<p>This could be true. Our problem was that every single college that my D considered was either private or OOS and cost approximately the same ($42K-48K), or was our instate UCLA or Cal at about $26K. She was admitted to, and seriously considered Cal, but her experience during her visit to Cal was tremendously different from Harvard and Yale, which she also considered. In the end, it seemed worth it to spend an extra $22K per year to go to Harvard over Cal, and we had her help pay for the difference with the unsubsidized Stafford loan.</p>
<p>If your wherewithal is such that Harvard is only $22,000 more than the state school, then it is an easy decision. Harvard all the way. Like the choice between a BMW and a Mercury for a millionaire. I can’t see how this is a choice at all.
As an aside, I’d figure it was darned easier for me to pony up some more bucks than it was for my daughter to get into Harvard in the first place. Kudos to her.</p>
<p>and then there are those of us who can’t afford that so if you lob a zero off your price range, then you’ll know what I paid for my last car (bought used 10 years ago)</p>
<p>I can say that if my income was 100K vs the 70K that it is in reality, I could certainly bank whatever the additional 30K meant in take home pay. Some people have their level of lifestyle increase as their income does, I never bought into that theory and though I never made more than 50K a year until age 40 (I’m 48 now), my lifestyle didn’t change as my income increased and I was able to save enough cash to pay my EFC out of savings. </p>
<p>I’m not in the full pay spot by a longshot when you look at the costs of my son’s school, but had he attended West Chester, I’d be close to it. So in MY case, the difference is paying 10K for a state school (plus stafford loans for my son), vs paying 12-15K for NYU (with stafford and perkins loans for my son)</p>
<p>Even us ‘lower’ EFC people have made choices and believe me, saving up 60K over the past 10 years or so was no easy task. </p>
<p>Had I been driving the 40K car, I could not have saved any money Long life my 1991 Honda Civic!</p>
<p>I personally know a lot of millionaires that sent their kids to state schools.
What I’ve found surprising I also know a number of parents that aren’t rich
that send their kids to ivies or other expensive schools. Of course I do know
some millionaires that send their kids to expensive schools too. These are
all self-made millionaires and a lot of them live a middle-class lifestyle to the
outside observer.</p>
<p>For Warren Buffett (worth around $40 billion I believe), the choice as an old Lincoln-Mercury town car. I don’t remember whether he bought it new or used but I think
that he sold it on Ebay several years ago and replaced it with a Cadillac. He’s probably
still driving the caddy.</p>
<p>One millionaire that I play tennis with drives around in a 1990s era Acura Integra.</p>
<p>A few others that I know aren’t going to pay for tuition for their kids - they will have to fund it for themselves.</p>
<p>My experiences with our aquaintances is similar to BC. I remember years ago when our family was with another family and the dad, a very weathly person, was explaining to his oldest daughter what the difference in $25,000 over time would mean. I think he would have gone either way had the daughter been able to give a credible rationale…but. …She went to the state flagship and has since graduated. We also have friends who don’t give it a thought. But there is a huge difference between people who can afford to make a decision and people who think they absolutely have to fork over the money for a very expensive school and really shouldn’t or can’t.</p>
<p>Perhaps because their kids weren’t good enough to get into the top private schools? </p>
<p>Some state schools are pretty darn good. I’d rather have my kid go to Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, or Virginia over the vast majority of private schools out there. The University of Virginia in particular seems to be riddled with trust fund kids.</p>
<p>I live in a state where people usually don’t show off their wealth and we had the recession in the 1980s where people learned to be frugal. A lot of these people have families where only one spouse works and these people usually have a choice of school districts and can pick the better ones. I also work with a lot of very, very smart people. Our building has generated a good number of patents and does world-class engineering. We are the top company in our industry and our financial numbers are very good in this difficult economy. I don’t know if these kids did or didn’t make it into top private schools but they would have had the advantages to do so. And that those less well-off had kids that did make it into top schools is an indicator to me that the kids of other parents could have. I think that it’s more of a choice on the parents part that they communicated to their kids while they were growing up.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>I agree. But that isn’t the most important point. There are a lot of wealthy parents
