<p>^^ Perhaps 8 months, when one factors in breaks/holidays. My mother always jokes about how school year seems to be shorter, but the pricing keeps increasing! She is comparing what my school year was vs. our son’s school year (I believe that I ended school in mid to late May and my son ended his semester at the very end of April).</p>
<p>Bates financials are on the web.</p>
<p>Twisting the topic a bit, one of my favorite dilbert cartoons appeared not too long ago. Partially applicable. </p>
<p>[Dilbert</a> comic strip for 09/01/2011 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.](<a href=“http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-09-01/]Dilbert”>http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-09-01/)</p>
<p>Most of my D’s Merit awards that covered her full tuition+ were private endowments (about 8 of them), the other 2 were from our state, not her UG. If fact, I do not think that she had any from her college, except as an upper classmen, she got some good ones from her department at UG, which is also probably supported by many private donations and corporate grants. So, despite the fact that she got tuition free UG education, I do not believe that any of that was covered by her UG school directly, although they were the ones making decision who should be awarded these Merit scholarships.</p>
<p>Well, I don’t know where your students go to school but a my son’s school there are other many more costs incurred besides faculty salaries & benefits. Heating and air conditioning all those buildings, paying for the electricity, security, building maintenance, upgrading and purchasing computers, personnel besides faculty (administrators, secretaries, financial aid employees, health care services, career services, IT services, etc., etc., etc) and maintaining the size of classes if that is important to one’s school like it is at my son’s which is 10. I’m sure there are many other costs a college incurs but these are one’s off the top of my head I thought of. </p>
<p>As for only being on campus 9 months, most colleges don’t close down over the summer.</p>
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<p>So true…</p>
<p>Is the implication that colleges will be advantaging full-pay students because they want more of them than in the past (if so, why? because endowments have tanked?), or is it that there are fewer full-pay applicants to go around, so they need to advantage them in order to entice them to attend and maintain the same level as before?</p>
<p>“High income parents on average are more intelligent than low income parents, so it makes sense they have more intelligent kids, on average.”</p>
<p>This is basically the old social darwinian argument, that those who have achieved wealth are better then those who are poor or middle income, and it was one of the thing people feared when Darwin published his theory of evolution, that people would say this. And frankly, it is almost completely crap, and here is why</p>
<p>-There are plenty of well off people whose intelligence when measured is nothing that special. More importantly, a lot of scions of the well off often end up being mediocre, living off dad’s or mom’s money and not doing much themselves…</p>
<p>-How are we determining intelligence? Mensa, whose entry characteristics are being in the top 2% of people on IQ tests, takes tests other then IQ tests for admissions, will take the old SAT’s…yet it has also been demonstrated that SAT scores can be boosted by prep programs and also simply by having access to a good education…so yeah, a well off kid with SAT coaching and good schools…</p>
<p>Or are we using circular reasoning, pointing out that the scions of the well off end up going to elite schools, getting good jobs, etc? </p>
<p>And if using IQ tests, which ones? Among other things, some IQ tests have ridiculous things in them that an upper class person taking it would do better on them.</p>
<p>-Studies of the families of well off people over the generations shows something interesting, that the scions of well off people as you go down the generations often shows less and less achievement, not the same or more. If what you are saying is true, then they should have showed that superiority.</p>
<p>-Malcolm Gladwell and others have shown that inate ability alone (i.e pure intelligence) is not enough to lead to success,and a lot of factors outside this influence ability or what someone does. Among these are luck (being in the right time and place), support (among other things, people from lower classes, working class and below, tend to have the attitude that things like intellectual growth and such is up to other people, or that as parents their role isn’t to suggest things to try and so forth, where upper class parents as a whole tend to be very involved in trying to stimulate their kids, get them to do something, try new things, etc. To argue that well off people are more intelligent flies in the face of what researchers have shown, that ‘inate ability’ in anything is only a small part of the puzzle.</p>
<p>Plus quite frankly, I can name a number of well off people I have met, traders and bankers and the like, who might be clever but in the IQ department wouldn’t score all that high; and in groups like Mensa they have a lot of people who score 132 or above who are working blue collar jobs that the OP was saying you wouldn’t find bright people in. </p>
<p>In other words, assuming that those who are well off (or more importantly, that their kids) are up there in IQ comparatively, leaves out the kind of things that being well off gives the kids especially that others don’t have and also leaves out such nice things as networks and contacts through the family and so forth.</p>
<p>BTW, I don’t believe that intelligence is a construct, either, that all people are equally intelligent, any more then everyone has the physical skills to be a baseball player or be a musician or whatever, there are definitely genetic factors, but like other genetic factors, they are not concentrated in any one socioeconomic group, and that a lot of what is attributed to ‘intelligence’ is often due to environmental and other factors.</p>
