Why the middle class has a huge disadvantage in admissions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The bad news is that life is terribly unfair. The good news is the military is hiring & their education benefits are outstanding. So quit the I-live-in-McLean-and-only-make-$200k pouting & get your kid to start doing 200 push-ups per day.

Seems like the same advice should also go to low income people. Please quit the I-haven’t-figured-out-how-to-get-ahead-so-give-me-everything-for-free pouting.
It is true that life is unfair… for everyone.

You really are a pill.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why not use the state school option?

A lot of middle class do it.
But the conversation with your teenager is not going to be easy.
Kid: I am so excited to be accepted to my favorite and top college in the country.
You: We can’t afford 80k a year, instead you should go to state university.
Kid : So, tell me why I was working so hard in high school?
You : Well…

So have this conversation with them when they start high school/ start thinking about colleges.

We did, but DC came up with different arguments like the state university is high school 2.0 and it is too big.

There are plenty of LACs willing to offer merit aid to bring the COA down to the price of an in-state school. If you were in this financial situation, how did you outsource so much of the list building, etc?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The bad news is that life is terribly unfair. The good news is the military is hiring & their education benefits are outstanding. So quit the I-live-in-McLean-and-only-make-$200k pouting & get your kid to start doing 200 push-ups per day.

Seems like the same advice should also go to low income people. Please quit the I-haven’t-figured-out-how-to-get-ahead-so-give-me-everything-for-free pouting.
It is true that life is unfair… for everyone.

I grew up in a high poverty area and I never knew a single kid who so much as applied to an Ivy school. This is a total myth invented by disgruntled high-income-but-not-rich yuppies.

All the smart kids from my husbands blue collar town in OH made it out. He had a single mother with 3 jobs.

Columbia, Duke, Hopkins, a few state flagships. Back then Pell grants and tuition not as outrageous made it possible. But it takes a good HS counselor and someone telling them they can do it.

The ones that screwed around and partied and got pregnant in high school or thought they were rich from their job at TJ Fridays are still there.

I'm a similar kid from Midwest. I had a great, great teacher in elementary school who came to our home and told my parents that I was college material. While a few kids in our neighborhood attended the local community college for the trades/LPN degree, I was the first kid to go to college. My HS counselor, however, basically told me that I was too ambitious and should consider a secretarial program - "you're smart enough that you could even be a legal secretary." She is saying this to a kid with a 4.0 in college track classes.

Fortunately the voice in my head was that of the teacher, not the counselor, and also knew I had the support of my parents who were not resistant to higher ed as were so many other parents in our neighborhood.

That said, I feel for my classmates who are still there, especially if it is because there wasn't someone in their corner.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why not use the state school option?

A lot of middle class do it.
But the conversation with your teenager is not going to be easy.
Kid: I am so excited to be accepted to my favorite and top college in the country.
You: We can’t afford 80k a year, instead you should go to state university.
Kid : So, tell me why I was working so hard in high school?
You : Well…

Your kid isn’t getting in to the Harvards of the world (neither is mine). But if a/he got in, you would figure it out. 84% of students accepted to Harvard accepted a spot there this year. There were some that chose other schools but it is unlikely that many kids got in who decided not to go because of the cost. The data doesn’t support this.

Not Harvard but DC was accepted to t-10 college.
And that’s the exact conversation we had.

There are tens of thousands of kids every year who would be competitive for T20 schools and simply never apply because they already know they can’t afford it. This isn’t some new phenomenon or rare exception.

Nobody said it is new phenomenon.
This is about being not rich enough to be full pay, or poor enough to get financial aid.

The only thing has changed is schools do more for poor kids than before. Not being rich enough to pay has always been a thing.

We are fortunate enough to be full pay. I was full FA when I was in school, but back then that meant a lot of loans and work study in addition to grants. I tell my kids my one regret about that era is that there were no supports/resources for first gen kids or even an awareness of our existence, just indifference.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The bad news is that life is terribly unfair. The good news is the military is hiring & their education benefits are outstanding. So quit the I-live-in-McLean-and-only-make-$200k pouting & get your kid to start doing 200 push-ups per day.

Yup, life is terribly unfair. You can choose to live your life feeling sorry for yourself or go into debt to try to do what you think you deserve or you can accept that, and forge the best possible path.
And the good news is your kid with the stats/resume for an elite/T25 university will get into plenty of your state schools, often the honors programs, and plenty of schools in the 40-80 range that give excellent merit. So if you apply accordingly, your kid will have excellent places to go that cost the same or less than instate.

