@blossom, I once read an article in which the father of Elaine Chao (who held the positions: Secretary of the Labor Department, and the director of Peace Corp in her life time) said that she is the poorest among his (4?) daughters but he believes she has achieved more than his other daughters and himself.
I am curious about how “poor” she is relative to her other family members, and then I found a link like this (I guess the definition of being poor is very different for some people.)
The author claims that the almost all (at least a very high proportion of it) of the wealth of the Senator McConnell came from her inheritance:
As regard to whether her husband “helped” her political career and also her father in his business in the past, I have no clue. (Do not intend to get into political affairs here.)
I am not sure how much the McConnell family contributed to Harvard Business School though (totally 40 millions among the 4 daughters.) I think this happened just one year or two ago so it happened after she had inherited that money from her father.
When DS applied to colleges, I also discouraged him to apply to colleges on the west coast (well.,except for one LAC in the end.)
@uclaalumnus, ROI is indeed more likely a concern among the poorer students. The major or career path that more likely requires more grinds (e.g., engineering, premed, etc.) is more likely to be favored/considered by such students. DS once said that in his path in college, the peers along this path are almost like “who’s who” from a public high school (i.e., the classmates tend to be from the same group of students from a competitive public high school in or near some major city.) I guess the academic environment (outside of ECs) on such an educational path in college is very similar to what these students had in their prior competitive high school - This could likely be the case no matter which college they attend. They tend to choose this career path partly because they are aware that it may be a better bet for someone whose family lacks the connections after college.
I find myself in agreement with @Pizzagirl. We all have different economic and family situations, attitudes toward toward the value of education, sense of our roles as parents, and abilities to communicate with our college applicant kids. Parents will be divorced or not. Kids will have learning disabilities or medical problems … .So we will do things differently.
I see my role as trying to help my kids find a path to a fulfilling adult life, which includes professional satisfaction, personal satisfaction, family (if they want one), … . Income in jobs is a part of that but only a part . So is having a sense of real contribution; having time for family. I’d like them to understand about their choices in life. I can give them a sense of how I see the world and their choices but ultimate value judgments are up to them. Because income is a dimension but only one, ROI calculations would partially miss the ultimate point. I can help them figure out how actions today might increase the probabilities of certain outcomes later. That has implications for how I guide/advise them (and there has been a transition as they have matured from choose for them to guide to advise).
With regard to the modestly named @Gr8One’s comments on Duke/Yale, some people are going to be constrained financially. Others are not. I’d suggest that the Duke/Yale problem is a top 10% or 5% problem and not a top 0.5% problem. The CC parents are probably over-represented on the higher end of the income distribution for a variety of reasons but with the the top 10%, 5%, and 1% well-represented but the top 0.1% probably under-represented. This isn’t a pity the rich statement, but people at that end of the income spectrum also have concerns about how to help their kids just like other parents and seek information from helpful people at CC with prior experience. So, no need to be snide about their choices, even if you don’t like the fact that they might have that choice.
My sense is that a reasonable percentage of folks on CC would fit into this category. If you are interested, the quote above comes from the following site of a lefty-leaning sociology professor but the author of this piece is a person who manages money for wealthy folks. http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/investment_manager.html.
Finally, I agree with @Hunt. There are intangibles that will be valuable enough for some people to pay for if they can afford it. In addition to the intangibles, I see that there are opportunities that kids at say Harvard are much more likely to get than kids at the top state school. Some of these opportunities come because the kids are exceptional but I know kids who are perfectly fine but in no way exceptional but got in because their parents are exceptional. This latter category has gotten opportunities that they just wouldn’t have had elsewhere; the good news is that they have taken the opportunities and run with them. That plus the value of the network goes beyond intangibles.
Could be immodest
Could be old enough to remember Jackie Gleason
Could be a Wayne Gretsky fan
or the last, true one-nice short name, meets the user name criteria an easy to remember in this day when we have a zillion UN’s and passwords to remember. I was embarrassed when what I thought would be only visible to me turned out to be what everyone sees.
Shawbridge I may be off on the top .5% but I think you are off at 10%. Somewhere in between is probably accurate. $200k per kid for undergrad is out of the question for the vast majority of families. Not to mention what percentage of kids out of the total freshman population each year really have the credentials to get in to Duke, Stanford, Ivy. No way 10% of the entire frosh population has a shot, I know this because I input my own kids numbers into the available search engines (and I would guess he falls within the top 10% of students in his class, even with a poor showing on the PSAT), but his chances at Duke or Stanford were slim to none. Not sour grapes, kudos to those kids who are bright enough and hard working enough to get in. They deserve a great education, but they, and those parents who can afford it, are among the very few with a real shot at getting in and paying that much.
