Do elite colleges admit unsuccessful or unmotivated students? If not, they didn’t create these traits in their graduates. They may help develop them, but so can lots of other colleges.
When the articles say colleges are “worth every penny” are they referring only to families who have a spare ~$240k per kid sitting around that they can pay out-of-pocket or are they including the families who would have to borrow ~$100k or more per kid? Worth paying for and worth borrowing for are two different things. I think that highly motivated and successful students will do well wherever they land.
It’s interesting that Haverford would be on the list and not the others in the consortium–Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore. Swarthmore has engineering too. Bryn Mawr and Haverford practically share a campus. I have no answer for why Haverford and not Swarthmore, but probs Bryn Mawr didn’t make the list because the graduates tend to go on to careers with slower salary starts–grad school for several years, social justice careers, that sort of thing. What are Haverford grads doing during the first 5 years that the others aren’t? That might be the more interesting question.
For the most selective/prestigious private colleges, the average debt at graduation tends to be relatively low. I doubt many families borrow as much as ~$100K per kid for them.
Some studies have tried to measure the financial returns from attending a more selective/prestigious college. Krueger and Dale for example found no significant earnings benefit. If I’m not mistaken, they did not even consider the initial net cost differences.
This measure is just as broken as calculating ROI. For a family who sacrificed vacations, gadgets, family time due to work commitments, time for graduate degrees, the ROI is dismal as compared to a family who kept assets/salary low by spending and not working as hard. This list tells us that a school with a higher percentage of legacy attendees (likely the reason Harvard, Penn, etc. do not appear) is not worth the same tuition as its peers. Working hard and staying married are not rewarded or advisable. Can an accurate ROI calculation include education expenses that range from $0 to $280,000? How has educating our children increased by 600% in one generation?
When one student pays nothing except their work study spending money and a portion of their summer job salary and their classmate’s parents are required to pay in full even though it is a financial burden, average cost of attendance is not an accurate measure of anything. These most selective/prestigious private colleges meet a families ‘full need’. Therefore, the hard working parents forward thinking/planning without trust funds, pensions or huge retirement savings are the ones who suffer.
I understand college is expensive, particularly for the middle & upper middle classes, @klsd, but do you really think that are families who say “quit your job and take a second mortgage and spend it” so that in a few years their children MIGHT get more financial aid from a college they MIGHT get accepted to?
As for staying married, I thought divorced family kids got the worst of it, fin aid wise?
My issue with ROI is that finances are not the only valid way to gauge R but the only way they are ever measured.
The Dale and Krueger study has flaws, as pointed out before in many threads. If you want to prove that the USNWR rankings don’t predict future earnings, then you need to include that as your measure of school quality and not school average SAT score. A well designed study needs to include more than 3 public universities. It’s questionable whether their central finding that the best predictor of future income was the highest average sat of any school that a student applied to, would hold today given the internet and Common App make it easier to apply to lots of schools, including reaches.
True. ROI researchers such as Krueger and Dale focus on the financial returns. Earnings are relatively easy to measure and many people care about them.
Other outcomes are measurable, though. Forbes considers the alumni listings in Who’s Who. In my opinion, alumni PhD completions per capita are a better academic indicator than financial earnings. PhD completions more closely reflect the quality of college instruction. However, most alumni don’t care to pursue them.
I didn’t read the article, but looked through the list @hhjjlala kindly compiled. This is probably the worst argument I’ve heard. Salaries from the NMSU (New Mexico State) School of Engineering with low in state and out of state tuition are either equal or even higher in some cases than MIT or any school on that list. And that’s just one example.
Interesting that no international schools are included. My daughter had a choice between a SLAC (for a total about a cool 1/4 million$) and Cambridge U (for a total of $80K). Guess which one she chose?
@alcibiade Did she get scholarships from Cambridge? Cost of tuition (for non-EU) + living expenses is about $40K/year (though granted that’s still cheaper than many LAC privates, except that the final COA is often much less than the sticker price)
Cambridge tuition at GBP 9k. A great school at a great value–that’s always where the real ROI is. Just another example of a discussion thread on CC that is way better at getting to the truth than the mainstream journalists are.