<p>So I was looking through many college confidential threads that compared full tuition scholarships at School X (assuming X is not prestigious in its own right) vs Ivys/stanford/mit/duke/chicago/jhu/NU and found that in almost every instance, posters advised the student to go to the full tuition no name school. Now, in the aforementioned schools, almost every if not every kid could get a full tuition scholarship at School X so why wouldn’t they just attend there? Using that logic, these schools should have trouble attracting students since every kid could just go to School X for free? Now, some of you might mention that it depends on whether these top schools place a financial burden on the families involved but I would argue than in these schools there is a wide variety of kids; kids where attending a prestigious school has placed extreme financial burden on their families to none at all. My question is this: if everyone seems to indicate “take the money and run” why are there still such a wide range of students at these prestigious schools? (wide range in terms of financial burden)</p>
<p>@spuding102 - Sorry if I am being dense, but I don’t understand what you are asking. A student got a full tuition scholarship at School X, which you are saying is “not prestigious”. I am assuming that in your definition “not prestigious” is anything that is not the schools you named. Why is it surprising to you that people advise students to accept the offer of what is essentially a $250K gift rather than spend that kind of money going to the HYP type schools and either draining the bank accounts or taking on debt? You go on to say
Isn’t that exactly what the posters are advising, according to you? Either I am badly misreading your post or you made an error in laying out your case.</p>
<p>I am asking why is the general sentiment on CC to take the money and run when almost every kid at these schools could do that but they don’t? I consider prestigious as top 25 give or take.</p>
<p>The people who ask for that kind of advice do not represent all college students/families. They belong to the special subset of people who would have some degree of financial hardship paying for the prestigious school. THAT is why they are asking for advice. The general sentiment you describe (assuming you’re correct and it exists) is not meant for all people. It is meant for members of that subset. Translated, the sentiment comes down to this: “If you have to ask for advice, then you probably can’t afford the more expensive school.”</p>
<p>There are many, many threads on this site about the tradeoff of prestige vs. affordability, as well as many that reveal parents’ anxieties about overextending themselves to make their kid’s “dream” school a reality. You would probably answer your question if you read them.</p>
<p>My opinion is because there IS a difference the quality of education between the two environments, but it makes a ton of sense for a family who can’t afford the more expensive option to take the one they can afford. You act like the financial situations of the families shouldn’t drive the decision – and if the two schools were truly equal academically, then maybe that shouldn’t make a difference. But they aren’t the same.</p>
<p>Although the students who are accepted into a prestigious college and the students who are offered a full tuition scholarship at a less prestigious college are not the same pool of students, a small subset of them overlap. These are the students who post with the dilemma of the choice between the two. I’ve seen families make that choice in either direction- some value the financial benefits, some feel the prestigious school is worth paying for, even if it is a struggle. I think the advice to take the full ride is a good financial decision, but that isn’t the only reason students and families base their choices on.
There are still a large number of students who attend the prestigious schools who didn’t receive a full ride offer. Some may not have applied, and others may not have received one. The scholarships are also selective programs and there are more applicants for them than there are awards. </p>
<p>One factor you seem to be overlooking is need-based aid.
At the most selective private schools, typically about 35%-60% of students receive need based aid.<br>
Many of them do not pay anywhere near the ~$60K sticker price.</p>
<p>Have a look through the Kiplinger lists of “best value” schools. Look at the “Total Cost Per Year Column”, then look at the adjacent “Average Need-Based Aid” column. At Yale, for example, the sticker price is $58,550, but the average need-based aid is $43,115. About 50% of Yale 2013-14 freshmen received need-based aid. Many of them must be paying less than $15K/year. Even with a large merit scholarship from a state university, the net costs might not be zero. For example, at Alabama (often cited on CC for its generous merit scholarships), the best merit aid for OOS students only covers tuition, not room and board. The net costs would be about the same as (or even a little more than) Yale’s net after average need-based aid.
