<p>I personally know three coworkers working on selling their houses.</p>
<p>One is selling it because he is single and doesn’t need a four-bedroom house with its attendant property taxes. Another is selling because he doesn’t need two expensive residences (he lives in one part of the country half the year and another the other half and renting in one part would be far cheaper), and another because he’s getting divorced (3 kids involved). There can sometimes be additional reasons for selling a house other than financial extraction.</p>
<p>I have spent the better part of 1/2 hour scanning through this thread. The nasty responses amaze me. Why do people look at a “gross” income and automatically judge someone’s ability to pay for college? Don’t you realize that $250 per year in the DC area is like making $75in Tulsa? The biggest thing that the FAFSA doesn’t consider is a factor for cost of living based on area.</p>
<p>Now, i’m sure many people on this board will say that they only make 20% of $250k. Do you live in an area where you can’t purchase a home for under $750k? </p>
<p>I didn’t think so. Do you think these people have “choices”? Find them a job in Oklahoma (just picking on OK) making $250 per year and then you can call them wealthy.</p>
<p>Best solution is to make a public college education affordable for everyone… same price for everyone…admission and scholarship based on academics and activities. Some will need to take out loans in order to pay but so what, they will be just as prepared as anyone else to get a good job and pay once they graduate.</p>
<p>There is not a single state in the nation where you cannot find a home under 750k. If you can’t move your job, you can commute a little bit. Trust me, there is a house within a 1-hr commute radius of your job that is affordable. You don’t HAVE to buy a house way outside of your means, you CHOOSE to.</p>
<p>Roman – maybe an exageration, but where I live its hard to find a family sized place under an hour commute in a good school district for under 500K. Where my mom lives its more like 200. Trust me – many people dont have a lot of choices.</p>
<p>I didn’t say the choices were ideal, I said they were available. They may require a little bit of sacrifice in some area, but it’s better than living way outside of your means and having huge amounts of debt.</p>
<p>Our family is taking out $20,000 (Perkins, Stafford and Parent Plus) in loans for Northwestern this year and our AGI is about $85,000. That’s about 23% of my AGI. A person with a AGI of $250,000 will have to pay the full ride at $52,500 or about 21% of their AGI. And I live in Central New Jersey with the highest property taxes and car insurance in the nation. The cost of a college education is hard on all of us.</p>
<p>I stopped reading at one of cptofthehouse’s posts. Here’s a thought: </p>
<p>Let’s say Family A has a 100K income and works 100 hours a week. They cut all the money spent on “quality of life” things (like music/sports enrichment programs for the kids) and live a lifestyle of a 50K income. All of that money saved goes to pay the EFC that the family is supposedly able to afford.</p>
<p>Family B has a 50K income and works 50 hours a week. They live the identical 50K lifestyle that Family A is living (except that Family A is saving 50K a year to pay for the kids’ colleges). Family B kids get full rides to Ivies.</p>
<p>What’s the difference between Family A and B? Family A doesn’t enjoy country clubs, private high schools, or even music lessons. Both families live on 50K a year, but Family A has to squirrel away another 50K to pay for tuition while Family B gets free tuition. </p>
<p>If I’m Family A, what incentive do I have to keep working 100 hours a week to save for my kids’ college tuition, when I can work 50 hours, live the exact same lifestyle, and not have to pay a dime for college?</p>
<p>^ I can almost guess what some people will say to that: move elsewhere!</p>
<p>Upon reading more of this thread, I saw this post where someone’s wife considered not working while the kids were in college because she would stand to pocket less than 10% of income after taxes and EFC. I think it’s ridiculous that families are being forced into such situations where they are better off if one parent stops working!</p>
<p>If everyone in the 100K-250K range starts to make the difficult but financially sensible choice of turning down top private colleges for state schools with merit aid, the top privates will be left with only the students at both far ends of the spectrum. I’m not sure there are enough wealthy to subsidize the revenue lost from the departure of the middle class. What are they going to do then? Raise EFC to 100K on those who are deemed able to afford it?</p>
<p>Hey, for all we know, the middle class will become such a rare commodity at top privates that they’ll give out a whole slew of grants then.</p>
<p>Sheep – so what do say to my Ds friends’ widowed mother who is working two jobs? How is she supposed to sell her condo and get a new job? Her main job she is a tenured teacher with 20+ years on the job. </p>
<p>The very top privates will at least provide for teacher’s kids. </p>
<p>It is eery - the private chat group for parents at my Ds schools has some parents coming a day early because they are letting the kid bring their own horse, and others can barely afford books. Talk about a two class society.</p>
<p>Several decades ago the middle class for the most part did not attend private schools because of the cost. I believe what has changed is people’s perception of what “middle class” is. $250,000 is in the top 2 -4% of income spectrum, yet shruggingsheep is lumping that income level into the “middle class” and not to pick on shurggingsheep because there are dozens of posts similar. Secondly, several decades ago kids went to school closer to their homes where there is more parity between “cost of living” to the college’s region. Look at the difference in college costs between areas of the country. The east supposedly has a high cost of living and the colleges charge more for the same education one can receive in the midwest or the south for less money where the cost of living is slightly lower. Thirdly, all that occurred as families became double income was that they adjusted their lifestyles upward. Frankly, daycare costs, the tax implications, the double cars, etc. to sustain 2 earner families proably stripped quite abit out of the “income” boost that second income actually brought in, but lifestyles adjusted upward to accomodate that and very little of that second salary actually got saved. Lastly, decades ago very few students travelled out of their areas to attend school. Those that did were quite frequently from wealthy families who also sent those same kids to boarding schools in the same region. “We” have come to think that it is essential for our kids to go to college with kids from all over the country and all walks of life. If that is indeed a necessity as opposed to a perk to education then these cost of living differences become illuminated “upward” or “downward” as we ship the kids from region to region. People make choices all through life about a myriad of things, the college we send our kids to is just one more choice.</p>