<p>One note about full tuition students subsidizing less well off ones, that statement is not directly true. Most private schools before college, and most colleges, public and private,operate on a model where the cost of educating a student (total budget/# of students=cost/student) is more then the tuition. </p>
<p>Most schools make up the deficit with income from endowments, plus donations to the school directly (though IME most donations go to endowment funds, or to fund something specifically, like a new library, etc, rather then directly to students in the form of scholarships or operating funds). Scholarships, for example, unless they are paid by an outside group, come from the income off endowments.</p>
<p>Leaving out the difference between what is costs to educate a student and even full tuition students, for students who can’t pay the tuition they get a combination of aid, need based and/or scholarship money, to help pay tuition (I am leaving out loans, for obvious reasons).</p>
<p>A full pay student does help, though, though it is not direct. If they admit a student who can pay the full 50k freight, for example, whereas a typical student in that position might get 25k in aid, then they can use the 25k from endowment income to give to students of lesser means to help them get in…but obviously, in either case, it does help get funds to less financially successful students.</p>
<p>I suspect that if they admit more full pay students from the US, that they won’t see much of a fall off (in other words, the kid with the 3.9 unweighted GPA/2200 SAT who didn’t get in because they came from an area well represented or didn’t otherwise lend to diversity, might now get in). Where I would be worried about it is with foreign students, one of the things that schools are finding I hear is that kids show up, supposedly with stellar stats, and then they find out the kid has more been made to look like a high level student then are one (and with a caveat, I have no way of knowing how common this is, though given what I have heard about how foreign students are desperate to get into schools here and other places, and the kind of corruption that already is common there, wouldn’t surprise me if it isn’t uncommon). Not unheard of, I am aware of some music programs that now require foreign students to audition on campus, period, specifically because of issues with auditioning overseas and not getting what they thought they were getting.</p>
<p>None of this surprises me, among other things, even though the stock market appears to have recovered from the ditch of 3 years ago, most endowments are still shaky, they took major losses that they haven’t recovered from, return on investments isn’t so great, and new donations I suspect may be harder to come by.</p>
<p>Emily-
You are correct, a lot of the costs are in running the institution, things like building maintenance, insurance, taxes (or payments in lieu of taxes), pension costs, health benefits, security, all the things that go into running a school, not to mention athletic facilities, sports teams and equipment (talking normal programs here, not BCS footballl), and so forth.</p>
<p>Private schools in the pre college world will tell you that the price of tuition doesn’t cover all the costs of the school, it is why they have endowments as well.</p>
<p>OP, thanks for posting this, it’s a very interesting read.</p>
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<p>This is an interesting question. Mulling it over as a California resident (and UC alum), my feeling is that it would only be worth be willing to pay OOS tuition for Cal if </p>
<p>a) my kid’s stats were just slightly below the norm for Cal;
b) my kid would be the sort to flourish in the Cal sink-or-swim environment;
c) I was convinced my kid could handle the workload;
d) we could afford full pay; and
e) Cal was my kid’s top choice.</p>
<p>I really don’t see this set of circumstances applying to many in-state students. D1 fits criteria a-d, but Cal wasn’t her top choice. D2 fits just (a) and (d), and wants to go somewhere smaller and more supportive. Even if she added (e) to the list, I’d say that we’d only pay in-state rates for her to attend any UC campus.</p>
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<p>If that is the case, then there could be several factors:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Endowment investments lost money.</p></li>
<li><p>Public schools have less state funding, and a lot of political resistance to increasing in-state tuition.</p></li>
<li><p>Students and families may have less money, so the percentage who are able to pay list price is lower.</p></li>
<li><p>Schools’ pension funds lost money, increasing retiree costs.</p></li>
<li><p>Medical insurance costs increase faster than inflation, increasing costs associated with all employees.</p></li>
<li><p>Donors may have less money, resulting in lower donations.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Note that all of the above financial pressures (other than #5) should generally be expected to occur during economic downturns. In the US, #5 seems to occur whether the economy is good or bad.</p>
<p>$100,000 per faculty member, all in, is wildly optimistic. 50 course/students/year may be about right, but 8 courses/student per year is also low.</p>
<p>And then you get to capital costs. They are enormous. And administrative costs. They may be inflated, but I’ll bet there is a lot less waste there than most of us think.</p>
<p>Obviously marginal costs are nowhere near average costs, in most cases. (I say “in most cases” because Yale is spending – and Princeton just spent – over half a billion dollars in capital expenditures to add about 250 students to their entering classes.)</p>
<p>We received a book from Williams about 3 months ago detailing everything about Williams.</p>
<p>The information they listed that is most shocking was the following: It said full pay student pays 55k or somewhere around that and it goes on to say that the cost per student to the college is at 83k or so.</p>
<p>I posted that on CC a while ago and people went that is true, liberal arts colleges spend lot more than they take in per student since they are so small.</p>
<p>I just can’t imagine running a business at 40% deficit year over year.</p>
<p>from Williams website</p>
<p>Is it true that a Williams education actually costs far more than what it charges its students?
