<p>collegehelp, what does the study have to do with parents’ willingness to “give till it hurts” so their kids can attend their college of choice?</p>
<p>I only skimmed the abstract but it sounds as though they studied a fairly small percentage of four-year colleges. Meaning there is unlikely to be “proof” of the outcome of matchups like South Dakota State vs. Stanford–they just wouldn’t show up.</p>
<p>That proves…precisely nothing, unless we know the financial circumstances of all the families involved, and the actual COA for students in income brackets where the parents would have to take out the kind of loans you describe.</p>
<p>You also really haven’t answered the question of why a parent deciding not to take out significant loans for college is any different than your family - or any hypothetical family - not doing the same for high school. I get that you don’t like the idea of boarding school, but there are plenty of elite day schools as well. If, as I suspect, Horace Mann students do better in college admissions than kids at most good suburban public schools, than by your logic wouldn’t parents be selfish if they wouldn’t start living on ramen and shopping at Goodwill to secure that inestimable benefit for their child?</p>
<p>And, then, the final line:</p>
<p>"We close by reminding readers that measures of revealed preference are just that: measures of desirability based on students and families making college choices. They do not necessarily correspond to educational quality.</p>
<p>OP, time to fess up: not that you like kids, get cheap or free clothes and drive an old car. But: parent, young adult, college grad, satisfied or not with your education (state or elite,) etc? Cuz you’re on a hunt to find records that interest you and seem to support your position, without the analysis- and without reassuring me, at least, that you understand the challenges of doing right by our families.</p>
<p>I find this whole discussion to be a bit silly–we can only create disagreement by using hyperbole. It seems to me that everybody agrees that it’s OK if you want to assume modest, manageable debt to underwrite a college education, and that this is even OK if you can get an education that you don’t like quite as well for less. And surely we can all agree that there are some parents out there who are selfish and don’t do as much for their kids as most (if not all) of us would think appropriate. And surely we can all agree that there are people who take out way too much debt to underwrite educations that aren’t enough better than the cheaper options to justify the debt.</p>
<p>The rest is just line-drawing.</p>
<p>What does revealed preference have to do with anything, college help? What kind of loser makes decisions in life by looking at what other people do and versus figuring out what is best for one’s own situation? If I’m choosing between schools A and B, what matters is what <em>I</em> think and how A and B compare in <em>my</em> eyes. What 99 other people did when faced with the choice of A vs B is utterly irrelevant.</p>
<p>More people like vanilla than mint chocolate chip. So? If I like mint chocolate chip, why should I care? </p>
<p>This isn’t helping your credibility, college help.</p>
<p>You know, college help, if I did a study in my state over the revealed prefs of parents, is find that the majority would pick U of I over Harvard because why send your kid 1000 mi away when U of I will get you pretty much any place you want to go and the kid can come home on weekends if he wants. Should I, if faced with that choice, care what other people would do? Of course not. So tell me again why what high schoolers prefer means anything?</p>
<p>Same in Virginia, Pizzagirl. Many top students like our state schools. That study seems pretty meaningless. It is skewed to high income ( $119,000 + in 1999 and 45% from private high schools-and probably looking at private schools and caring about the “eliteness” of a school more than the average population to begin with). For some people, prestige tends to trump fit which is why you may see a kid picking the higher ranked school regardless of best fit.</p>
<p>My reading of the revealed preference “pecking order” suggests that the choices must have been made by both students and parents because it is based on where students actually went. (Correct me if I am wrong.) I am not certain about the sampling methods. Are they representative of the general population? Well, the study was conducted by some apparently well-respected researchers and widely disseminated. You’d think they would know how to perform the sampling. I doubt that they surveyed only parents who were wealthy enough to pay full-freight. I imagine that a good number took out loans.</p>
<p>I was just trying to shed light on what the general population does with regard to selecting and paying for colleges. It is apparent that the majority in this thread are averse to loans. I have no way of knowing everybody’s individual situation. But, it appears that many people DO choose the more selective option when they can and many PROBABLY take out loans to do so.</p>