(<a href=“http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-private-colleges/index.php”>http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-private-colleges/index.php</a>)</p>
<p>If your family income is up to about $90K/year (or maybe a little more), with assets typical for that income level, your net costs to attend some of the private “full need” schools may be less than your net costs to attend your state flagship. Of course, it depends on which specific schools we’re comparing and the details of your family circumstances. You can use College Abacus to compare net costs of some of these schools, given various financial and other inputs.</p>
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<p>Probably because the people who ask this kind of question are the ones for whom affordability of the prestigious school is a financial stretch.</p>
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<p>The people asking this question are often from very high income, but very high spending, families for whom the net price even after financial aid (if any) would be a financial stretch at least.</p>
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<p>Because CC is not representative of the world.</p>
<p>Mind blowing, I know.</p>
<p>@spuding102 - And there you have it, in just a few replies. I think the main error in your post was implying that outside of the wealthy class, the rest of the kids at Harvard, Yale, etc. are stretching to be there. To the extent that 1) a family is low income, a lot of the top schools have no loan guarantees. So they are taken care of financially.</p>
<p>To the extent that 2) a family is very high income but still cannot afford being there, then they have already shown a disposition towards poor decision making when it comes to finances and are continuing to do so. They value the prestige label and are counting on high cash flow to pay off the loans, or are saddling their kid with high debt. </p>
<p>Finally, 3) there are the families that have decent incomes but not enough to really afford high cost schools like HYP. I suspect these are the majority of people asking the questions you see. People in the first two categories (and the wealthy) aren’t going to come on here and ask that same question, because they have no motivation to do so. Although in that 2nd category of parents of very high income but less cash on hand, I have seen the students come on and ask how to convince their parents that attending School X on full tuition is a better idea than taking on debt to attend the “prestigious” school. Many of them are smart enough to know that there are a lot of great schools outside of the USNWR top 25. In most of those cases the kids are smarter than the parents when it comes to debt and money issues.</p>
<p>So as stated by @WasatchWriter, you are only seeing the particular subset of people for whom the question comes up. In fact, you are right that “there are a wide variety of kids (financially)” at these most selective schools these days. If you go back just a few decades that wasn’t at all the case, and this kind of question never would have been asked because it would have been completely irrelevant. Almost all the students were from wealthy families. The landscape used to be very different. The widening of the admissions to these schools has created a lot of new questions, perhaps especially in the financial area. In response to the early issues that arose, the wealthiest schools created the no-loan policies, so that lower income and even the lower end of middle income families could attend these schools and not be burdened by enormous debt. That essentially left the the wide swath of truly middle income families to be left in the “squeeze” situation. These are no doubt the ones posting regarding the full ride vs. “prestige” issue.</p>
<p>How do we even know the OP’s premise is correct? Where is the data showing how many students turn down big merit scholarships at less prestigious schools to accept heavy financial burdens at more prestigious schools? </p>
<p>According to Kiplinger’s, the three private universities with the lowest average debt at graduation are Princeton ($5,096), Yale ($10,742), and Harvard ($13,098). Caltech, Vanderbilt, Dartmouth, Rice, Stanford, and Duke all average less than $20K debt at graduation. In contrast, Iowa State, Clemson, Colorado School of Mines, Delaware, Pittsburgh and Penn State all average over $30K in debt at graduation. Many other public universities average more than $20K in debt at graduation.</p>
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<p>This is what I came here to say. I don’t think that every middle-income student at a top 25 school was choosing between that school and a big merit scholarship somewhere else. A few of them might have been offered big merit aid elsewhere and decided to attend HYP-type schools because the need-based aid made it almost as affordable as the merit aid. But I think a lot of them chose to attend HYP because it was their most affordable option OR it was the best option out of several different expensive options.</p>
<p>Other answers:
-Different families have different priorities - some families are more willing to sacrifice everything to put aside the $30K a year it’ll cost to send Junior to Harvard
-Some people are willing to pay the premium to go to top schools; not everyone comes to CC
-Some people are not financially savvy and spend more money than they can afford. This goes for houses and cars and college educations, and pretty much everything.</p>
<p>@tk21769 - There wasn’t really so much of a premise as there was an observation of what the OP saw on CC. I don’t think he/she was really trying to say it was all that way at these schools, although the way it was stated in the post could be interpreted that way. That is one reason I asked for clarification. Of course there are lots of different cases for lots of different students at all these schools. There are many students that in fact turned down an Ivy or equivalent because of full scholarships at other schools. There are many that got the scholarship offers and didn’t turn it down. There are many that didn’t even get major scholarship offers from other schools, even though they had Ivy level stats.</p>
