<p>The study, like most, will be slanted to benefit the originators. That aside:</p>
<p>I don’t see how anyone could have predicted the meteoric rise in college tuitions in the last 5 years. How can one save realistically when the numbers changed so radically.</p>
<p>I have 2 kids. There is no way I could have saved $360,000 without severely
changing our lives. </p>
<p>College costs are just way out of line.</p>
<p>It is amazingly expensive to allow our kids to have as many good college choices as we’d like them to have, much more than many of us had ever expected. </p>
<p>There are certainly biases when folks write articles, especially if they’re invovled in financial planning and/or college loans. Nonetheless, it is true that costs for colleges have gone up much faster than salaries, especially in recent years.</p>
<p>We had always only been able to save enough for our kids to go to the local flagship U & told them that they’d have to get good merit aid to make up the difference. We have been very fortunate that our S has gotten good merit aid to lessen our out-of-pocket costs for him to attend a college he’s very happy at. So glad we’re not having to figure out how to come up with $180-200,000 for his 4 years of school – still a challenge figuring out where we’ll get his reduced $100,000+ & his sister’s ??? college expenses, but we will somehow. <sigh></sigh></p>
<p>HImom,</p>
<p>Nice to see you back on line. Hope all are well. Have you seen? You have your own thread.</p>
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<p>Maybe a bad pun instead of irony? Groan?</p>
<p>Seriously, in states with lottery funded scholarships, a lot of people are betting on their kids ability to get the GPA in HS necessary for the scholarship and then more importantly keeping that GPA requirement in college where lots of other distractions await.</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong, I think these lottery funded scholarships are a great thing, but many parents find themselves disappointed when their kid has a rough freshman year and that money suddenly disappears.</p>
<p>“Don’t get me wrong, I think these lottery funded scholarships are a great thing, but many parents find themselves disappointed when their kid has a rough freshman year and that money suddenly disappears.”</p>
<p>Goaliedad, This is true of merit awards at private schools too. The fear of the possibility of losing a merit scholarship was part of the reason that my son chose a public university. I did make it clear to my son that if his merit award was lost at some of the 40,000+ schools, that he probably would need to pack his bags, b/c we more than likely would not get enough financial aid.</p>
<p>“Don’t get me wrong, I think these lottery funded scholarships are a great thing, but many parents find themselves disappointed when their kid has a rough freshman year and that money suddenly disappears.”</p>
<p>Goaliedad, This is true of merit awards at private schools too. The fear of the possibility of losing a merit scholarship was part of the reason that my son chose a public university. I did make it clear to my son that if his merit award was lost at some of the 40,000+ schools, that he probably would need to pack his bags, b/c we more than likely would not get enough financial aid.</p>
<p>sax, I agree with you. As I said, something will need to change, b/c middle income families simply cannot save the kind of $$ it takes lately.</p>
<p>Northeastmom,</p>
<p>At these state schools with “lottery” scholarships, the vast majority (95%+ in our local instance) of the kids at flagship U get this money, discounting the tuition over 50%. (The HS GPA required to get the scholarship in the first place is very low compared to the admissions requirement for the flagship U).</p>
<p>Unfortunately, most parents don’t plan on their B+ student at HS turning into a B- student at flagship U and becoming academically ineligible. They don’t realize that their children are competing with the A students from the rest of the state and are going to struggle.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, they’ve already budgeted in that scholarship money (it is well publicized and easily calculated whether you will get it initially) and find themselves in a bind when it isn’t there any more.</p>
<p>These families are kinda new to the merit scholarship problem and are rather unsophisticated about understanding the likely outcomes.</p>
<p>goaliedad, That is most unfortunate. I would think that many students simply do not complete their college education, or they move back home after their first year and attend community college.</p>
<p>For some (out of town students in dorms) who had low balled their cost estimate based upon the lottery scholarship, I would think that moving home and going to the lower level state school or cc will offset the loss of lottery money.</p>
<p>For those locals (commuters) who this lottery money made the difference in whether they went to school or not, it is a harsh thing, as they are probably not going to be able to cut their expenses enough to continue on. Perhaps these kids would have been better off going to a lesser state school (instead of flagship U) where they would have been less academically challenged and therefore kept the lottery scholarship.</p>
<p>Moral of the story is that there are strings attached to merit money and it is probably better to know that you are in the top 25% of your college class before planning on keeping it.</p>
<p>Yes, the article was written, probably by a PR firm, to drum up business. That said, the problem is real. It is easy to read reports about the high costs etc. and not do the simple math of 4X$40,000 = a big number. My mental calculator overflows at 4 digits anyway.</p>
<p>Another part of the problem, IMHO, is the college PR machine, which constantly hypes financial aid availability, merit scholarships, state scholarship programs (often with a good deal of state PR about some pet program that finances those scholarships) and so forth. But no one is telling these poor customers that this is mostly PR, the same as no one is telling them that the star students at a typical high school won’t even get into the best colleges. </p>