<p>I am trying to arrive at general observations of the population rather than individual cases, though the individual cases are enlightening.</p>
<p>apprenticeprof, if you live in a poorly-performing school district, yes, I would pay to send my kid to a private or parochial or Christian school or home school. But, most school districts would be adequate, I think. With enough foresight, I would buy a house in a great school district (which I did not, but I may move at some point). I bought my house for under $90K in a town with low taxes and an average school district. Seems that in the public schools, students are diverse in ability in the earlier grades but become more homogeneous in the upper grades. I think teachers have to discipline less and can teach at a higher level when students are “tracked” at some point. Better for all students, actually. Better “fit”.</p>
<p>lookingforward, I went to an elite college but come from a middle-class family. I know about financial struggles and hope to use my own resources wisely. The good news for families with low income is that elite schools make themselves affordable. Families with higher income AND higher debt may have a harder time of it.</p>
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<p>Why on EARTH would you imagine that? Most parents do not take out loans. That’s a ridiculous assumption to make. </p>
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<p>Again, based on WHAT? If anything, more selective schools are often (though certainly not always) better with FA than less selective schools.</p>
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<p>The “general population” was not the subject of the research you cite. It was people choosing between selective colleges. Did you actually read the paper?</p>
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<p>I will not be available for a while because there is a big sale on ramen noodles around here, and I will be filling our car, the “Acme Deathus Trappus,” with packages of them, till I can barely see out the front windshield. Also, I am going to see whether Goodwill will let me buy my donations back at a reduced price. :)</p>
<p>Collegehelp,
You forgot about the bottom of the chart (p. 28)</p>
<p>Tuition (In Thousands, In-state or Out-of-state, Whichever Applies) -6.443. </p>
<p>In other words, a student is 129 points more likely to choose a school with a price tag of $20,000 less, regardless of FA. So to use your JHU/U Maine example, assuming an in state student, your match up, ignoring other misc. factors like whether one’s parents attended, looks like this,</p>
<p>Johns Hopkins (tuition and fees $61,502) 2096</p>
<p>U Maine (tuition and fees $20,712) 1833 or better wins</p>
<p>Since U Maine wasn’t included in the study we don’t know where it would have ranked.</p>
<p>Furthermore, this study assumes head to head competition, which assumes that students have applied to both schools. Students don’t usually apply to schools they know they can’t afford.</p>
<p>The thing is, collegehelp, that a lower tier college is not comparable to a lower tier high school. There are high schools in this country that really are not preparing a student for the future, where even a naturally bright student may be severely limited by lack of effective teaching and/or lack of exposure to high level materials. And unlike a college student with basic fundamental skills, a student whose primary education is severely lacking, no matter how ambitious and hard-working, may not even have the resources required to supplement educational failings with self study.</p>
<p>There aren’t that many colleges in this country where you couldn’t get a reasonably good education, especially if you took it upon yourself to take on more advanced classes. Just as an experiment, I looked on the website for the English Department at a decidedly lower-tier school (average SAT under 1000). There were definitely plenty of courses that you wouldn’t see at a better school (aside from the usual writing seminar, there were elective courses like “Crafting an Argument”), but they also offered courses on Shakespeare, Victorian Lit, the Transcendentalists, Restoration Drama, and Henry James. That doesn’t mean those courses are going to be taught on as sophisticated a level as equivalents at another school, but it does mean a student who chooses to take them is being exposed to a range of excellent texts. I can assure you that a Henry James course, even if it avoids his most difficult works, is not for the faint at heart; the fact that the school can even offer it suggests that there are some quality students there.</p>
<p>I would also note that a number of faculty members have PhDs from elite schools. Given the glut of PhDs (a problem I am becoming all too aware of as I advance in my program), you’ll be learning from some very accomplished scholars almost anywhere. </p>
