Ranking List Most Schools Don’t Want to Be on: 25 Most Expensive US Schools by Business Insider

[ucbalumnus]

@blossom

And for the most part, it doesn’t matter because most schools can’t award full need anyway.

And “meet full need” can be an empty promise if the college’s definition of “need” is significantly different from what you think you need.

@fiftyfifty1

For me the surprise on the list was Carleton. It’s so much more expensive than St. Olaf. Not only does St. Olaf start off less expensive, they also offer merit aid. And they do all this while also meeting full need just like Carleton.

But do St. Olaf and Carleton have similar definitions of “need”?

[AustenNut]

@Data10

There was no overlap between the highest sticker price and worst income distribution lists.

When there are so many schools with a sticker price in excess of $90k, I tend to think of them as a group with different ones popping up on the “most expensive” sticker price list each year as they’re all clustered so closely together. Even though there is little overlap between the highest sticker price colleges and the best/worst income distribution of students, with the exception of Landmark, most of the colleges on the highest sticker price list are schools found on the same application lists of students applying to selective schools.

I will say that at the schools with the “best’ income distribution, that the top 5% is overrepresented between 4.5-6.5x more than it representatively should be, while the bottom 80% is underrepresented by about half. And four of those top 10 are publics which have policies in place to help make things much more affordable for their economically disadvantaged families.

@Data10

my primary point is, it’s a far more complicated relationship than high sticker price leads to higher income distribution.

Would it be fair to say that the income distribution at schools with sticker prices of $65k or below generally have a different distribution than schools with sticker prices of $90k or above? Although there are exceptions at some schools, my sense is that the general trend would be less clustering overrepresentation/underrepresentation, but you, @Data10, are truly the data maven.