<p>Reed is in beautiful setting, …and it does kind of remind me of a country club. Great school. Great place. Worth every penny.</p>
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<p>You didn’t mishear. Marite - maybe its’ different in different fields, but in the biomedical field it’s routine for colleges to take a huge slice of NIH grants for overhead. They sometimes confiscated over 50% of the grant this way. The schools get very creative in defining “overhead” in order to justify grabbing more of the grants. I recall at my grad school, UC Davis, the overhead charges included a charge to pay for campus guard dogs. I never saw a guard dog there in my entire four years. Professors just hate the whole overhead game. </p>
<p>It got so bad at Stanford a few years ago that a scandal erupted. Stanford had long led the nation in Overhead Charge Theory, but when they broke the 90% mark a public controversy ensued. UC Berkeley and UCSF were able to recruit away some of their rising stars with promise of lower overheads. I think Stanford did in the end rethink their overhead charges, but it’s still pretty bad out there.</p>
<p>Yes, one of the decisions universities have to make is how much overhead to return to the principal investigator (PI), the person running the grant. By the way, there are many govt grants with a specified % for overhead.</p>
<p>You wouldn’t need to “clear the market” - just raise the list price to the point where the quality of “full-freighters” didn’t decline when the number of applications began to. I expect that’s probably at around the $65k range or so, but there is no way to know until the prices rise (which they will). Until then, prices are way too low.</p>
<p>Coureur:</p>
<p>I know universities charge high overheads–and much of it doesn’t get back to the PI and staff. It stays with the grants office. I don’t know if the university as a whole benefits from the high overheads charged to the funding agency (75% for one agency I know of). That was what surprised me about the statement, not the huge overheads themselves.</p>
<p>Some foundations absolutely refuse to pay a nickel for overheads which can be difficult as any time a researcher gets a grant, that researcher makes greater demands on the support staff. And if it involves foreign visitors, the demands are doubled or tripled. </p>
<p>I remember the Stanford case. It involved, among other expenses, mucho $$ for flowers and various lavish receptions.</p>
<p>“You wouldn’t need to “clear the market” - just raise the list price to the point where the quality of “full-freighters” didn’t decline when the number of applications began to. I expect that’s probably at around the $65k range or so, but there is no way to know until the prices rise (which they will). Until then, prices are way too low.”</p>
<p>I think of anything MINI’s $65K is a little low. There are lots of parents who would sell a kidney and turn tricks down at the local nursing home after coming home from the second jo if money alone would get their kid in HYP.</p>
<p>It is a funny world we live in.</p>
<p>$45k is chump change. It says so here:</p>
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<a href=“http://www.purseblog.com/styles/brands/hermes/[/url]”>http://www.purseblog.com/styles/brands/hermes/</a></p>
<p>Mini,</p>
<p>That is an interesting way of rephrasing the question of clearing the market. My guess is that the colleges may be using your definition and that they (HYP) feel that number is around 45K and that is how we got to that number.</p>
<p>Clearing the market is an interesting concept. But as we all know, if you could just buy into HYP it wouldn’t be worth nearly as much. The book, “The Price of Admission”, explains that some folks do buy their way in by buying a library or making a similar donation to a school. But if everyone could just walk up and pull out a Black Amex Card and get their kid admitted having a degree from HYP would be much less impressive and worth much less. When you stand back and look at the process it really is amazing that we have gotten to where we are. Who would have designed the system like this from scratch?</p>
<p>“But if everyone could just walk up and pull out a Black Amex Card and get their kid admitted having a degree from HYP would be much less impressive and worth much less.”</p>
<p>Actually I kind of doubt that. The fact is most people want to go to Harvard precisely because they want to rub elbows with their percieved betters. In America Betters is more or less generally defined by those with a lot of money.</p>
<p>Read these boards and the primary arguement people present for reducing themselves to penury in order to send their kid to HYP as opposed to a full ride at a school a couple dozen slots down the USNWR rankings list is the “contacts” they will make and the “opportunities” they will be able to avail themselves of. I have spent a little time observing the rich and powerful over the years and come to two conclusions. One is they like to hang around together in really nice places, and the other is they don’t particularly like to share their stuff though they are frequently more than willing to have you share yours with the folks they think deserve it.</p>
<p>The trick for HYP to keep the number of apps up if they go the Black Amex route is to still claim you have holistic admissions. What this means in practice is that on rare occassions for no discernable reason you admit a fat, red headed Eagle Scout from Bumpass, Kentucky with a badge in frog taxidermy, a 4.0 gpa, 1500 on the SATs, and barely a pot to pee in. The stated reason for doing this is that this year you just desperately need a frog taxidermist and fat red headed kids to round out the class. The actual purpose is to keep the booboisie coming with the delusion that they actually have a chance of getting to rub elbows with their betters if only they get the correct Boy Scout badge and happen to be short, fat, tall, red, black, brown or whatever unstated thing HYP will allegedly decide they just must have next year to construct a class that looks like Aspen Colorado.</p>
<p>"Mini,</p>
<p>That is an interesting way of rephrasing the question of clearing the market. My guess is that the colleges may be using your definition and that they (HYP) feel that number is around 45K and that is how we got to that number."</p>
<p>Highly, highly unlikely. At 10% admissions rates, most prestige colleges are less economically diverse than they were 25 years ago. So it is likely (not proven, but likely) that, as a percentage of total applicants, the potential “full-freighters” has gone up, not down. </p>
<p>No one is suggesting that one should be able to “buy” into prestige colleges - although one can actually do that now - the only question is the price. I think it would be great to reserve a certain percentage of admissions and openly auction them off to the highest bidder, among “pre-qualified” applicants. Colleges essentially do that now, but the auction isn’t public. </p>
<p>There is no evidence that at anywhere near current prices, the qualifications of full-freighters is declining. (The colleges seem to think the opposite.)</p>
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<p>Some do. Not all. S chose H because of its math department. There is no denying that H has one of the top math departments in the country. The “betters” in his case are better at math than he is. I know for certain some are on huge financial aid packages (including many internationals). No Black AMEX for them.</p>
<p>Marite, I’ll see your Hermes diamond crocodile Birkin (I dont know what a Birkin is… not a hairpiece is it? ) and raise you one diamond encrusted shift knob!! 
