects parents to be able to pay tuition out of current income (i.e. it requires past income/savings, plus current income, plus future income in many cases/loans).</p>
<p>I will also throw in my two cents after watching many of my friends kids crash and burn at college this year (if you think paying for a college where your kid is successful is painful, try paying for a college where your kid is asked politely not to return, or asked not so politely to take a leave of absence, and there are either no transferable credits or very minimal…)-- not every kid at 18 or 19 is ready for college. Whether the college is free, affordable, or expensive, not every kid is going to take advantage of the education, and not every kid can handle the freedom and endless opportunities.</p>
<p>So there’s no shame in taking a gimlet eyed look at your high school senior and sitting him/her down to talk about “next steps”. If your kid can’t get excited about any college, or kid’s HS performance suggests that he/she will need a full time “wrangler/handholder” to get through the semester, or the only colleges your kid gets excited about are the ones you can’t afford or he/she can’t get accepted to— maybe this calls for some creativity about next year.</p>
<p>Every flagship state school I have researched has some outstanding programs. It is impossible to make a statement that encompasses a whole university that are the size of such schools. Sometimes you have to find a program that is very good at a college when the particular one you want is not up to snuff in a big way.</p>
<p>I am guilty of generalizing the public U’s as big, impersonal schools—yeah, check my back posts, I plead guilty. And I do stand by the GENERAL sentiment, but that is not always true. One of my kids graduated from the largest SUNY, and he could not have gotten more personal attention than he got there. His program accepted only 10 kids, and the department clucked over them all 4 years. A whole different experience than if he were a psychology, political science, or philosphy major there–so many kids graduating with those majors that the “p” took up most of the pages of the graduation program where the graduates were listed by department. Also, the maths and science offerings there were quite impressive. I looked at the books at the book store that were being used by those departments and talked to some students majoring in those disciplines. Nothing to put ones nose up, I guarantee you. So I find it difficult to believe that a flag ship state school anywhere is not teaching college level worki adequately in every area or even in most areas.</p>
<p>There is big difference, IMO, between “the” flagship state school (whose average enrolling students have, for eg, 3.5 GPAs and 1950 SATs), and “a” state school (perhaps tier 2 or 3) that happens to be part of the state school system. A state school and THE state school are vastly different animals.</p>
<p>Many state flagship Us are highly regarded and offer excellent educations to students, and attract many top students. That is quite different from other schools that happen to be part of that same state U system, but may, for example, be a largely commuter school, have a student body half of whose admitting GPAs were below 3.0 and whose average SAT scores are, say, 1500. I would not expect the same level of education at school B as school A. The lower tier school may provide a vastly disappointing education to the parent or student who is expecting the caliber of a top tier school.</p>
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<p>Can those kids be characterized, so parents with younger ones can pay attention to?</p>
<p>Agree with CPT. Your kid can be majoring in “leisure studies” or applied math at the same university. If Boeing and Merck are hiring entry level statisticians from the math department, and another group heads off to grad school at Berkeley, Chicago or MIT, then I don’t think you need to worry about the academic chops of that schools math department.</p>
<p>All over America there are kids trying to get a BA taking the easiest courses with the least amount of reading and majoring in a department with the fewest number of requirements. If that’s your kid- nothing wrong with it, but I wouldn’t blame the financial aid system for the fact that your child is not taking advantage of a university education.</p>
<p>cpt…The level of teaching is not nearly worth the time invested or the money that most parents are spending. That is my opinion of course and some will say that my view is unrealistic because I have three other kids in very selective schools. I could assure you that text books aside some may be used at upper level schools the level of the work is NOTHING in comparison. The privates that you have mentioned are well known among those who know about educational institutions. I am not speaking of those schools I am speaking about the schools that are charging $45.000 and $50,000 a year for a private education so the kid could be around upper middle class or upper class kids when the average SAT score is nothing more than the national average. These are the schools that are a stealing money in my opinion. I have visited many along the way and for the most part the parents that can’t afford those top LACS or Ivy’s, or top publics that are known to be Ivy like, than the best bet is to send your kid to a state school, but just don’t have any illusion that the education they are getting is great. After this winter break meeting several kids from state and unknown privates I feel sorry for those parents buying into the idea that a state school or a private is better than it really is. Now I could really laugh when people say they turned down an Ivy or top school because their kid could get just as good an education at state U or private X. If the difference isn’t going to kill you send your very smart and talented kid to the best school they could get into because anything short of that is short changing the talented kid.</p>
<p>momma-three- I can not believe that your child is at a state flagship or even a well-regarded state directional U. I believe you live in the northeast and if you are going to belittle state universities, perhaps you should share more about your personal experience. I gather we are not talking about Penn State or TCNJ. Are we talking about Cheney State, West Chester (actually well-regarded), Temple or something in NJ or NY?<br>
Do tell.
I do agree that many of the highly selective colleges DO provide great educations. They darn well better! Both my kids went to private universities but my niece went to Penn STate for engineering and appears to have gotten a fine education. My nephew is at TCNJ and has had to work quite hard there. I suspect you aren’t on the same playing field with your comments???</p>
<p>Momma-three, it’s hard to agree or disagree without knowing which schools or knowing what you mean by “if the difference isn’t going to kill you”. I have friends who won’t let their kid apply to private U’s because they don’t qualify for aid but won’t temper their lifestyle one iota (summer house, 17 year old got a car for his birthday, etc.) Their kid is at a low-end State school and commuting and they insist they can’t afford private college “like the rest of you”. Well sure- if I owned a lexus and had a summer place, I couldn’t have paid tuition either.</p>
<p>Even so- kid seems to be working his tail off and getting an adequate education, although nobody would confuse this school with U Michigan or Berkeley.</p>
<p>So I don’t mean to be argumentative- and I probably would agree with you if I had the facts- but since I don’t, there are plenty of talented kids getting a fine education at “no name” schools. And plenty of parents getting fleeced by paying tuition at schools which are lovely country clubs with fancy cars in the student parking lot, with a library or lab thrown in to impress the neighbors.</p>