A number of CC offer engineering, e.g:
Of course, as I said, it obviously depends on circumstances.
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If it’s $100,000/for 4 year’s no problem. Lol.
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We explained to both our kids that $350k-$400k for college means they’ll inherit that much less. We let them make the call and were fine with whatever option they chose.
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Yes, it really varies by location. In our Midwest state, there are a few community colleges where a student can earn an entire ABET accredited 4 year mechanical engineering degree. The first 2 years are taught by faculty of the CC. The last 2 years are taught in the CC building by faculty from one of the state directional universities. The degree itself is granted by the state directional university. It is a very good deal for the students who do it (but of course your fellow students ain’t gonna be Rockefellers, and that matters to some people.)
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Often the kids (and indeed adults) are not capable of making that choice carefully
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I think the fellow students could be older and getting a degree to support work they are already doing.
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Agree with whoever noted upthread that if a family was wiling to pay 80k, they are going to be willing to pay 100k , even though the number sounds exorbitant to most folks. Those people probably have enjoyed the positive stock market ride in the past year (today’s drop excepted, lol) and an additional 20k is peanuts to them. Folks able to pay this amount likely have lots in a 529 plan too, so may not be batting an eye at this increase. It’s a matter of scale to many at the financial level where the ability to be full pay is no big deal, doesn’t affect their lifestyle or retirement plans.
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This is often NOT the right move.
A finance major who does the extra year for an MBA has likely “wasted” the opportunity to get a more rigorous/better payout MBA which is what happens after going back to school with a few years of solid work experience on the resume. Ditto for many other disciplines–public policy, data analytics, etc.
There are sectors and companies that view the one year master’s programs as “Master’s lite” because without meaningful work experience, it’s just doubling down on more classwork with an extra internship thrown in there.
Cheap doesn’t always mean better. And students need a lot of research to figure out if that tempting sounding Master’s is at all valuable once they graduate.
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Let’s talk about full-pay families only. For this cohort, I think the honest answer is that “it is not worth it” unless you plan to enter a field which is highly prestige conscious. You can get a great education at many schools, and then most fields don’t really care that you went to Fancy U. So then you might ask yourself, ‘well, what is the point of spending all that money just to end up at the same place as virtually all of my work colleagues?’
However, this adopts the viewpoint that college is merely a trade school to learn skills to get a job, and college is something never think about again once you’re 10 or 20 or 30 years into your career. I’m not sure how valid that is. If you think about a car as merely transportation to get around town, then any Ford or Honda will do. You get to the same place at the end of the day and those cheaper cars are perfectly serviceable. But a lot of people don’t think of cars as merely transportation. Just as a lot of families don’t think of college as just a trade school.
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It can be worth it, yes, but it depends on the school and family.
The appropriate framework in my view is marginal cost vs lifetime utility (for both student and parents).
As mentioned, many families for whom that price tag is a problem would receive significant need-based aid to reduce the cost.
For a full pay family choosing between, say, Brown and the state flagship the marginal cost might be $60k or so per year (assuming no merit scholarships at the flagships). If Brown feels like the ideal fit for the student, the parents will probably enjoy more lifetime utility from spending those resources now than having an estate a few % larger at death. That’s probably true for the student as well in most cases.
I don’t think ROI type estimates that look at early earnings vs cost are a useful measure. But there are cases where that can be a slam dunk in favor of the correct school that happens to be expensive (not all expensive schools though).
Part of the challenge with these questions is that many full pay parents of college age children don’t yet realize just how large their estates are likely to become with continued contributions and growth, even with generous allowances for retirement spending.
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It will be interesting to see how the student who just chose Dartmouth over Ole Miss (Stamps I believe) fairs long term.
No question Dartmouth is great - but the tradeoff was grad school expense. If OP goes to a has to pay program, it’s on them. Had they gone to Ole Miss, Mom and Dad had it covered.
When you choose one path, one never knows if it was right or not. Maybe it doesn’t work - it doesn’t mean the other option would have.
Whereas I think that being full pay for both my kids was a great use of our money. They both found jobs in industries that recruit at a limited number of colleges. I would gladly do this again.
This is often misunderstood. There is a talent distribution overlap between any state flagship and any elite college, so it’s no surprise that some people from each end up on the same place.
But what’s not seen is that the very top students at Elite U can be snapped up early, in some cases committing to their post graduation job as early as the summer after sophomore year.
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Same happens at flagships too!