<p>The main point is that the OP didn’t have data, they were speculating that all the students at an Ivy League or equivalent school could have gotten a similar scholarship offer to attend a school that offers such scholarships. Now this is probably not true, I am not sure there are really enough of those kinds of scholarships out there to cover all the kids that attend all the Ivies, Stanford, etc. But let’s say it was true. The OP was then asking that since the advice on CC seemed to be overwhelmingly to take the full scholarship, why didn’t all the Ivy kids do that? And subsequently it has been pointed out that the ones that ask on CC don’t represent all financial and other circumstances, but in fact most likely represents those caught in that middle squeeze. Yes, they like the idea of attending that super name brand university, but they don’t qualify for the no loan programs but can’t really afford the school either, at least not without taking on debt. And remember, those stats you gave are an average, which could mean there are students at those schools with fairly substantial debt. No way to know.</p>
<p>Thus your citations of debt levels doesn’t really prove anything, since there are several scenarios that could explain them. But it certainly supports the premise that at the most prestigious schools low income students get a lot of debt-free aid, and/or that there are a lot of wealthy students at those schools, and/or that a lot of the middle income students that got in decided not to attend but instead took the generous offers from the other schools. The truth ls, no doubt, some mix of all that which keeps the average debt low. The other schools have students that end up with more debt because even if they snag some of these would-have-been Ivy students, it is a small percentage of their overall student body.</p>
<p>In my case, I am going to be paying 100k over 4 years to attend such a school when I had full tuition scholarships at 2 schools where I would graduate debt free and another school where I would end up paying 50k over 4 years for room and board. I definitely understand that I chose the most expensive option and that such an option will require significant financial sacrifice from my family but I felt like such a school would provide me the best stepping stone to a successful future. If I would have posted this same exact question for myself, I would have almost exclusively gotten the take the money and run posts rather than the pay 100k posts. Now, I am not graduating with debt but the burden will be significant for my family. A better question would be why would kids like me receive such advice almost exclusively? I mean I would think that me wanting to pay 100k would be an anomaly. Wouldn’t most kids in my situation (as many middle class kids at such schools are-debating between financial burden and free ride) choose the free ride option?</p>
<p>OP, I know a student who made the same choice you did, and his family chose to take on the extra financial responsibility, even if it was not going to be easy for them. In the same class, another student turned down an Ivy for a significant scholarship at a state college. For each student, the decision was made with the parents. </p>
<p>Families make this decision either way. Although a student can get advice here on CC, that decision is ultimately up to the family who has to apply it personally to them.</p>
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<p>You should in no way view the advice you get on CC as either good or representative of common wisdom.
It’s just a small number of people making a lot of posts. Often they made this choice and think that everybody else should too. </p>
<p>By the same token, I’m paying full price for two kids to go to private colleges. I think that’s the better way to go for us and I think that sometimes you get what you pay for. Of course, you shouldn’t take my opinion as either good or representative either. </p>
<p>You have to consider the full COA, not just tuition. Getting full tuition isn’t the same as getting a full ride, and an offer of full tuition at a less well known school doesn’t necessarily mean it will be less expensive than a name brand one. That’s why it’s important to run net price calculators and have financial safeties. </p>
<p>Low income students can qualify for a lot of need based aid at some of the name brand schools, so the COA there is equal to, or less than, the COA at less well known schools. Other families use a combination of savings, current earnings, and loans to cover costs. Some families borrow heavily to pay for the well known school. Just because a school has families with a wide range of incomes, it doesn’t mean all of those families are comfortably affording those costs.</p>
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<p>Presumably, the data available shows the opposite. While the average student loan debt was 26k, median student loan debt was just a bit over 10k, probably in the 11k-12k range. And over 35% of graduates have no debt after graduation. And here’s another important point that’s almost never mentioned:</p>
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<p><a href=“http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2013/09/24/five-myths-about-college-debt/”>http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2013/09/24/five-myths-about-college-debt/</a></p>
<p>@spuding102 - The fact that you are graduating debt free is a major factor in the advice you might have received. If you had said you would end up $100K in debt going to this school, or even $50K in debt, I would have said you were nuts. Not to put too fine a point in it or anything. Now a lot of people would still say that saving that amount of money remains the smarter decision. But @Pennylane2011 is right that it then becomes more of a family decision as to how much they want to sacrifice to send you there. There is a lot of latitude in that term, sacrifice. We cannot know the details, so it indeed is a family decision.</p>
<p>But I am not sure the advice would have been as one-sided as you assume. Usually the student is talking about taking on a lot of debt (or having his family take on additional debt) and that really is different.</p>
<p>Best of luck to you at college! I am sure it will be great for you.</p>