I’ll go out on a limb with no statistics to back me up and state that poorer students are likely to congregate in early childhood education, nursing, etc. These kids ROI look very different from that of an affluent classmate. Every year they are not in the workforce is a serious opportunity cost. The colleges that cater to the needs/price point of poor students aren’t churning out Classics majors with great abandon- they focus on getting kids (many of whom work a full time job) credentialed at something that pays the bills.
MCAT, I don’t know where you live, but in my part of the world, poor kids aren’t heading off to premed or engineering. The Community College near me would be an exceptionally poor choice for both premed and engineering- and it has a decent track record of getting kids to the state U after their AA is completed. The kids at the public U’s populate the undergrad business majors and allied health. Engineering?
@Gr8One, let’s separate ability to get in from income distribution. Your response dealing with admissions chances did not connect well to my post so perhaps I was not as clear as I could have been. I didn’t address at all students’ chances of getting in to Princeton or Stanford. The probability that any student drawn at random from the population of seniors would be admitted to a particular top 10 school is clearly less than 10% (although the question we need to answer is the what the probability is of getting in to the top 10 schools if one applied to all of them, but even that must be way below 10% given the number of seniors and the number of slots at the top 10 schools).
I agree that $200K or $250K is out of the question for the vast majority of families. I was addressing the 90th percentile of the income distribution (which already eliminates the vast majority of families). With respect to the income distribution, the 90th percentile of the household income distribution (or equivalently, the income at the bottom of the top 10%) appears to be about $120K (courtesy of Google). Here’s what Harvard’s website said (I think current, but one cannot always tell):
As students from the Class of 2016 use the calculator, they will see that families with incomes between $65,000 and $150,000 will contribute from 0 to 10 percent of income, depending on individual circumstances. Beginning with the Class of 2016, families with incomes between $150,000 and $180,000 will be asked to pay slightly more than 10 percent of income.
So, if I understand things correctly, a family with $120K in household income would be expected to contribute $12K per year or a bit above $50K total given tuition inflation. Am I reading this correctly? If so, I’d think that they might be able to make the Yale/Duke choice, but not without pain.
Whether they choose Yale plus pain instead of Duke is a value choice. You would not make that choice. It sounds like Hunt probably would. I would likely make such a choice where the economics made sense – I’d probably do it for a kid who wanted to study science or economics but probably not for art. My daughter was going to apply to nursing school in Canada, where our costs were roughly $15K for tuition, room and board. I was willing to pay for a school in the US at full-pay because it guaranteed her admission to a nurse practitioner program if she kept her grades up. Knowing my daughter, she might not have gone on for an advanced degree given her personality and I had gotten information telling me that NP’s are the sweet spot of the health care system and get treated with a lot more respect than nurses, so I really thought her life would be better with an NP degree. To make that a high likelihood, I was willing to pay the increment. So, I made my value choice there.
Even though I’m a Senior in high school, my mother went through something similar to this. She got into Colgate, and was there for about a year before she couldn’t take it anymore and HATED it. She dropped out, and eventually went to a small school in her state. From there, she got into Georgetown for her PhD and met my father-and thusly had my brothers and me (there are four of us). She’s worked for three Senators in high ranking positions, and has had 3 big companies offering her salaries upwards of 500,000 per year (after tax deductions) when she announced she wanted to move on from the Capitol. The school she went to wasn’t anything compared to Colgate in terms of ranking. What I’m saying is that she went to a small school at a ‘low rank’ and still succeeded in life. If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be alive. And now that I’m going to college-as the oldest-she stepped back and let me choose my college (UMW) regardless of the fact that I got into other high ranked schools (I think UMW’s ranking was the third or fourth highest in the colleges I got into). So if your kid feels right there, then let them be. If they make a mistake then fine. But if my mom hadn’t gone to that small tiny school then she might not have been so successful. It just goes to show that ranking has little to do with job potential.
College decisions are a complicated juggling act, and I think that students will be more invested in the success of their education the more choice they have. Our son is in the midst of deciding between 1. A liberal arts college that is nationally ranked in the top 50, with a generous merit aid offer but not particularly strong in his major. 2. A liberal arts college nationally ranked in the top 100 with a strong program in his major and an almost full tuition scholarship, and 3. a highly ranked regional university with an exceptionally strong program in his major and a full tuition scholarship. The difference in price is substantial, though all are affordable for us. So which will he choose? I have no idea, and I think there are good arguments to be made for each of them.
No way would my parents have let me pick an undergrad school that’s maybe in the top 100 or so at best vs. one that’s in the top 20 LACs, for weather reasons.
When I was looking at law school, I narrowed the choice to two of them: one in the top 5 and another that was just 2 numbers below, but still in the top 10. My parents nearly lost it and were going to let me make the choice to go to the lower-ranked one (again, still in the top 10), but they literally exploded about it.
