Uh… @CaliCash my mortgage for a 3 bedroom house is $9xx and I don’t live in Podunk USA. Even in one of the most expensive cities in my state, $900 would net a pretty nice apartment.
It might not go that far in select parts of California but in the vast majority of the U.S., it’ll get you a nice place.
^ true. Columbus Ohio houses in the OSU area go for about that for a 3BR.
@SeniorStruggling wrote
Easily said when you’re not the one pulling the cart…
" Can you imagine walking into a car dealer and having them tell you that the car you like will cost more because you can afford it? That’s exactly what private universities say to parents with high incomes."
Airlines and hotels charge a wide variety of prices for the same seat/room.
A budget traveler booking weeks/months in advance pays a lot less than the business traveler booking on short notice. The airlines/hotels impose a variety of fare rules and restrictions to sort out those who can pay more from those who can pay less. And then they jack up the prices for the wealthier customers.
Maybe we should we require airlines to sell all their seats at the exact same price?
If you don’t want to get charged more because of your income, don’t pick a school that does only need-based financial aid (like Yale). Pick one that does non-need based merit aid where your kid will qualify for merit. Or pick one of the one low price colleges. It’s a free country.
When you net it all out, a kid with better off parents has much better college choices and college access than a kid without those parental resources. The kid from a very tough situation who gets to attend Yale for free is close to a unicorn.
So don’t pull the cart by ignoring all non-merit schools. I have posted it before, but here is a partial list of non-merit schools (3% or less non-need aid). If you don’t like the current system that strives to yank as much money as possible from families who work and save, boycott these schools.
Amherst College, Amherst
Barnard College, New York
Baruch College of the City University of New York, New York
Bates College, Lewiston
Berea College, Berea
Boston College, Chestnut Hill
Brown University, Providence
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Colby College, Waterville
Colgate University, Hamilton
Connecticut College, New London
Cornell University, Ithaca
Columbia University, New York
Dartmouth College, Hanover
Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster
Georgetown University, Washington
Georgia College & State University, Milledgeville
Hamilton College, Clinton
Harvard University, Cambridge
Haverford College, Haverford
James Madison University, Harrisonburg
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
Middlebury College, Middlebury
Pitzer College, Claremont
Pomona College, Claremont
Princeton University, Princeton
Reed College, Portland
Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs
Spelman College, Atlanta
Stanford University, Stanford
State University of New York at New Paltz, New Paltz
Swarthmore College, Swarthmore
Thomas Aquinas College, Santa Paula
Tufts University, Medford
University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, Buffalo
University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
University of Texas at Austin, Austin
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie
Wellesley College, Wellesley
Wesleyan University, Middletown
West Chester University of Pennsylvania, West Chester
Western Washington University, Bellingham
Williams College, Williamstown
Yale University, New Haven
@Zinhead where did you generate that list? Some surprising ones on it, and some I’d have thought would be on it, aren’t.
@OHMomof2 - The list is generated from Kiplingers. It is a sortable list based on thier top 100 colleges. As such, it does not have all of the schools that do not offer significant merit aid, but it has most of the schools that CC would care about.
The point of the financial aid is to make it affordable and make succesful people after college.
Kenyon College, average debt upon graduation is 24k. If your parents can afford 65k and you end up without debt compared to the kid that took out loans and has 24k in debt. Well congrats you dont have to deal with a burden accumulating interest. Imagine if only the rich had access to good private schools because they had the better education opportunity and money to afford it.
Get off your high horse because financial aid is a good thing. Rich people can whine all they want over having to pay for a 65k tuition. Income over 200k has to pay that at kenyon.
So whine all you want but that kid in the inner city that has a terrible school and no access to college prep schools and private schools can’t get in and afford it if we take away financial aid.
Whine all you want, but lets face it… People would take paying full tuition and owning a lakehouse than have a full ride and be poor.
Financial aid exists to create equal opportunity. Being born poor shouldn’t make college a luxury, and being born rich shouldn’t make it an entitlement.
If you can afford it, then good for you because that means you’re top 1% in the country.
@zinhead - thanks. I was wondering where the popular UCs, Northwestern and Emory were and found them in the 4-6% range.
@northwesty wrote
This is a totally FLAWED analogy.
Airlines and hotels don’t charge different prices on the basis of the income of their customers. They offer the same jacked-up fare for a last minute booking whether you are rich or poor. Rich customers are just as eligible to avail themselves of cheap early-booked fares.
Airlines don’t impose fare rules to sort out poor and rich customers. Yield fares are a strategy to balance revenue stream.
The reason airlines charge a cheap fare for non refundable tix is that a 100% chance of revenue from a low fare is as valuable as the revenue from a ticket that costs 5x as much but where there’s an 80% chance the seat will be refunded or not not sold.
I have a fundamental problem with the kvetching that goes on with people bashing elite private college tuition prices. After all nobody is forcing anyone to buy what they are selling. Certainly not everyone can take a two week family vacation to Hawaii in one season and Aspen in another season all the while flying first class and staying in five star hotels. Some can, most cannot. So the fact that these private schools make themselves affordable to a large group of kids who otherwise would never be able to attend is itself commendable and an affirmation of their liberal and progressive values. Nevertheless, there is no specific requirement that you must attend one of these schools to become very successful in life. Indeed, the majority of corporate CEOs, the highest paid athletes, celebrities and entrepreneurs mostly derive from schools outside this rarified orbit. So like everything else in life in a capitalist economic system, its a question of consumer choice and supply and demand. Given the dramatic increase in wealth in the top 1% of the world, all of these schools could charge maybe twice their stated tuition and still easily fill up their quota of students without suffering any significant drop in academic quality.