that got that way through understanding the meaning of value.</p>
<p>I spoke to a parent last year - the parent is incredibly smart, has a big house in an
excellent school district and has done a great job raising his kids. They’ve been on
extended trips all over the world. The kid has also had job experience. His father
told me that he’s going to go to a local two-year state university and then transfer
to the four-year state university. I was moderately surprised at hearing this as I
expected him to go to a four-year university away from home.</p>
<p>I think that a lot of parents that are self-made think that there is value in the struggle and that students need to find their own way. I think that this was true for me - there was value in the struggle which provided me with wisdom in later life. I’m paying for our kids, though, as I’m hoping that they learn those lessons from listening to what I tell them. Lessons are usually more potent when you learn them yourself but more efficient when you can learn from the mistakes of others.</p>
<p>Maybe in CC world, most kids can get accepted into an IS school of the caliber of Virginia, Mich, or Berkeley. There are many other parents either in states without a similiar caliber flagship U., or whose kdis cant get in there. The upper income people will pay full freight at a good school, the lower income will struggle.</p>
<p>I think the difference is between the haves and have nots is choice. The majority of schools out there do not meet 100% of need and most of the time the financial package is made up of some aid, some student loans and alot of parent loans. The difference is that the people with means will have the choice to attend that school or not because they can afford the school. The have nots do not have that choice - alot of them have to choose a different path - community college or lower tier state school - because there simply is no money to pay for the school.</p>
<p>Well, without impugning anybody’s motives, that seems to be a case of making virtue out of necessity. If money is truly a serious object, just go to a school that offers a full merit scholarship, which any top-performing high school student should be able to obtain. Granted, it may be at a low-tier school, but if you’ve done well in high school, you should be able to find a merit ride somewhere. That’s precisely what my brother did: he performed well enough in high school that he never paid a dime for college, instead, he got paid to go to college.</p>
<p>Now, granted, that option is available only if you do well in high school. But I would consider that to be the moral of the story - study harder in high school.</p>
<p>It’s not my son and he’s not someone that I would advise on child-rearing matters. He went to school in England and maybe he has a thing for public universities. At any rate, I have the feeling that this was all settled a long time ago.</p>
<p>The two-year university that he will be going to is very good for what it does.</p>
<p>I find that many wealthy people are quirky and nothing like the stereotypes portrayed in movies and on television. I think that The Millionaire Next Door provides for a better depiction.</p>
<p>Re: “There’s no such thing as scholarships for mortgages.” </p>
<p>Oh, but there are! There are programs like Habitat for Humanity, HUD low-income home buying assistance. Even at the middle income levels, there are programs to assist people in buying homes. As an example, the town where I live has a Downpayment Assistance Loan (DAL) program. All of those things are based on income levels and are in some ways analogous to need-based educational aid. Even things like VA loans are basically a form of financial aid for mortgages.</p>
<p>Those programs had nothing to do with the mortgage meltdown. Most of those programs have extensive pre-qualification requirements for the buyers. I was in the housing business and the reason there was a meltdown was because of many reasons. Massive overbuilding and people living way beyond their means. Many of the buyers of the homes we were putting up (400-700K) were taking out 90 - 100% financing, interest only financing and a few even took out those 40 year loans. All of these were upper middle income people were trying to keep up with the jones’s and I know a few have them had to sell their homes (now at a loss) when someone lost a job and at least two went bankrupt. The other reason was because of the sale and packaging of junk mortgages. These financial institutions would package loans that were all risky and because of fancy accounting - they could bundle them and make them look like good loans and banks and other institutions would buy these loans and then when the economy went bad and the housing market crashed so did all these loans. </p>
<p>It had nothing to do with the programs out there to help lower income families.</p>
<p>There were assistance programs out there that essentially increased the price of the house and then provided the amount over to charities to provide down payments for those that couldn’t come up with the down payments.</p>
