I think college is still expensive for poorer students (even coming up with $14,700 can be a challenge) but many of the complaints I hear come from solidly middle class or upper middle class parents. Part of the tension comes from the fact that their kids don’t want to attend the schools that are cheaper to begin with or where they might get substantial discounts. Our state flagship is $33k per year, all in, and most middle class + students won’t get any aid - some outstanding kids might get merit money, but much of that is reserved for OOS students they’d like to attract. Because of its location in Western MA, it is not in commuting distance for most kids as the bulk of the MA population is located in and around Boston.
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This is the way.
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Agree completely. The numbers show that cost has not actually increased (recently) on average.
That said, the huge gap between the sticker price and the real price is another sign of a broken system. Brick and mortar stores play massive discount “Kohls Cash” games because they are trying to stay alive. But even Kohls doesn’t discount 56%.
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Absolutely. These students, especially those who aren’t high stats, have few choices beyond community college. Which we all know can provide good educations. But still not for everyone, for example, some students can’t safely live at home after HS, some aren’t in commuting distance of a CC, etc.
I get it. But parents have to be the adult in the room. More information about costs is better…including the difference between gross and net costs, and frank talk about budgets is important early in the process.
I never said any of this is easy, but I am sharing that net tuition costs on average at four year colleges are decreasing, not increasing…it’s important to dispel misinformed or inaccurate information. I understand that some might not want to hear that, and understand that some students will still fall thru the cracks.
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Your Mandalorian reference for the win!
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I am not sure the right word is broken (might be!), but…there are too many college seats and not enough students, so lots of discounts necessary. And more college closures coming.
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Right, even the fact the the price is opaque. You have to apply to tons of schools because you don’t really know if you’ll get in or even if you’ll afford it.
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Totally agree this is broken. If NPCs showed how much discount an applicant would get (or even a range), it might cut down on the number of apps a merit seeking student needs to send.
I know most schools don’t have the FA staff to do financial aid pre-reads, but then even more reason to make the NPCs accurate…which would include merit/discounts too. Or have nice little merit/discount grids on their websites.
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If they’d reduce the sticker price to something reasonable to start with, they might not need to offer so many discounts. You have small lower tier schools charging $60k plus $20k sticker price for all in? Comparable to top tier schools? And they offer discounts to 99% of their students but don’t actually say how much. When you plug in the NPC, it says it might be more like $40k all in. A 50% discount? But you just don’t know so you apply to multiple schools.
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I agree with most of what you say - and I definitely agree that parents need to be the adults. If budget is a consideration, they need to communicate that up front instead of delaying until after decisions are in which can lead to a lot more disappointment. If kids only apply to schools that are affordable (or could be affordable with the right merit) it take some of the pain out of the process.
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But two different schools can value gpa or ECs or personality in different ways. A student with a 4.8 can be a lock for the flagship even without curing cancer but Williams may have 6 similar applicants and room for only 3 of them. Amherst may not think the best quarterback in all of Texas is a good fit, but UTexas may (or may not) love him.
And some students just can’t face reality. A student may be shocked he didn’t get into Yale but no one else is, even his GC or the teacher who wrote that this was the smartest student since Einstein on the LOR. How often do we here on CC answer ‘chance me’ questions with ‘your chances are very low’ but the student still applies because he wants that opaque process to work in his favor? He knows he can’t check the highest gpa box or that his 1510 is a little low, but boy, won’t his ECs put him right over the top? (BTW, they usually won’t).
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That’s why I think of it as “tuition discounting” instead of “merit”. I think Colby Sawyer (not a school often mentioned here) eliminated merit in favor of reducing tuition for everyone so that their sticker price more accurately reflected what kids were actually paying. I have no idea how that worked out but it is one example of more transparent pricing. Why so many colleges have been resetting their tuition | Higher Ed Dive
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It is almost impossible for ECs (other than recruited athletes) to make up for an inadequate academic record, anywhere-the academic bar may be set differently at different selective institutions but that threshold must be crossed. Athletics matter for recruited athletes, but if not worthy of recruitment, are just another time-consuming EC. Charitable activities should be demonstrably long in duration and of defined impact to be considered sincere.