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Is it a ton of money? Absolutely! To me, a fortune. And I am genuinely concerned about the affordability of education. But if you have the money, it depends on what else you would spend it on.
Is a 3 bedroom apartment on Park Avenue “worth it” if a 2 bedroom in Flushing will fit your family? Both will house a family in NYC. But if you are willing to live in Pittsburgh, an arguably wonderful city, is NYC worth it? Is a Rivian SUV “worth it” vs a RAV 4? Both will carry you and your gear where you are going. Hotels come at different price points. As do restaurants. As does pretty much everything.
It also depends on what you think you are buying when you pay for a college education. If you just want the credential and can master the material in the way it is being delivered- no, probably not worth it for you. Realistically, for many, it’s just a ticket punch this way.
Schools provide an education, and they also are where you live for 4 years. The US model is different from that of most of the rest of the world that way. So it’s not just the credential, but the whole experience of it. People gladly live in a smaller home to be in a community with other attributes they want, from safety, schools, commutability, vibe, etc. This is a version of that.
For the FP families, it’s probably more appropriate to think about the incremental cost. As in, is it worth an additional $40,000 per year? For many, that answer is yes, for any number of reasons, whether access to resources and opportunities, location, cohort, etc. And if it can be done, but not easily, it will depend on what the tradeoffs are.
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Same here. Our kids graduated undergrad from pricey private universities in 2007 and 2010. Costs were less for their colleges then, but so were our salaries. We paid for college out of current earnings, and would do so now if we had kids attending college.
The most important thing, in my opinion, is to have a plan for paying for college. We did, and because we did, our kids didn’t have to consider costs when applying to college. I know we are very fortunate to be in this position, and not everyone is.
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It’s like so much in life - if you want it , and if you can afford it, you’ll be willing to pay it. There are many things I don’t think that I would purchase even if I had the money … but lots of people would, and that’s just the way things are.
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That one sentence doesn’t capture the context or the meaning of what I was saying. This truncated version better reflects my point.
You had your reasons, and made a valid choice.
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It is curious to me that nobody seems to ask the question “is it worth X dollars having a destination wedding in Cancun when you can just head to the local courthouse (or your clergy-person’s office) and get married?” And nobody asks “Is it really worth installing granite countertops in your kitchen when Home Depot sells formica with a gray/white grainy pattern which works just as well?” And it is heresy to ask “why would you pay to take the family to Disney when you’ve got a Six Flags amusement park within driving distance and you don’t need to pay for an overpriced hotel, overpriced food, and airfare?”
The intangibles of an education are very valuable for some people, marginally valuable (within reason ) for others, and not at all valuable for still others. Some people find this hard to accept, even though they spend money all the time on things that THEY care about that other people find ridiculous.
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Correct, and a key reason for us were specific types of employment opportunities that are more easily accessible from the elite colleges. This is on addition to a rigorous education and a strong peer group.
I know it’s possible for strong students from a typical state flagship to break into these fields, but it’s an uphill battle if the school is not a recruiting target.
And before someone tears my head off, state flagships are often elite in certain fields. Just not the ones I thought my kids would pursue.
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And we had completely different reasons.
Didn’t know or care about employment opportunities in specific fields. Our point of reference was the family’s immigration/refugee experience, where the ONLY thing that’s portable sometimes is education- and an elite education (in some cases) trumps everything else in terms of being able to regain your footing in another part of the world.
That wasn’t the only reason for being full pay of course. But there is certainly residual trauma/imprinting for many immigrant families. You leave the factories you own behind. You leave the home, everything in it except for a few portable trinkets. Anything of value gets seized or appropriated- either by a militia, the government, or your neighbors. The bank accounts can’t be transferred. But what’s in your head- that goes with you, and if you are uncertain about where you’re going and what you’ll be doing, there is a comfort level in a “very recognizable name”, whether this is rational or not.
I have a colleague who volunteers with refugees and immigrants in the US to help them “upskill”. Her “clients” include physicians who now work on the sanitation team at hospitals, uber drivers who used to be litigators, food service workers who worked in finance. On the one hand, she’s busy explaining to them that sending their kid to Baruch or Hunter is a wonderful and rational decision (inexpensive public universities in NYC where their kids can commute). And on the other hand, she’s forced to recognize that the “famous name” university from their home country gives greater optionality to the parents.
It’s just a lot more complicated than “only an idiot pays full price when Eastern State Clown College teaches bio and poli sci just like Yale”.
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