<p>Last year, I chatted with my friend on the phone. Her kids graduated from college a few years ago, one went to UPenn coasted her $180,000, one went to UCLA costed her about half of that, both full pay.</p>
<p>I got off the phone and saw my son working on his college app. I asked him if he has a choice of UPenn and UCLA and I told him that I would give him the cost difference, which one would he choose. He immediately said UCLA and started talking about what he would do with $100,000 with buying a house being the first possibility.</p>
Remember it is a 2009 list? 2010 is different, the schools may leap frog on their costs. One year it is Harvard, the other year maybe Chicago and so on, they are all expensive.</p>
<p>No, it really doesn’t matter whether it is $55K or $57K anymore. When I bulk at that $2,220/year Student Insurance cost, my wife said,“why bother? In the grand scheme, $2K has very little impact, our move in cost is way over $2K and we did just stay in a hostel on campus”… There is an old saying, “When you catch too many lice in you hair, you do not feel the iching any more.” I nevertheless did spend hours to call around to find a waiver for the $2,220/year Student Insurance Plan.^^</p>
<p>I agree that we should group the colleges into different categories and not to count every penny in published literature and try to rank them some way. For all private schools, I would only separate them in to two groups: those over 60K/year and under 60K/year, in “Total Cost”. Compare them in tuition and fees are not practical by all means.</p>
<p>Just one more of those “life” decisions where you have to define your own pain threshold and what the value is to you. In our case times three. I have absolutely no problem with a magazine doing a story on the most costly colleges. That at least is a fact based assessment. Colleges can’t “hide” their cost. I get a kick out of it because it’s alittle bit like housing costs. When they do those shows that show you what $250,000 gets you in various cities it does give you pause.</p>
<p>The list is sticker price, not actual price. And for the parent who are sore about having to pay full sticker price to fund financial aid for others, I’m sure the students living on financial aid would would love to trade places with your S or D and grow up in a family that doesn’t need financial aid to send their children to school.</p>
<p>On the Top Middle of the web page, right next to the SAP advertising logo, there are two arrow icons, one is previous, the other next. If you click on the previous it will roll to the #2 school - Columbia and so on.</p>
<p>artlovers,
The Forbes article uses the data from the 2009 Campus Grotto article. Why are you trying so hard to be the most expensive school? U of C is expensive, but not the most expensive. Let it go.</p>
<p>Artlovers, most schools raised their fees by 3-4% this year. The movement on the list is miniscule. And who (besides you, I guess) really cares what spot their school is on this absurd list? Try as you might, you are not going to be #1 on the most expensive college list this year. You should be happy. Sheesh. And as for this
Too funny. You sure are trying awfully hard to set your personal oop costs apart from everyone elses. If thats what is important for you, well, ok then.</p>
<p>By the way, did you read THIS, artlovers?
CollegeGrotto hasn’t yet published a 2010 list. They used the 2009 CollegeGrotto article. Your apology is accepted.</p>
<p>That Forbes ranking of best colleges is laughable at best. The second most important thing in their ranking is ratings from RateMyProfessor.com. What the heck? My university doesn’t even use that site- we mostly post on our own version of it. The only people that do are those who are completely out of the loop on campus.</p>
<p>It’s quite difficult to trust anything Forbes says about colleges. Whether it be cost, excellence, or otherwise.</p>
<p>Face it, the $60,000 barrier has been smashed. With inflation, the quarter-million dollar undergrad degree is here.</p>
<p>Add 3 years at the most expensive law schools, (NYU, Berkeley, and Columbia now top $70,000), and you’re up to $500,000 before the first Brooks Brothers suit is bought.</p>
<p>There’s a 5 year difference between D1 and D2. The difference in the tuition/room & board/fees amounted to an average of $10,000 per year. Thank goodness we only had 2 kids…</p>
<p>What I would like is to see the statistical correlation between the administrator to faculty ratio and the rankings by cost. Also, the statistical correlation between the administrator to student ratio and the rankings by cost. Just for fun, it would also be nice to see the correlation between the salary of the football coach and the tuition rankings. Just saying . .</p>