<p>ShruggingSheep, there’s often much more merit money to be found at the privates than at the publics. A student from a family with income up to $180-200k will not pay more than 10% of that total family income for Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. That’s not merit aid, but it makes the COA for those schools less than many in-state publics. Step outside of the Ivy League, and there are many many private schools that offer lots of merit aid. </p>
<p>Your A and B families are only considering schools which meet full need AND which have a no loans policy. There aren’t a lot of schools that fit that description. It’s much more likely that the kids will be admitted to schools which will either offer a package containing a lot of loans, or will only offer a limited amount of aid, even with loans figured in. The kids from Family A can then afford to go to college, while the kids from Family B are out of luck. They’ll either need to take on back-breaking debt, or they’ll need to find lower-cost options. The incentive for Family A to work hard and earn more money (not that work effort always correlates with money earned) is that they can be sure their kids will be able to afford to go to college. No such assurance for Family B.</p>
<p>Shrugging Sheep: I guess my confusion is, for how many years do you expect family A to live on half their income? It almost sounds like you think they’re going to do that for 4 years – while the student is in school. So, did they suddenly have an increase in income during the college years? Probably not. What about their income for the first 18 years of that kid’s life? Where did it go? I’m sure they weren’t making 100K the whole time, but they didn’t go from 10K to 100K in a year, either. </p>
<p>People think it’s entirely reasonable to make a 30 year commitment to a mortgage. And not so long ago, the expectation was that you’d <em>live</em> in that house for 30 years, that you were making a choice to maybe crunch a little at the beginning, and be more able to afford the house as time went on, until when you retired, you’d have that house, and you wouldn’t be making payments, and you could retire with less overhead expenses. Hell, even a 15 year mortgage has some of the same commitment. </p>
<p>So, I guess my question is, if someone is willing to put years of income into paying for a house, why do they balk at similar planning for paying for an education? The very fact that the family has such an asset suggests that they’re capable of long range planning – or at least, it used to. Instead, we hear from people making 250K on this board, or worse yet, students of families that do – who say, “Given all of our cars and our home and our retirement assets, we have a high EFC and we have to pay 50K a year tuition! It’s terrible!” And again, those of us who have never had those advantages don’t see any merit in the argument that “it’s the terribly high cost of living!” I live in one of the single highest COL places in the country. 500K buys a small condo here, as others have said. But I live here, and so do the postman, the busboys, the waitresses, the small business owners, the bus drivers, the car repairman, the saleswoman at the bookstore. A high COL doesn’t mean that no one lives here but the superwealthy – it just means that a lot of us sacrifice home ownership. Or car ownership. Or private schools. Or whatever.</p>
<p>I was under the impression that our president stated that sub-250K people would not see tax increases. Does that not imply that the 250K and up crowd can “bear it”, while the sub-250K crowd cannot?</p>
<p>Going to school with “kids from all over the country and all walks of life” should give your kid a wider/more global perspective, which I’d argue is essential to be competitive in a world where the US may not be king for much longer.</p>
<p>SlitheyTove:</p>
<p>I believe the cutoff is 180K for those schools. It’s quite literally only a handful of schools that offer this. And once you get just above 180K (e.g. 210K) your costs go straight up to 25% of your pre-tax income. I’m not sure which top 25 privates offer merit aid to a great deal of middle class students. Any examples?</p>
<p>Let’s just say there are more top colleges that give free rides to sub-60K than those with the HYP style of “10% of 180K and under”. So Family B would in fact have a greater range of colleges to pick from than Family A.</p>
<p>**TrinSF:</p>
<p>So what you’re saying is that a family that makes more money should rightfully have to sacrifice the “home ownership or car ownership or private schools” so they can pay full freight for college, and be on exactly the same footing with a family that makes less money and got full rides?**</p>
<p>As a full-pay, my beef is not with the fact that I do pay, but with the cost of college. Yes, I know I had the choice to send my kid to cc and pay next to nothing, or send her to a lower-tier school on a full-ride merit scholarship, but she got into Harvard, and it didn’t seem right to deny her that opportunity when she had earned it.</p>
<p>I have trouble understanding how it can possibly cost $50k for my D to share a spartan room, eat for a 105-lb. frame, and attend classes 3-4 hours per day for 9 months. I just don’t get it. That is more than the average American family earns to support an entire family for a year. It boggles my mind every time I think about it.</p>
<p>You know, humor aside, what is the functioning difference between a SubZero and a Whirlpool fridge, between a $70,000 automobile and a $40,000 car. People just hate to equate the mystique of education to a product but really. No one yet has convinced me with any article or opinion in the several years posting here that there is a greater value in a $50,000 education over a $30,000 education. To ShruggingSheep I might have “bought” that argument (that 18 year olds from Wyoming would be different from an 18 year old from Ohio) fifty years ago, but these days with our digital age there’s not a whole lotta difference in the kids anymore. My sons roommates are from Virginia, Arkansas and Pennsylvania and with the acception of their “accents” they could have grown up down the street.</p>
<p>The process is not fair. THere are many niches where you do favorably. The biggest unfairness of all are kids whose parents are not interested in paying for their education and won’t cooperate whether they can afford it or not. Of course the standard of living is higher if they do have the money, but it won’t necessarily help with college costs. </p>
<p>However, anyone who makes $100K can certainly reduce his income by half if he really believes that he’s better off that way during his college years.</p>