These are widely held standards by almost all selective schools.
Athletes actually are quite aware, due to national high school sports rankings, of exactly where they place and which schools are targets for their level of ability.
It would seem reasonable for colleges to state the above clearly.
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*levitating like Lyle, the yogic guru ghost in Infinite Jest *
In order to discuss whether and how the current admissions process is broken, one has to imagine what it would mean for it to be in an alternate state of working, an exercise which reveals its futility, since the deepest recesses of tool-being always escapes the feeble grasp of mere Dasein.
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In other words, it ain’t broken if it can’t be fixed.
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Yes, please.
It is the way.
Look @twoinanddone for some kids, they bust their hump for 3+ years in school, get amazing grades, participate in an EC or two, maybe a team captain here/there, and then wanna reach for the collegiate brass ring. Is it beyond their grasp? Maybe (probably.) That said, efforts need to be acknowledged, and if an earnest student/family wants to spend $75 on a low-percentage application, you know, Godspeed, hope there’s a miracle. Now that student better have 2-3 admission locks in their pocket, otherwise it’s irresponsible behavior. I think most reasonable people buy lottery tickets not for the actual chance of winning (which is mathematically insane) but that 10–15-minute drive home from the gas station or convenience store. What a ride home that is, filled with amazing dreams. I think the same spirit applies to uber-reaches.
Also, to validate your final thought - yeah, admissions officials really should say, in one way or another, “No, the essay won’t save you.”
There are extraneous costs to big discounts for some students. The schools have to get money for their increasingly bloated budgets somewhere. Therefore, the list price grows tremendously at many universities and is paid by some U.S. families but also many of the families of foreign admitted students. Some of these foreign students are wonderful members of the university community. However, some of them also come from countries that hate the U.S., contribute heavily on campus to the current hatred toward the U.S., Israel and Jews, and then end up helping hostile nations and groups after graduation.
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Not to step on my own philosophical mic drop per @roycroftmom, but rather: if it can’t be fixed it can’t be broken in the first place. Not in a meaningful way true for all people in all places and times, where a common substrate reality is shared that can be acted upon. There are people for whom the admissions process is currently ready-to-hand and for whom it is present-at-hand, and in the latter, in a million different and inexhaustible ways. The state of broken/working is always already local and relational, not universal and objective.
cf. Star (1999):, which I always assign when I teach MIT undergrads in my old grad school dept.
The image [of infrastructure] becomes more complicated when one begins to investigate large-scale technical systems in the making, or to examine the situations of those who are not served by a particular infrastructure. For a railroad engineer, the rails are not infrastructure but topic. For the person in a wheelchair, the stairs and door-jamb in front of a building are not seamless subtenders of use, but barriers (Star, 1991). One person’s infrastructure is another’s topic, or difficulty. As Star and Ruhleder (1996) put it, infrastructure is a fundamentally relational concept, becoming real infrastructure in relation to organized practices (see also Jewett & Kling, 1991). So, within a given cultural context, the cook considers the water system as working infrastructure integral to making dinner. For the city planner or the plumber, it is a variable in a complex planning process or a target for repair: “Analytically, infrastructure appears only as a relational property, not as a thing stripped of use” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996, p. 113).
Or, as I told Jeff Selingo:
The admissions process is messy, Peterson, of the MIT admissions office reminded me. His first job there involved monitoring the forum College Confidential. That experience answering questions about MIT on a website where misinformation and anxious chatter about admissions run rampant taught him that no single measure of merit, no metric of achievement, no amount of information about how someone ends up in the acceptance pile will satisfy students and their families. In the end, Peterson said, what they want is to “make the admissions decisions themselves.”
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