<p>Did you read about Habitat for Humanity Homoaners that sold their homes for cash to live a nicer lifestyle?</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>When you have a low-income family and they lose their job, what happens to the home?</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Rubbish. I’ve read so many stories about people with low incomes buying houses at 6 to 10 times their income. Read through a few years of the housing bubble blog.</p>
<p>BTW, where are those 100% free ride home programs for the rich?</p>
<p>So what happens to a home when the main income earner for an upper class family looses their job?? You come off as if all the problems in this economy stem from lower income families. No - it was a wealthy Bernie Maddock that bascially screwed millions of people out of Billions of dollars and three are many more like him. There are many factors for the crash of housing and the economy.</p>
<p>BTW - other than Habitat for Humanity that may build a few hundred homes a year - what free ride programs are you talking about. Even programs for the VA and lower income families are not free. They might get a better rate on a mortgage or a slightly reduced price on a home, but what is the free ride?</p>
<p>I know of many upper middle income people living way beyong their means. And I don’t have to read through a blog - I was in the business and saw what happened.</p>
<p>So, what were those free ride home programs again?</p>
<p>Read what I wrote again. Those programs CONTRIBUTED to the housing crash.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Read the context of the thread. Scholarships for houses.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>We on the blog saw it two years before the peak and which was three years before
the crash. And most of us took action to avoid the crash. Some shorted the housing
stocks, banks and mortgage companies. Many sold their homes and rented.</p>
<p>The general consensus is that those in the business didn’t have a clue and were just
concerned with keeping the money rolling in. The blog is very unkind to your profession.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>You said that there were scholarships for homes. Where are they? I made no such assertion.</p>
<p>In my neighborhood of single-family homes, which I would say is definitely middle-class (and not on the upper end of that, at all), the houses that now stand empty are ones that were purchased by large “families,” ones with many adults in residence. Houses here have three or four bedrooms, sometimes five if the basement family room has been carved up to make bedrooms, and there could easily be eight or more adults living in each home. These families are immigrants, many of them recent (given the lack of English skills evident), and when these families first started buying in my neighborhood, houses were just below or at the $500K mark. </p>
<p>I’d wondered how they could afford to buy them – I know now, of course! – since I certainly couldn’t fathom buying into my neighborhood at those prices. Of course, having many working adults contributing helped… for a time. But the house behind me stood empty for a while and is now occupied by renters, the house two doors down stands empty and is in foreclosure, the house next to it isn’t empty yet but is also in foreclosure, and so on. </p>
<p>I think there was a great deal of predatory lending going on in the Hispanic community in this area. I cannot speak to what might have happened in other immigrant communities, but in my neighborhood, all of the houses around me that are in or have gone through foreclosure were occupied by collections of Hispanic adults, some with children. </p>
<p>That is not to say that all of my Hispanic neighbors are such homeowners with houses titled in numerous names with “et al” at the end; that is certainly NOT the case. But there was definitely an influx of immigrants with low to no English skills buying homes together.</p>
<p>Upper middle income people may certainly live way beyond their means, but they are not the only ones who do or have done so. A lot of lower-income people were shown how they, too, could grab a piece of the booming real estate market for themselves, if only they could reach <em>just</em> a little farther.</p>
<p>I was in the business of building homes - not providing mortgages. If someone came in with an approved mortgage, I had to sell the house to them or I could be sued. The mortgage brokers were very predatory - absolutely. They lied and cheated and pocketed a ton of money.</p>
<p>I know that you said contributed - but you put forth the same argument over and over and never say who else might have contributed to the crash. </p>
<p>Did I mention the word scholarship? I don’t think so.</p>
<p>And the thread started with a person with a AGI of 450K looking to find out if they would qualify for any aid.</p>
Long life my 1991 Honda Civic!</p>