The only people mad about this are people who are educationally “downwardly mobile.” They can’t afford for their kids what their parents afforded for them, AKA “the best school you can get into.” For most of us, state flagship was always the ceiling.

+a million

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^as if all of us did European vacations and drive Mercedes. LOL. Clueless. Net price calculator EVERYWHERE is that we will get $0. We saved, we aren't big spenders, etc.

There is this complete disconnect that people don't understand how hard some of us worked and the sacrifices we made after paying off our own student loans because now we fall just outside the aid group. And, any generational advantage we managed to scrape up to will essentially be wiped out by college tuition.

Instead of fighting with each other, we all need to demand something be done about the exorbitant cost of college these days. It will be $100k year soon for many of these private universities and the publics will bump accordingly. AT 85K, we aren't that far away from it.

Since you have struggled so much with student loan debt of your own (and your spouses), I would think you would understand that where you go does not matter---it's what you do while there and that student loan debt is NOT worth it. Amazing that you list that as a struggle yet somehow still think your kids and/or you should take on massive debt for college. Imagine the gift of state school or private with good merit that means your kid only takes on $27K total of debt and you take on none.

I was a STEM major, my kid is not. The actual school is much more important for future employment.

Well, many of us who were not STEM majors and didn't attend prestige schools have still managed to be successful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^as if all of us did European vacations and drive Mercedes. LOL. Clueless. Net price calculator EVERYWHERE is that we will get $0. We saved, we aren't big spenders, etc.

There is this complete disconnect that people don't understand how hard some of us worked and the sacrifices we made after paying off our own student loans because now we fall just outside the aid group. And, any generational advantage we managed to scrape up to will essentially be wiped out by college tuition.

Instead of fighting with each other, we all need to demand something be done about the exorbitant cost of college these days. It will be $100k year soon for many of these private universities and the publics will bump accordingly. AT 85K, we aren't that far away from it.

Since you have struggled so much with student loan debt of your own (and your spouses), I would think you would understand that where you go does not matter---it's what you do while there and that student loan debt is NOT worth it. Amazing that you list that as a struggle yet somehow still think your kids and/or you should take on massive debt for college. Imagine the gift of state school or private with good merit that means your kid only takes on $27K total of debt and you take on none.

I was a STEM major, my kid is not. The actual school is much more important for future employment.

For law, business and medicine, schools matter, but for things like CS it doesn't.

The GPA and board scores matters for law and medicine. Have no idea about business.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why not use the state school option?

A lot of middle class do it.
But the conversation with your teenager is not going to be easy.
Kid: I am so excited to be accepted to my favorite and top college in the country.
You: We can’t afford 80k a year, instead you should go to state university.
Kid : So, tell me why I was working so hard in high school?
You : Well…

I love the inanity of this post. It only makes sense inside one very specific bubble.

I can't even imagine what parents from my rural Midwestern town would say to it. Maybe, because you were raised to work hard. Maybe, anything worth doing is worth doing right. Maybe, keep up that nonsense and you can take a couple years off to work and pay your own way through State Flagship U.

Maybe implied here is that all of the kids who work just has hard knowing only State Flagship is at the end of the rainbow for them are inherently raised better than you raised your kids.

Some have higher aspirations than assistant manager at Menards.

You have got to be kidding me. IDK one of my Midwestern HS classmates who graduated from a state flagship and is now working at Menards. They all run their own businesses, hold a range of professional jobs, etc. Many of the kids who graduated in the top 20 of my 500+ class were admitted to T20 schools, including a number of Ivies, but attended state flagships as that is what their parents could afford. They excelled in college and many got into great grad/professional programs, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why not use the state school option?

A lot of middle class do it.
But the conversation with your teenager is not going to be easy.
Kid: I am so excited to be accepted to my favorite and top college in the country.
You: We can’t afford 80k a year, instead you should go to state university.
Kid : So, tell me why I was working so hard in high school?
You : Well…

I love the inanity of this post. It only makes sense inside one very specific bubble.

I can't even imagine what parents from my rural Midwestern town would say to it. Maybe, because you were raised to work hard. Maybe, anything worth doing is worth doing right. Maybe, keep up that nonsense and you can take a couple years off to work and pay your own way through State Flagship U.

Maybe implied here is that all of the kids who work just has hard knowing only State Flagship is at the end of the rainbow for them are inherently raised better than you raised your kids.

