@arkimom - I will pile on with having your daughter retake the SAT. If she can get that up to over 2100, she has a real shot at great merit from a lot of schools, and then she could also legitimately apply to Vassar even and see what could happen there. You DO have a decent income, but Vassar does give really good aid too.
I liked the Brandeis campus a lot too, Blossom. And I liked the way they presented themselves as well. They seemed more serious about their academics than most schools. But I’m not the one going to college! I thought it was funny because I think Tufts and Brandeis have a lot in common.
Of course, in the absence of financial aid, and a purely private education market, people from poor families will have to acquire much more debt than they do now. Perhaps if your goal is to block people from education by family lack of wealth, that may be effective, but society as a whole loses when many people are unable to make the best use of their abilities through education.
Reality is that most such people won’t go to college at all, so their lifetime of added economic contributions will be lost to society.
@awcntdb, I agree with you in aggregate. But there are fundamental issues I would be interested in hearing from you on.
The first is the fact that your argument is in aggregate. There is no proof that the rich 50% of students succeed and graduate, and the poor people, who “should never have been subsidized,” fail and provide a drag on society. This may be because the students are not using their own money. students are using either family or government money, and to them, personally, there is a surreal nature to it. While it may be true that there is a net drag to society- I think it is almost certainly true- not subsidizing would further solidify class stratification and lead to other inefficiencies in the market due to the suppression of the destabilizing forces. For example, anti-trust types of cartels could start to form and there would be robber-baron deal-making.
The second is your contention of an obvious “truth”:
I found that some technicians where I worked were much better off quitting and taking loans to pay for an engineering degree, than they were working and saving. Simply put, the disposable income rises non-linearly with income, and income differences between “blue collar” and “white collar” positions are quantum leaps. I could never convince an accountant to take the leap- even with the spreadsheets it was too risky for him, so he never increased his capability to finance manager/controller, and continued getting his incremental-over-inflation raises. The fact is that it sometimes is better to take a loan to get to a higher income more rapidly. Taking 6 years while earning minimum wage and reducing your school performance is NOT superior to 4 years with loans, a top GPA, and a triple-minimum-wage starting salary. The debt will accelerate your path to higher earning potential. If it does not have that potential, then it is not worth it.
Some schools have barriers that are so high that poor people could never surmount them. Wall street hires wonks right out of certain high-tuition schools and pays $120K to start. You simply cannot get that job without that education. There are many examples where it makes sense to invest in an education. To say that it NEVER makes sense to take out a loan is simply counter to proven fact.
I see where the overall system efficiency would be improved in the short term. I do believe we must live with a certain inefficiency in order to not have the opposite problems caused by a ruling class.
I am interested in how you see this.
FYI Binghamton doesn’t really give merit scholarships.
I am not sure what to say to you because you are so blinded by this perceived rich-poor ideological war that you completely ignore the 50% of poor people harmed by this process, i.e., people who would not have been harmed if the program did not exist the way it does. Again, 50% of students who take loans fail to graduate without a degree. This is like taking a car loan and never getting the car, but pay for it anyway. That’s bad.
The salient question to ask is, “Before a liberalized student loan program, were there poor people going to college and graduating, and getting into the educated job market, while incurring little or no debt?” The answer is yes. They were all over the place going to community colleges, state universities, and colleges with cooperatives that also gave experience while in college. There was no shortage of poor people pursuing degrees. However, there was an appropriate shortage of poor people who did not have the wherewithal to be in college, and they were not there because there were no loans. That result was a good thing for them.
Those same non-college attending people went on to live comfortable lower middle to middle class lives if they did three things: 1) took a job after high school and started acquiring skills, any job was fine, 2) got married, and 3) did not have any kids before they were married. This simple three step equation applies even today. Today, the poverty rate of males and females who go these three things is in the single digits, with no government subsidies or education loans involved.
Are you seriously saying that people who do not go to college cannot be and are not productive members of society? No economic data supports this at all.
You are correct in that only 25% of students get a 4-year degree or higher, so obviously a good segment of the 75% non-college people are contributing to society both economically and otherwise.
But, what I view as just fundamentally wrong is to think that without going to college that people cannot economically contribute and their economic contributions are lost. They can contribute and they do every day.
All work that the market will pay for is vital to economy. More importantly though, all work done honestly and a fairly by an individual is respectful work and that individual should be respected. The plumber, bus driver, electrician, ditch digger, snow plow operator etc. are no less important than the doctor and lawyer. In fact, the argument could be made that they are more important in that because of them we get where we need to go and they make the trains run on time. I have never seen a collective group of doctors and lawyers accomplish that feat.
All work paid for is necessary and important, and I do think that you are way off the mark saying people are less than without a college degree. They are not less than; they are just more than in another area.
@ItsJustSchool - I see your questions. I have some business meetings to prepare for, but I will get to your questions.
Federal student loans first appeared in 1958. Before then, access to college was more limited for those from poor families, since there were far fewer low cost (to the student) state universities and community colleges. At the time, bachelor’s degree attainment was only about 10% of the population, often defined more by family finances rather than intellectual ability and motivation.
Are you suggesting that going back to the much more privatized college situation of 1957, where far fewer attended or graduated from college, and attendance and graduation were even more strongly tied to family wealth than now, is desirable?
No such claim at all. However, many of them would be more productive after a college education, than with just a high school education. Remember that many of the good non-bachelor’s degree jobs do require some post-high-school education.
Just ran the NPC for Family of 5, 1 in college (student), income 150k, family own house but have no other real estate, no investments except for retirement. Result: EFC is $9,300 at Hamilton. In addition to famil contribution, student would have to take the subsidized loan and a work study but everything else would be covered by a grant.
SUNYs are another great way to go. 
Wrt to subsidized vs. unsubsidized college in relation to tuition costs:
most countries in Europe and other developed countries subsidize students and college studies; many also have tuition-free college. Subsidizing college thus does not correlate with tuition costs.
(Unless you want to argue that Americans are a peculiar species with a totally unique economic system that works like nowhere else.)
The British government recently decided to triple tuition costs to make students “more responsible” (skin in the game, sort of). The result? Opposite of what was hoped.
This part of the discussion is OT though, and kind of hijacking the thread.
Did the OP ever come back?
@ MYO That Hamilton EFC sounded really low to me, so I ran it myself using the criteria you mentioned, and it came up with an EFC of over $30K. Could you have dropped a digit?
@rrobb
I ran the numbers too back when that info was posted. I was thinking awesome! But when I ran the numbers with a family of 8, our EFC was still over $30,000. @myos1634 must have input something incorrectly.
Yes, I must have input something wrong evidently! I’ll try again and document it…;