A: Yes. You might be interested to know that although the listed “price tag” (tuition, fees, room, and board) of a Williams education $47,530, it actually costs the College more than $80,000 a year to educate and support each student. Fortunately, income from the College’s substantial endowment and from annual alumni giving makes up the difference.</p>
<p><a href=“http://admission.williams.edu/financialaid/faqs[/url]”>http://admission.williams.edu/financialaid/faqs</a></p>
<p>It sounds reasonable to me that our sustained depressed economy necessitates increased tuition dependency. </p>
<p>I can’t recall seeing any school say they don’t operate with a gap between tuition+costs and purported actual costs. As others have said, there is a lot of “interesting” accounting that goes into calculating the published gap figure, which is really a development figure for the purpose of annual fund solicitation from not just alumni, but current students, current parents, former parents, grandparents, friends, etc. (The pitch is always, meet the gap with a tax-deductible contribution toward your student’s actual cost of education.) Annual fund revenues + interest/return on relatively liquid investments structued to support operational expenses are two major sources of gap funding. Obviously, after several years of hard economic times, colleges are really feeling the pain of both fundraising challenges + pitiful interest/ROI rates. They don’t want to and often can’t dip into endowments to gap operational expenses, except to the extent of directed endowments that do meet current operational costs, e.g., financial aid, merit scholarship, endowed chairs, etc.</p>
<p>If the children of wealthy parents were always genetically superior, then I guess there would be absolutely no need for any college to give any admissions preference to any full pay student?? </p>
<p>In reality, as discussed above, there are multiple different types of intelligence. Anyone who claims that intelligence can be boiled down to a SAT score or an IQ test needs to really work on their emotional intelligence.</p>
<p>SlitheyTove, your rationale re: Cal is similar to what we faced for our OOS 2011 kid. It was a top choice for him considering his field of interest. However, the Dear Parent letter we received with the Congrats on your admission package said we should budget for five years “just in case” of course sequencing difficulties secondary to the UC budget crisis. I was particularly relieved kid questioned the wisdom of choosing Cal during these challenging times when I read in July that they enacted an emergency increase in fall tuition of 9.6% (in addition to the 8% already approved). Ouch! And of course, all the headlines now are about the UC debate over how steep they are willing to go with annual tuition hikes in the coming years. </p>
<p>Not sure we saved any dough with the pricey private choice kid made! But at least we aren’t dealing with the same extent of uncertainty over total cost and how fiscal constraints could impact the overall educational experience. It’s a bummer, as Cal is such a fine school in so many ways, and we would’ve gladly been a subsidizing OOS’er had it made more sense.</p>
<p>Very interesting, thank you for posting- and great title for the thread.</p>
<p>Interesting information on page 18 of the report. Only about 6% of adcoms from 4 year colleges & universities believe that rankings, such as USN&WR, are effective resources in finding appropriate institutions while 25% believe social media sources (CC is mentioned!) are useful.</p>
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<p>Nobody said the children of wealthy parents were ALWAYS genetically superior. The words ON AVERAGE were consistently there.</p>
<p>And nobody, on this thread anyway, said intelligence can be boiled down to a single or even measurable number.</p>
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<p>Asking once again: evidence?</p>
<p>Intelligence will make very lsmall difference in academic success. Academically successful kids are hard workers. If a kid knew his/her priority since kindergarten (5 years old), this kid is set for success, if not, genius or not, he will not surivive at some point. Work has to be done, period. Genius does not need to go to college, many did not. But how many could be called a genius? Saying that they did not work very very hard at whatever their goal was is also misleading. However, to rely that your genius kid will do fine because of some superficial genetic superiority is way beyond misleading.</p>