<p>Again, as I’ve said before I certainly wouldn’t recommend going to a lower level school if there is another affordable option, but the idea that sending your kid to such a school out of legitimate financial concerns is inflicting some harm on them isn’t, as far as I’m concerned, reasonable.</p>
<p>*I am not certain about the sampling methods. * That’s in there, too. No, not representative of the general population- and that doesn’t even matter because the general pop doesn’t qualify. Go re-read it, OP. It’s not that long.</p>
<p>It’s high schoolers. It doesn’t tell us how much the amount of aid factored in their actual decisions, the size of the loans different families needed or where the resources came form, how decisions were made, in toto. Pay attention to the right detail and use some critical thinking. We want our kids to make the right use of their educations.</p>
<p>Again, last line: [The results] do not necessarily correspond to educational quality.</p>
<p>There’s mention in the study that, just like hotel or dining assessments, we base on our own experiences as well as how many others rate some place high. But this wasn’t a survey of college seniors or recent grads. Not the same as having dined/attended somewhere. It’s about the head game. Sheesh.</p>
<p>ps. About not applying to schools they can’t afford- the study is dated 2004, pre-NPC.</p>
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<p>Only an “average” school district? What’s the matter? Don’t you love your (future) kids enough to scrimp and save for a measly apartment in an outstanding school district?<br>
(See how this works?)</p>
<p>We all make tradeoffs all the time where we may recognize that something is Better, but we don’t necessarily value the degree of Betterness enough to sacrifice anything and everything for it. There <em>were</em> better school districts than where you bought your house, but you decided yours was perfectly serviceable and just fine. Similarly, most parents may intellectually know that Harvard is <em>better</em> than the state flagship, but they don’t value that degree of betterness enough to live on ramen noodles and keep the heat at 50 degrees to afford it. </p>
<p>I value the money spent on an elite school very highly, myself. it was something very important to me and my husband. But that doesn’t obligate everyone to feel the same way. I can be very cutting towards a particular circumstance I’m familiar with where a person who really did have money to burn refused to spend on an elite school for a bright kid because he was too busy taking his flavor-of-the-month girlfriends on world cruises. But that doesn’t translate to “and therefore everyone who doesn’t sacrifice to send their kids to elite schools is a schmuck and I’m perfect.”</p>
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<p>I have been thinking about what it means to tell a child you are willing to sacrifice to send them to a school because it is more “prestigious” and to meet a better class of people. I have a feeling that might inflict some kind of harm. I realize there is sort of a continuum from best fit academics for particular child to best networking opportunities for future white collar professional careers, but at this point in the thread I am pretty much willing to support boycotting all private schools, thinking the potential damage may outweigh the benefits.</p>
<p>my own are already finished so it’s a pretty meaningless support</p>
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Did somebody refer to a better class of people? I know that some of us think it’s valuable to go to school with a better class of students, but I get annoyed when that is interpreted as my thinking that they are better people.</p>
<p>Hunt</p>
<h1>237</h1>
<p>fwiw - at this point in my life, I’m not at all sure about the better class of students, just a generally more enriched class of students, usually due to an accident of birth. Does participating in the enriched environment provide my kid more opportunities in life? absolutely. But unless my kid goes on to give back in some positive way to society, I become a little conflicted as to the point of the “prestigious” education over a more democratic public state school education.</p>
<p>ETA: There has been a lot of discussion of a particular article on this board, even references on this thread. I don’t remember anyone really talking about the “excellent sheep” part of the article. The steadily increasing number of students deliberately shaping themselves into what “top” colleges want is a relatively new phenomenon. imho. I am finding it more and more bothersome. I think it has to be tied up with this idea of prestige and exclusivity.</p>
<p>“annual take-home salary of $60k”</p>
<p>OP: Do you have any idea how much you need to make before tax to take home $60k?</p>