Exactly, zoos. Many contract attorneys still work long hours for $50k/yr and may or may not have employee benefits (healthcare, etc). A talk show host where I live says you should have no more undergrad debt than you think you will earn our first year of employment (and I assume he is talking about employment after undergrad, not grad/professional school).
" I don’t think I understand your point. Your daughter attended a private high school then had a full tuition merit scholarship for undergrad and you could apparently pay the rest, so she didn’t have to worry about money. If @jym626 is correct that you were able to pay for med school out-of-pocket"
-I do not understand this point either. Very rarely a family can pay for both UG and Grad. School. However, paying for Med. School INSTEAD of UG is a valid option. But again, my point was that it was right for MY family. If a kid is after prestige and most of these Elite places have either zero on very small number of Merit offerrings, then my point is NOT valid for this family at all. However, just to keep in mind for those top kids who are in decision making category, the top caliber kids who are eligible to be accepted to Elite colleges, WILL get SEVERAL huge Merit awards at other places and they wil be in position to negotiate with their families paying for the Grad. School instead. Again, family has to be able to pay for at least one, while vast majority will not be able to pay for both and again, great number of those who attend at Elite colleges will apply to some Grad. Schools. BTW, the reason that we are able to pay is becuase we decided to continue working past full retirement age, this is another decision making, it did not happen by accident of some sort.
This thread has 98 posts and 6500 readings. So 99% of people are reading and not posting.
The lesson is that sending your child to a less expensive, less prestigious undergrad may not harm their chances of being just as successful as those students who graduate from higher ranked schools.
This leaves the student and his family with that much more money to spend elsewhere.
The lesson is that you are not dooming your students future by asking them to attend the less prestigious , less costly school.
Miamidaps kid got into med school. She took the less expensive undergrad option. It did not hurt her.
My kid took a full ride UG at his safety. He got into a number of top 10 grad schools. His UG less prestigious school did not hurt his career projection.
I think these are helpful examples for parents making this decision this year.
Crosspost miamidap
Many many many longtime readers lurk and do not post. No way of knowing how many are “new”. But its irrelevant.
Everyone agrees that the less debt the better. No argument there. Posters here almost unanimously agree that $170K in UG debt is ridiculous, That is not the issue. My DS#2 chose a full tuition merit scholarship at an otherwise expensive private U, initially planning to attend med school so wanted to save the college $ coffers for med school, but instead chose to go into engineering. That $ we saved for college became his at 21 (our choice). He is financially comfortable for his age, and working at a well known big company in SV. But we still paid about $12k/yr for room/board/fees/transportation, etc. There were still OOP costs, and MiamiDAP likely had close to the same. Doesn’t seem that their family paid NOTHING for undergrad. They just paid less. But, as in her case, both s’s had no debt after UG.
Many choose different educational paths. Some, like myself and miamiDAP, chose to pay for private HS for our kids. Thats not cheap either. Each family makes their own financial decisions, and decides what expenses are reasonable to fund their child’s education. But ot answer the OP, NO, dont come out of UG with $170K in debt. Just.Say.No.
That’s what I thought she said, jym, full tuition. Her posts are confusing, though, because in the thread above she says her DD got “full tuition,” BUT also says that her DD’s undergrad was “free.” And, since she “didn’t pay” for her DD’s undergrad she paid for her med school.
I don’t get the lesson people are supposed to get from that. Her DD had the choice between a private which was offering a merit and/or sports scholarship and a public which was offering a merit scholarship, but she was able to afford the difference. Families who reside in that lovely donut hole where they make too much for aid but too little to make up the difference between merit scholarships and the COA don’t have that choice to make.
As I read it, and yes its confusing, the dau didn’t get a full ride. She got full tuition. Don’t recall if she got any other departmental or other scholarships over those 4 years. But I agree with you. I don’t think her undergrad was “free” (as I added/clarified in my post above). And they paid for a private HS. that can’t be cheap.
