Several posters also want to talk about how you can cut costs by going to CC or state school and that also is not the point of this thread.
If you click on the link provided by the moderator Mr. Berry, you will see eye opening charts. For all the middle and lower income parents who want to understand why their academic star didn’t get into a certain elite college.
@NearlyDone2024
Extremely interesting link. From the linked article:
The charts accompanying that quote, showing 2008 versus 2016 admissions probabilities binned by income are eye opening.
With each piece of data that comes out, the facade of “holistic” admissions crumbles a bit more.
For the person objecting to the direction of the conversation, I would assume that the obvious “it is unsurprising that schools manipulate their behaviors to influence their rankings” is what is wanted??? I am surprised that the researchers found the data that surprising.
Universities are businesses. Looks to me that that is what that data reveals. (Raise perception. Protect bottom line. Anyone surprised that USC is now offering free tuition below certain income?)
Part of the brand value of these schools is from the fact that the children of the rich and powerful attend. It is just like a club in Vegas. The normal people will stand in line for hours to have a chance to be in the same club as the person that got escorted in through the back door. It is the same crappy music in all clubs. Why pay the premium?
Colleges are businesses in some ways, but not in others. That’s part of the conflict.
"As one UI alum, Laramie Wall, asked pointedly in a recent Facebook exchange: “If the UI is to be run as a business, shouldn’t they stop asking for alumni donations? I mean, what kind of business begs for money?”
^ Nope, non-profit colleges aren’t businesses. They are non-profits.
But they still have to make the finances work. People don’t work for free even for a nonprofit. Buildings don’t build and maintain themselves. Money has to come from somewhere.
A non-profit business is still a business.
Thank you for posting this. I thought it was very well written and especially liked this paragraph:
More and more it seems we want to see public higher education less as a public good than as a private business opportunity–the way the CEO of Nestle wants to think of water not as a human right but as a consumer item and opportunity for commercial water sellers. There are deep questions of community values here, questions that our society needs to be asking now.
Exactly.
Regarding the link shared by @NearlyDone2024 : definitely interesting, but likely not applicable to the Ivy plus colleges that are the subject of the thread. At most of those schools, students just above—and well above—the Pell grant threshold would attend for free.
I don’t necessarily disagree with the claim made by some in this thread that full pay families might see a better value proposition in a state flagship or merit scholarship. I do disagree with the idea that Umass is superior to MIT or Stanford, although I’m a big fan of Umass and I think it could be a great choice for many kids.
But with respect to the middle class being shut out: MIT, Stanford, Harvard and the like provide exceptionally good aid for families with incomes below 150k, and especially those in the 100k range. So to say that middle class families are somehow priced out, and aren’t seen in good numbers at those schools, just isn’t accurate.
Some of the criticisms in this thread would be better directed at the tony privates that seem to be the darlings of CC.
“But with respect to the middle class being shut out: MIT, Stanford, Harvard and the like provide exceptionally good aid for families with incomes below 150k”
- There are only a handful of schools that are as rich as those schools and can afford to provide such good fin aid.
- Add "MIT, Stanford, Harvard and the like" together, and you're talking about a relatively tiny number of seats for a big country. For comparison, the 2 of Oxbridge provides as many 1st year slots as all of HYPSM added together, and they are in a country with 1/5th the population of the US.
- In many parts of this country, $150K-$300K annual income effectively buys you a middle-class (not upper-middle-class) lifestyle and savings.
Put that together, and you can’t but draw the conclusion that, yes, the middle class is effectively shut out (outside of possibly a handful of genius-level/national/international-accomplishment applicants and/or kids with parents mortgaging their retirement/house to send their kid to an expensive private).
“Exceptionally good aid” is completely relative to the perspective. We in no way can afford what we are expected to pay. Not even close. The most we have paid for any of our kids to attend college is 1/4 of that “exceptionally good aid.” (4 yrs for the price of 1. 
) Even full tuition scholarships are not enough for our kids to afford to live away.
We aren’t alone. We are surrounded by middle class families and by far this is everyone’s reality. Kids are attending where the cost is low, often even living at home and commuting to a directional U bc they are getting scholarships there. (This isn’t just a “local” thing. We have moved 5 times while our kids have been in high school. This is happening everywhere.
Re: 1&2: yes, it’s a handful of schools. But those are the schools the initial study looked at (Ivies plus Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Duke). I’m suggesting if we’re going to talk about that group in particular, let’s be accurate about what aid and student demographics look like at those schools.
Re: 3: sure, there are COL differences. But aid at these schools doesn’t stop at $150k. That is just above the point at which families start paying tuition. AGI of 200k at MIT, for example, results in a COA around 40k. That assumes no other kids in school. Is that really being priced out? There are plenty of families in that income range sending their kids to out of state schools at a higher cost. If the point is that those with family incomes in the 250k+ range will be full pay, and that this creates an affordability problem for those in HCOLs, I don’t disagree. But that doesn’t seem to me to be what is implied in this thread, and certainly wasn’t the issue raised by the study, in which the salary range you mention is firmly in the top quintile. My point is that it’s not as if most teachers, librarians, and firefighters are being priced out of Harvard. For them, Harvard is likely a great deal.
Yes, I feel as if it’s like “oh, but Harvard and Stanford and Princeton are offering such great deals for the peasants. The peasants should be grateful that their aid makes it as affordable as paying full price at their flagship state u.” Seriously? Our flagship state u isn’t even really affordable. We are fortunate in that our directional has offered full tuition and our D20 could commute if she wanted to. But then, she would not be able to participate in their honors program, because all honors students are required to live on campus, and pay for a meal plan, to the tune of almost 17K/yr . :-/ The fact of the matter is that EFC on FAFSA is c-r-a-p. It is at least double or more of what most families can actually afford. And then, on top of that, most colleges expect kids to take loans. In addition to, not as a supplement to, EFC.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek Its going to be hard for any school to beat living at home, but are you saying you’ve run the NPC at one of these schools and the aid doesn’t make the school affordable?
@amsunshine The FAFSA efc is not what most families pay at these schools. Not even close. And for most middle income families the price will be far less than a state flagship.
I’m not defending the high cost of college. But this group of colleges is not the source of that problem. They are trying to alleviate the problem for moderate income families and in many—not all—cases doing so successfully.
There is also far more variation in aid given among these schools. Aid amounts offered can vary by tens of thousands of dollars per year between, say, Princeton and,Dartmouth.
“AGI of 200k at MIT, for example, results in a COA around 40k. That assumes no other kids in school. Is that really being priced out?”
Uh yes, many households with a 200K AGI do not have a spare $40K/year ($160K total) lying around.
“My point is that it’s not as if most teachers, librarians, and firefighters are being priced out of Harvard. For them, Harvard is likely a great deal.”
Another quirk of financial aid is that non-contributory final salary pensions and retiree healthcare for public employees such as firefighters don’t count against you for financial aid purposes, whereas the savings that most private sector employees have to make out of their salary for those things are assumed to be available to pay for college.
Yes. I understand exactly what our parental contribution is at the various schools. (I have actually been giving college app workshops for the past several yrs in order to help families understand the process.)
Why? Do you find it that hard to believe that families cannot afford their contribution?
I have been on these forms for a lot of years and have shared numerous times that our kids have very tiny college budgets. We are a merit seeking family. We are blessed with kids who have earned amazing scholarships and have had fabulous college opportunities.
FA formulas would expect us to not contribute to our retirement funds from 2007-2032. (We have a lot of kids who are spaced out over 21 yrs with very little overlap in college enrollment. Ironically, if we had had a couple of sets of quads we would have had a deal!! 
)