While I wholeheartedly agree that hard work is its own reward and that "anything worth doing is worth doing right," you as someone from the rural midwest are missing a lot of the context that informs the exchanges quoted above. There are only eleven elite post secondary institutions in the midwest region, two of which (Michigan and Wisconsin-Madison) are flagship public schools and arguably the academically strongest universities in their respective states; most of the midwestern states are home to no more than one elite college or university; and in the one midwestern state whose two elite schools are both private universities (Chicago and Northwestern), the flagship, Urbana-Champaign, is overall an academically rigorous institution with one of the most challenging comp. sci programs in the country. In other words, most of the smartest, talented and hardest working students in the midwest attend their public flagship. By contrast, the flagship universities of most states are intellectually quite weak, while the majority of rigorous schools in the northeast are private universities and colleges that students in the region routinely choose over in- state public options. Given the pervasive idea that the U.S. is a meritocracy and that affiliation with elite institutions, fair or not, does confer some very real opportunities that are not readily available to graduates of other colleges and universities, it is quite understandable that a student who busts ass to earn, say, a 4.5 GPA and a 1550 SAT might wonder why s/he/they did so only to end up at a school where the average SAT is an 1160, the average ACT is a 22 and their classmates perceive college as an extension of their high school years rather than as an opportunity to engage intellectually.

There are plenty of LACs that would have given them aid and brought the cost down to the price of their state flagship. The talk about life not being fair doesn't start senior year of HS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just posted this in the UVA thread. It really is an effed up system. People that were careless get rewarded and people that scrimped and saved and built wealth and equity through long hours and sacrifice are expected to drain three entire savings. Their kids end up not going to the elite private universities while their neighbors with no 529s, family wealth so they work at non-profits making little $ since their parents bought their homes and paid for their college have kids that meet the “need based” criteria and go virtually free to Ivies and places like Hopkins. Our system is broken.

Also relevant:
$350-400k in North Arlington or McLean with 2-3 kids makes you a donut hole where spending $85k/year for each of them is a serious burden. That is $680k for two kids for 4 years or a whopping $1,020,000 for 3 kids. With housing costs over $1.5 million (and much more) the closer you get to DC you can see why in-state universities (which VA has many great ones) are such a draw to ppl that would be wealthy in a lower cost state/area, but it’s really effed up that people that started with nothing and worked 70-80 hour weeks to attain that salary are full pay while people with better backgrounds and family help so they didn’t need the high salaries work at non-profits making a 1/4 of that and their kids can go to Ivies for free.

You act like this is a big part of the population but it’s not. It’s a very rare circumstance. You’re so mad it exists (rarely) that you want to blow up the whole system.[b]

I just don't want to pay for your kids anymore.

+1. Me either. Sick of having to
Pay full freight for others. Kid got into an elite school at $90,000. Half the kids were given scholarship - except mine. Nada. Nothing. Not even $50. Go to a state school if you need so much help with a private. I don’t want to pay for you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is frustrating that if you make $250k now, the assumption is that you have been making $250k long enough to save $320k for your child's education. For those of us who only started making that amount of money when our child was in high school (with both parents working all along), that's not realistic.

It's not the end of the world; our child will be fine. But it's quite the bucket of cold water to realize that a whole lot of schools are completely inaccessible to your kid, schools that would have been accessible a few years ago when we made $100k.

And FWIW, I am fully aware that $250K is NOT middle class! It's a great income and we're grateful. But having that income now doesn't magically make $300k of savings appear.

Here's an idea, you take the extra money you earned and put it to college savings if "top" privates are important to you. Even if you made $150K, you should have been saving at least for a state school and when you made much more put it into savings vs. lifestyle. So, just curious when you are screaming poverty at $250K, how much did your house cost, your cars, how many vacations, even weekend vacations did you take in the past 5 years? Much of it is lifestyle choices.

+1000

You could have chosen to save majority of the pay increases over the last 5 years if "elite private education" was of value to you. DOn't upgrade your house or lifestyle instead save for college and retirement. But apparently most do not seem to understand the idea of personal accountability or personal savings.

DH went from a combined HHI of $150K to $400K + a bonus in one year. We banked the extra money for years. Some times I wish we would have spent a little more on certain things, but there have been many more times that I have been so grateful for that extra money. Truly so.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is frustrating that if you make $250k now, the assumption is that you have been making $250k long enough to save $320k for your child's education. For those of us who only started making that amount of money when our child was in high school (with both parents working all along), that's not realistic.

It's not the end of the world; our child will be fine. But it's quite the bucket of cold water to realize that a whole lot of schools are completely inaccessible to your kid, schools that would have been accessible a few years ago when we made $100k.

And FWIW, I am fully aware that $250K is NOT middle class! It's a great income and we're grateful. But having that income now doesn't magically make $300k of savings appear.