Austinmshauri,
This may help you. According to this post by MiamiDAP, her daus undergrad costs were around $25K/yr http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/17454201/#Comment_17454201
Yes, this can be confusing, not helpful, to the “new” readers who may not understand the difference between a full tuition scholarship and a full ride.
Nope. My D. made a choice NOT to apply at all to any Elite colleges, NONE, zero. She made this choice DESPITE of the push of her GS. It still cost us - we paid her living expences, she had TUITION free UG. If she choose to attend at Elite college (she was in position to do so, every #1 in her private HS before and after her went to Harvard; she also had Merit award attending private HS, 1/3 of tuition), she would be in great debt right now just like majority of her Med. School classmates. That was the only point. We are the same as most people here, middle class, 2 working adults, but we are much older than most and have paid for 2 kids.
Again, this is NOT for everybody, I presented my D’s story as an option for those who are deciding now. Some will decide that this is not for them. I am not sure that I understand the “argumentive” side. There is nothing special about us, not in any high paying jobs, D. is the first who attended Med. School, definitely road was harder for her than many around her from physician’s families.
OP family is the only one who can decide about debt being worth or not, there is no general answer to that, no single glove that fits all.
OK- so living expenses for four years @ 25K per year- that’s 100K out of pocket. Plus med school fully funded including living expenses.
Miami- you are WAY too modest! You are indeed something special!!!
You’d think for whatever the Gates Foundation contributed to the reporting for this article, NBC News might have thrown in a copy editor who knows the difference between “phase” and “faze.”
This is really an article about magical thinking and how easily too many Americans (including successful ones like the parent in this story) make very bad decisions based on very shaky advice from guidance counselors and other college “advisors.” It’s entirely possible the parents had no idea how expensive ANY college would be, let alone a private LAC, until the student was getting ready to start applying in the fall of his senior year. This is WAY too late in the process to educate yourself. So you trust the “experts” who tell you a top student like your kid is not only competitive for the “very best schools,” but that those “very best schools” are often the “most affordable” for middle-class families (which is true, but YOUR definition of “middle-class” might be quite different than that of the colleges!). And then you cross your fingers and hope it all works out. When your really smart kid tells you it’s all under control (and he likely believed he could get the loans on his own, not realizing his family’s EFC would require Parent PLUS loans), and you trust him, you’re pretty much screwed.
Even after explaining the terrible situation this student and his family find themselves in, the writer adds a quote from some expert that implies that the Williams education financed with $170,000 in debt STILL might be worth it!
So, essentially, this first-time URM college student/class valedictorian is destined to a second-class lifestyle with the rest of the 99%, apart from the “leadership class,” if he doesn’t go to a top LAC like Williams. (Pomona at no. 5, presumably, was too far down the food chain.) Seriously, he’s “better off” $170,000 in debt for a chance to be in the “leadership class”?
That’s crazy talk.
It’s really too bad this boy and/or his dad didn’t come to CC for advice. Just running the NPCs and comparing the offers from Northwestern, Notre Dame, Grinnell, and Pomona might have resulted in more affordable options. And folks here would have made sure he had an affordable safety in the bag, unlike his trusted advisors:
Caveat emptor!
"Miami- you are WAY too modest! You are indeed something special!!! ’
-if you call retirement money withdrawals “special”, then, I guess, I am (plus my H.). Not by any stretch of my imagination though…And do not forget, D. has an older Bro. who has been all paid up by us also…very long time ago. Double special?.
Thank yo!!!
Many posters keep saying “Having gone to a non-elite school didn’t hurt me/my child/my friend.” Well, that is only true if you make it true, if you don’t let it hurt. There will always be people, including employers, who will hold it against you.
My sister went to Middlebury for one year, but couldn’t afford it and finished at Wisconsin. She then compounded this prestige error by going to a lower ranked law school. At night. While she worked. All this lesser education got her was a partnership at Leboeuf, Lamb. Yes, one of the great unwashed, a female at that, became a partner at a top NYC firm (although she was in an outpost office). She went to a partner’s meeting and one of the older (male of course) partners asked her where she went to school and was aghast that someone from a ‘public’ had slipped by the moats, the armed guards, the crack security system and become one of his partners! This could have caused my sister to feel inferior it she had let it. Yes, most of the partners had graduated from some ranked school, but since she’d gone to Middlebury she knew that those students weren’t any better, any smarter than she was. There were even a few idiots who did go to fancy schools who were members of the firm. Attending a fancy school doesn’t guarantee one isn’t an idiot.