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<p><a href=“http://most-expensive.net/shift-knob[/url]”>http://most-expensive.net/shift-knob</a></p>
<p>*Birkin is… not a hairpiece is it? *</p>
<p>I think that would be a merkin 
not so much the fashion anymore from what I see in the gym.</p>
<p>When I hear about the cost of ridiculously expensive cars, clothes and jewelry I get a warm feeiing. It’s nice to know that the really rich are spending thier money on stuff I don’t really care about. </p>
<p>But back to the OP, do any of you have any ideas about how the costs of a collge education could be reduced without sacrificing quality?</p>
<p>NJres: A Birkin is a bag, named after the actress Jane Birkin (whoever she is).<br>
EK: Would one bring a $45k bag (chump change) to the gym? And if one could afford a $45k, would one not want one’s own private trainer?</p>
<p>To think that I could have steered S toward full merit scholarships. I could have saved $180k and would have been able to afford the Birkin bag and had (chump) change left over.</p>
<p>Marite
I was referring to the need for a [url=<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkin]merkin[/url”>Merkin - Wikipedia]merkin[/url</a>] as apparently unneccesary- going by the styles of “hair” that I see in the gym
To totally do without, seems more common.</p>
<p>Although we do have people who bring their personal trainers- we don’t even have a handball court! ( or a jacuzzi)
But its clean and the people are very nice :D</p>
<p>I don’t think the women of Ballard would know a $45K bag if it bought them a latte’</p>
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<p>Curious:</p>
<p>There are some savings that can be made by colleges; how much they would reduce tuition costs isn’t clear. For example, sourcepacks have become ubiquitous on campuses. Nowadays, however, it is possible for colleges to acquire copyright permission for articles and excerpts from books, and then upload them onto course websites. This can achieve some significant savings for large classes. What is a significant saving for individual students or classes, however, may not lower tutition costs by very much.</p>
<p>When Yale had a financial crisis, it deferred building maintenance and regular upkeep such as window-washing and lawn-mowing. It must have achieved fairly siginificant results. But the deferred maintenance eventualy became quite costly.</p>
<p>More and more colleges are hiring adjuncts rather than tenure-ladder faculty. While the adjuncts can be every bit as qualified as tenure-ladder profs, the experience for students may be quite inferior since adjuncts don’t have offices, don’t take part in decision-making and may not be able to advise students since they are not part of the community.</p>
<p>Lots of colleges achieved savings in the 1990s by replacing support staff with technology and shifting the burden of typing, photocopying, etc… onto profs.</p>
<p>“But back to the OP, do any of you have any ideas about how the costs of a collge education could be reduced without sacrificing quality?”</p>
<p>Yes stop the government from pumping money into it. Stafford loans, Pell Grants and all the rest are merely driving the costs up because they don’t impact the studeny/family ability to pay. The universities are not willing to leave money on the table so to speak so evert found dollar coming from a source external to the customer simple gets tacked on to the cost.</p>
<p>To be fair the schools are in an arms race themselves. I don’t mean a junior year abroad and a campus in Geneva are totally useless but they definitely are not required to learn French or study the Reformation.</p>
<p>The kinds of steps government should be taking are things like cracking down on ED admissions as ant-competitive and forcing more disclosure on the schools with respect to sources of money and where it goes. Actual pricing and admissions standards, preferential pricing schemes etc. In fact I think we should take the FAFSA info away from the school altogether. Let what aid the government does dispense be between the families, students, and government. There is not reason why the universities need to know this info.</p>
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<p>Can you clarify? I thought that for private insitutions, the FAFSA information is used by these institutions to make finaid decisions. If the information required under FAFSA did not exist, some other way of extracting it would need to be devised by the institutions themselves, unless they decided not to give any one finaid. I’m sure families would prefer to fill out one FAFSA form to be used by multiple institutions than a different one for the several colleges that the kids will be applying to. Or am I missing something?</p>