<p>And as for SAX’s comments about the “meteoric rise” in costs, where have you been? Nothing new about the rate of the rise. It’s been happening for years. You think costs are out of line? Don’t pay them then. </p>
<p>Ultimately, we consumers set the prices of college educations, as we do of any other product. If we don’t like the price of something, we stop paying it (like housing at this moment) and prices stabilize or drop. But for college, the bidding war, on the part of prospective customers continues. In fact, some economists puzzle over why prices at the elites are not higher.</p>
<p>Another result of the state lottery-funded Hope scholarship is that more of the top-level students are staying in-state. Thus making entrance into the “flagship U” and then all of the other colleges in the state, much more challenging. Students who could coast by in HS with their b averages and be assured of getting in before are at times shocked to find they are denied admission.</p>
<p>Newmassdad makes a couple of excellent points. </p>
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<p>So true!!! How many great students, coaxed on by their parents, guidance counselors, peers, the media, and even forums like this, apply to a bunch of top-ranked, private schools and then their state U as their safety, only to discover in April that their only real choice is the state U. I’ve seen it happen to nearly all the kids I know here in our town. Somehow they believe that ANYONE in America can attend these “top” schools. Wrong. You not only have to be academically gifted and come from the right school with a family that could afford all the fancy ECs, but you also have to be either extremely wealthy or extremely poor. Hmmm.</p>
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<p>I would suggest that the way our economy is going, with the virtual dissolution of the middle class, explains rather well how these very high prices can persist. The upper class is getting richer, not poorer, and they are primarily the customer for these schools anyway.</p>
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We could almost deal with the 4x$40,000 … it really gets fun with multiple kids … for us it is 12x$40,000 (3 kids) which when first added college expenses to our financial planning created a stunningly different picture.</p>
<p>when I look at college costs - I discount room and board- because unless we kicked them out after high school graduation we would be paying that anyway.
We also assumed that they would be taking out small loans- working during the school year, as well as during the summer- the former, enough to pay for books and personal expenses, the latter enough to take a chunk out of the EFC.
After subtracting room & board- and the money that the student will be contributing, by working & loans, it is really much more managable.</p>
<p>* It doesn’t hurt that we only have two kids either- and 8 years apart at that! 
*</p>
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<p>I remember when I started at Berkeley in '81. Registration fees (they didn’t technically have tuition then) plus dorm with full meal plan was about $3500 (instate). My older brother bought a brand new stripped down (5-speed, manual locks/windows, no A/C) '81 Corolla that year too. It was about $5000.</p>
<p>Fast forward to today. That new stripped down Corolla is about $15000 (and it has power locks/windows and AC! - a much better car) about 3x as much as it was 25 years ago. I think room and board at Berkeley is now about 3x what the whole package was 25 years ago and we haven’t even talked tuition! Is it a better education?</p>
<p>I think a lot of people are now looking for “value” in school pricing much more than they used to. Yeah, there are those who are still hung up on the “big name” schools and are willing to pay the price. That is exactly why the price is so high. The rest of us look at what “we” are getting for the money. </p>
<p>For our dollar, I’d rather have my kid be a top student at a good school than an also ran (bottom quartile) at the big prestigous big name school. More likely to get better quality need-based FA (i.e. more grants and less loan) when you have leverage (yes, unfortunately FA has become like used car shopping where the best price goes to the best haggler) because you are in the top quartile (or decile!). And job recruiters rarely look at the bottom quartile of any graduating class whereas the top kids have many more choices no matter where you go to school.</p>
<p>goaliedad: Your comparison of the cost rise in tuition vs. the cost rise in cars really brings home the point. Tuition has grown out of hand, largely because of federal subsidies that allow colleges to raise costs without a care. Just seek more needy students and the federal money will follow them.</p>
<p>In 1976, NJIT and Rutgers cost about $650 a year. There was no limit on number of courses you wanted to take each semester, so you could graduate in three years if you wanted to load youself up. NJ state scholarships covered 100% of the cost at a state school or up to $1000 at a NJ private. I think today those NJ scholarships (Bloustein) cover no more than $2000. There is simply no comparison to today. Top students regularly went to flagship U for free. Not so common nowadays.</p>
<h1>36. I call it the appeasement of the middle/working “class.”</h1>
<p>Princeton Review
Avg. private school tuition increase last yr 5.7%
Avg. public school tuition up 6.3%
Avg. room and board for both up 5%</p>
<p>If this has been happening every year for the last twenty years I have had my head in the sand.</p>
<p>Spouse and I both worked through summers and part time during the school year to pay for our private undergrad degrees with no help from financial aid or parents. We graduated with no debt.</p>
<p>For our kids to do so they would have to be pulling in (guessing) somewhere around $30,000 a year.</p>
<p>And, oh yeah, Newmassdad, we chose not to pay it. Son is on full ride ++ at a top 50 school. “Brilliant him, lucky us.”</p>
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Actually in our area the rate of increase has been slowing down. A few years back it was double digit increases.</p>
<p>And congratulations to your son on his achievement.</p>
<p>My tuition at a top ten school almost 30 years ago was $3500. Today it is $34K.</p>
<p>I think that is outrageous.</p>