So at the end of the day, we should be very happy that these schools consider it important to seek a diverse student body, not just in terms of race or ethnic lines, but more important a diverse student body in terms of family income and economic income level, because otherwise these schools would be full of nothing else but rich smart kids from the worlds top 1%.
My wife and I were at a private college that our daughter almost went to and we were in programs that were for parents, there was a financial aid presentation, and I knew we would receive none, but we stayed to listen to the presentation any way. There was a Q&A session at the end and a parent raised their hand (all parents in the program were the parents of accepted students) the parent wanted to know if their financial aid award exceeded their child’s total cost of attendance were they allowed to keep the extra money. This was a highly ranked private LAC that had a $60,000 plus annual cost of attendance. We are a struggling full pay family (our choice!) I was initially miffed that was even possible, but I looked at this woman who asked sincerely and I looked at her daughter who looked like a lovely young woman and I thought in my mind, it is time to get past thinking only about your own circumstances and think about the circumstances of others. I am glad this young woman can attend with no out of pocket expense and if she has money left over to fly home for Thanksgiving or to buy a computer to assist her in her studies well than good for her.
It is an important component of the diversity that a college should have, and if these kids have got the goods to be admitted to these schools they should have the opportunity to attend without burying themselves in debt.
The airline, car whatever analogy is totally flawed anyway - you don’t buy a college education by walking into a college and handing them a check in exchange for a degree. You earn it by doing the work for 4 (or more) years.
Income-based pricing on things like cars is not unusual, but it usually benefits the wealthy.
Well-off folks will pay less in interest on a car or a house or a boat because they can pay cash or put more money down or just qualify for a better interest rate on the loan because of their income/assets/credit, for example.
Is this far? Not really, but we can opt out of that, too.
Why would I boycott the best schools because they choose to focus their financial resources on those who need the aid the most? Their actual costs are higher than their tuition, as high as it is. Sure, we all wish tuition was lower, but no one is forcing you to go there, and they are private institutions that can do what they want.
I’m really not feeling the outrage.
Colleges provide a service, not durable goods like car dealerships, and they’ve discovered that people will pay premium prices for their brand so they charge premium prices. If you don’t value the service enough to pay full price for it, then you’re wiser to take your business elsewhere. But it’s a waste of time and mental energy to resent lower income people because they got a deal or to resent the colleges that gave it to them.
If you read the financial aid forum it becomes apparent that lots of colleges make ridiculous offers. It seems like families who earn close to the median (~$60k/year or so) routinely receive offers that expect them to contribute nearly half their income every year. They generally don’t become outraged or complain that the low income kids are getting a deal because they know the ~$5k Pell grant and $5500/year student loan don’t go far; they just toss the offer into the recyclables and move on. If you don’t think a school is worth the money they’re asking, ditch the offer and focus on the affordable options.
Google up the term “price discrimination” and you’ll see three industries cited as the prime examples – airlines, hotels and colleges. The yield management pricing systems used by many colleges literally are taken from the airlines.
While they all don’t function identically, they are basically the same – high fixed costs, low variable costs, and a product (seat on a flight, seat in the freshman class) that has a fixed expiration date. The goal is to sell all the seats if possible while meeting the business’s goals. For an airline, the goal is highest total revenue per flight. For a college, revenue is a goal but there are also other goals to be met as well – diversity, academic qualifications, etc.
The airline fare rules (Saturday night stay for example) don’t have any impact on the cost of providing the product. But they function to divide the customer base into different groups who can then be charged different prices. Colleges divide their customer base into different groups that can be charged different prices using income (for the need-only type schools like HYPS) or using academic credentials (for the merit money schools like Case, USC, Tulane, Miami), or a combination of both.
The airline/college analogy is the single most important thing I’ve learned from CC and sending my first two kids through college. It really explains a lot of how things work.
Late to the party, but the obvious answer is that it makes no sense to lower tuition for the 1%'ers. Clearly, Mark Zuckerberg has the wherewithal to pay mega bucks to send his kid to college, so why offer him a discount, when college tuition is not even a rounding error in his household?
The thing about college tuition that bothers me is that the people in the “middle” get totally screwed. The poor are given financial aid, and rightfully so, and the wealthy can go wherever they want simply because they can. But what happens to families like mine who are in the middle? We also have to pay full tuition, not because we make a lot, but because we saved a lot and all assets count when asking for aid. The middle class is forced to use their savings to pay for an astronomical amount for college if they want their kid to go to a top tier school with no merit aid.
In essence, those paying full tuition are also paying for those with aid. I think it would be better if the colleges charged on a sliding scale, dependent on your income. Then it would be fair for everyone. You pay what you can afford, and everyone has the same ability to go to a college of their choosing.
Why should an extremely bright kid have to take top tier schools off their list just because their parents happen to have put away a nice sum of money for emergencies and retirement?
But schools don’t count retirement funds. They do count the annual contributions to retirement funds and that’s where we got hit for EFC. But honestly, you do what you can. If we stopped contributing to our retirement, yeah, we probably could be full-pay using that and savings (we have a chunk of change but it’s not much either). But DH and I have our priorities: retirement over college. Others may be better prepared and have ample funds for both. I’m not going to resent the people who can pay out of pocket without any pain, and I’m certainly not going to resent the people whose earnings equal the COA of a private school whose kids may get full rides.
No child is entitled to a “top tier” school.
There are sliding scales for other services: childcare, health clinics, law services. Not all places offer them but like colleges, some try to make these services more accessible to those who may need it but can’t afford the full charge.
I also see tons of posts from kids whose parents earn $10-20K and colleges are giving them a net price of $10-15K. Which is a MUCH more typical situation than a free ride given that very, very few kids go to the super generous schools.