Here's an idea, you take the extra money you earned and put it to college savings if "top" privates are important to you. Even if you made $150K, you should have been saving at least for a state school and when you made much more put it into savings vs. lifestyle. So, just curious when you are screaming poverty at $250K, how much did your house cost, your cars, how many vacations, even weekend vacations did you take in the past 5 years? Much of it is lifestyle choices.

+1000

You could have chosen to save majority of the pay increases over the last 5 years if "elite private education" was of value to you. DOn't upgrade your house or lifestyle instead save for college and retirement. But apparently most do not seem to understand the idea of personal accountability or personal savings.

DH went from a combined HHI of $150K to $400K + a bonus in one year. We banked the extra money for years. Some times I wish we would have spent a little more on certain things, but there have been many more times that I have been so grateful for that extra money. Truly so.

You managed to save money with a 400k hhi; how did you manage? You should totally teach a seminar

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just posted this in the UVA thread. It really is an effed up system. People that were careless get rewarded and people that scrimped and saved and built wealth and equity through long hours and sacrifice are expected to drain three entire savings. Their kids end up not going to the elite private universities while their neighbors with no 529s, family wealth so they work at non-profits making little $ since their parents bought their homes and paid for their college have kids that meet the “need based” criteria and go virtually free to Ivies and places like Hopkins. Our system is broken.

Also relevant:
$350-400k in North Arlington or McLean with 2-3 kids makes you a donut hole where spending $85k/year for each of them is a serious burden. That is $680k for two kids for 4 years or a whopping $1,020,000 for 3 kids. With housing costs over $1.5 million (and much more) the closer you get to DC you can see why in-state universities (which VA has many great ones) are such a draw to ppl that would be wealthy in a lower cost state/area, but it’s really effed up that people that started with nothing and worked 70-80 hour weeks to attain that salary are full pay while people with better backgrounds and family help so they didn’t need the high salaries work at non-profits making a 1/4 of that and their kids can go to Ivies for free.

You act like this is a big part of the population but it’s not. It’s a very rare circumstance. You’re so mad it exists (rarely) that you want to blow up the whole system.[b]

I just don't want to pay for your kids anymore.

+1. Me either. Sick of having to
Pay full freight for others. Kid got into an elite school at $90,000. Half the kids were given scholarship - except mine. Nada. Nothing. Not even $50. Go to a state school if you need so much help with a private. I don’t want to pay for you.

Seriously? The state school doesn't offer that kind of an arrangement. And most kids who need that kind of help never get it.

And how DYK half the kids were given scholarships? Nearly all elite schools don't offer merit aid, so what money did they receive?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is frustrating that if you make $250k now, the assumption is that you have been making $250k long enough to save $320k for your child's education. For those of us who only started making that amount of money when our child was in high school (with both parents working all along), that's not realistic.

It's not the end of the world; our child will be fine. But it's quite the bucket of cold water to realize that a whole lot of schools are completely inaccessible to your kid, schools that would have been accessible a few years ago when we made $100k.

And FWIW, I am fully aware that $250K is NOT middle class! It's a great income and we're grateful. But having that income now doesn't magically make $300k of savings appear.

Here's an idea, you take the extra money you earned and put it to college savings if "top" privates are important to you. Even if you made $150K, you should have been saving at least for a state school and when you made much more put it into savings vs. lifestyle. So, just curious when you are screaming poverty at $250K, how much did your house cost, your cars, how many vacations, even weekend vacations did you take in the past 5 years? Much of it is lifestyle choices.

+1000

You could have chosen to save majority of the pay increases over the last 5 years if "elite private education" was of value to you. DOn't upgrade your house or lifestyle instead save for college and retirement. But apparently most do not seem to understand the idea of personal accountability or personal savings.

DH went from a combined HHI of $150K to $400K + a bonus in one year. We banked the extra money for years. Some times I wish we would have spent a little more on certain things, but there have been many more times that I have been so grateful for that extra money. Truly so.

You managed to save money with a 400k hhi; how did you manage? You should totally teach a seminar

Whatever. My point is that there are plenty of folks who come on here saying they just earned these new salaries so they shouldn't be penalized for it - others are saying well, you should have banked the new pay differential in the run up to college. We decided to do the latter even when college wasn't yet in the cards.

[Anonymous]

When I was in high school I understood that my dad had the money for in-state public. We were in Virginia. I remember feeling wistful because I got zero aid for Georgetown, but fast forward to now and I feel ridiculous for ever losing any sleep about that. My dad paid for everything at UVA and I got a great education and have never opened a student loan in my life. I'm sure Georgetown is great but so is a debt-free education at a top public.

Particularly in Virginia, being "relegated" to a state school is not that bad and provides solid options.