And where are they now? Well, my sister left the partnership and now teaches 4th grade because that’s what she wanted to do. Mr. Old Male Partner is probably dead, but if not he’s out of work since the firm failed a few years ago and all those Ivy degrees and T-14 law degrees were out pounding the pavement just like the grads from City College and State Law. If Mr. Old Male Partner isn’t dead, I’m sure he’s still impressed with himself and looking down on others.
There will always be people who look down on others, but the control over whether that matters lies with the person who earned the degree, who is applying for the job, who is living the life. Don’t feel inferior and you won’t be. Someone will question MiamiDAP’s daughter’s education choices some day and look down on her for not picking Harvard, or at least Northwestern. Whether that matters will be up to Miami’s daughter.
But it will always matter to some people.
Many would advocate not taking money from retirement funds to pay for an education.
I like reading MiamiDap’s stories and Jym626’s stories and Sax’s stories and other posters’ stories. The stories are all interesting.
There are many ways to accomplish goals.
A friend’s daughter went to Middlebury. She has a job she likes but the pay is low and she is not self supportive. She hasn’t found a decent paying job yet. Also, I am not sure she knows what she really wants to do. She got a good education but Middlebury is very expensive.
I don’t know how good Middlebury’s career office is.
Twoinanddone, I like your post.
And Middlebury’s career services could be fantastic, but the D waited until April of senior year to find out where it is located, waited until May to finish her resume, never took the counselor up on the offer to role play an interview, never did a video interview to realize how annoying her hair pulling or “Like, Y’knows” are in real life, never bothered to get the download of people in industries she’s interested in who went to Middlebury, graduated within the last 10 years, and volunteered to do informational interviews, etc.
Career services doesn’t come to your dorm room, drag you out of bed, and force you to sit down with a recruiter from the Gates Foundation to learn about Malaria-prevention programs and the kind of talent they need.
I said I don’t know.
Are Middlebury’s career services fantastic?
The friend’s daughter is very articulate. Not knowing what you want to do is a hindrance.
Well that’s not quite what happened! And it’s also not true that undergrad carries any weight in hiring in BigLaw, unless the person interviewing you is from your school. It’s all about the law school because law firms, even lower down the scale, typically only do on-campus recruiting at specific law schools of their choosing. There are a couple of firms in NYC that love, love, love UVA, and each firm has its own subcultures. Unfortunately since the economy crashed and law hasn’t recovered in NYC, people who didn’t go to maybe the top 8 law schools and graduate in the top of their classes wouldn’t make partner as your sister did because they wouldn’t even get hired now. To make it even more convoluted, some firms are moving away from the on-campus recruiting model to the clerk-only model. Which means that a person would have to get into a top law school (from wherever that school’s admittees come), then graduate high in the class, THEN get selected for a clerkship before he or she could even be considered for an interview for a law firm, partner-track position. Therefore and thus, don’t incur big debt!
Middlebury’s career services are good. Middlebury does not have as much of a pre-professional crowd as Williams or Swarthmore (to compare peer institutions) so it is not a surprise that the D doesn’t know what she wants to do.
There are a couple of very helpful job boards for new grads (idealist is one- jobs in higher ed and non-profits) which often have great opportunities for a kid to launch. Entry level marketing for a museum/historical society? Entry level social media for a public health initiative? Entry level HR at virtually anything?
Blossom,
I am going to forward what you posted.
Thank you very much.
" Only true if you make it true" - you have to “make it” at any Elite college also, isn’t that true? Or name of the place will make it for you? The fact is that YOU have to make it anywhere, where you want ot be is YOUR own desire that is not applicable to anybody else, no matter what and who made here or there.