@MaddyDUMW, wouldn’t you say that Georgetown would have opened doors for your mother?
If my sons are 100% self-sufficient, then they have the right to pick wherever they want to go. I would give advice if I feel they are making a dumb choice, but ultimately it would be their decision.
If, however, I’m paying the bills and getting in debt over their education, then I would certainly set some ground rules about which colleges (and major) they can pursue. This is not a restrictive as it sounds. My son applied to 13 schools, all of which we deemed to be great schools in terms of quality and area, and highly plausible for him to be accepted.
For us, the goal of an higher education is to become a working and contributing member of society. That’s it. Plain and simple.
So, to that end we have set these clear rules:
If you want to study Guatemalan Tribal Languages, WE WON'T PAY FOR THAT EDUCATION. You can pursue hobbies after you graduate.
If you become an anti-American while at college, WE WON'T PAY FOR THAT EDUCATION. We are immigrants and recognize the value of the opportunities we have been afforded by this great country. It's not perfect, but certainly damn better than China and France!
If you decide that drinking irresponsibly or doing illegal drugs is the thing to do in college and we find out, WE WON'T PAY FOR THAT EDUCATION, etc., etc. You get my point.
We are a hard working family and have other children to put through college, so we won’t fund a four-year party.
I sympathize with @Arriba, but would be a little softer. If someone were partying and not working, they shouldn’t be in school. OTOH, if they want to study something that is unlikely to have any link to careers, I might suggest doing that at a lower cost school. I’d like to understand the kid’s reasons and dedication. Sometimes obscure things lead to careers. I hadn’t thought about anti-American. Hasn’t ever come up. I don’t mind some partying, but that is letting off steam from working hard. If partying is the main event, the kid shouldn’t be in school.
@Shawbride, yeah, I know I sound harsh but I come from poverty and with very hard work have managed to become middle class. Not upper middle class, just an average family in a modest suburb. There is no room in our finances for any of our kids to explore a non-caree
"Recently just spoke to some parents that picked an inferior school, vastly inferior, because the kid liked the weather better.
Is this common that weather and location plays such a big role in the ultimate decision? "
-I have 2 comments. There is not such thing as inferior schools. There are kids with inferior work ethic though. Another comment is that I can see that weather may be criteria #1, in my D’s case, the location WAS criteria #1 for choosing both college and her Medical School. In fact, she stood very strong on her own about it and did not let any advisors derail her from this stand…and they tried very hard as she graduated #1 from her HS and as a top pre-med from in her college class, receiving several awards for both.
Any place will work for a hard working kid. The success story is up to a kid, not the place!! However, the match between kid and the place is very important. If weather or location (and in my D’s case, additional “inferior” consideration was a pretty campus) are top criteria, so be it. D. is graduating from the Med. School in May. Her college was 3.5 driving distance from home and her Med. School is 2 hours away. She refused to apply beyond 5.5 hours of driving. The first time that she ever was flying all over the country, was her residency application cycle. Thank goodness, it is behind, it was the only stressful, I would call it brutal application process that D. ever experienced. Everything before it was relaxed and mostly enjoyable. Why - because she applied where she wanted and got in where she wanted, and it is very important even if weather and location are the highest criteria.
Arriba ~ I couldn’t agree with you more. We are also a middle class family (well, I’m lower middle for sure lol) and I’m scrimping and making substantial sacrifices for D to go to college. I could insist that she go to cc but I won’t. I could insist that she go to the lower-priced state schools, but I won’t. She was given a budget (matches the instate flagship COA) and can choose from those schools that she applied to that come in under that price or there-abouts. I did set parameters though, including what majors I would and would not pay for. I have also set a minimum GPA and other academic expectations. There is wiggle room with explanations but there is no way I’m paying for her to get a low-paying career choice degree or support any type of partying while she is attending college. She can do those things once she graduates and is financially self-sufficient.
@PurpleTitan, Sorry if I was unclear. I doubt there are huge differences in economics departments between Yale and Duke. Don’t know about science. Yale’s CS department is not strong and the two schools may be at the same level in CS.
My point wasn’t really about Duke versus Yale per but about the perceived benefits of prestige-- contacts, alumni network, name recognition outside the US, etc. and maybe a slightly different perception from employers between schools one tier apart on the perceived prestige scale --that kids or parents might be thinking about. Of HYPSM, Yale is the school I know the least. My uninformed sense is that Yale has declined in academic stature while Stanford and Princeton have risen significantly and Harvard has stayed flat…
@shawbridge, I won’t disagree about the relative placement of HYPSM.
However, I’d say that Yale and Duke are a half-tier apart at most.
Even in perceived benefits of prestige, other than maybe in terms of international recognition, I think it’s really hard to make the case that Yale would give you a clear leg up compared to Duke in those other aspects that you cited.