Do NOT pay full price for college - secret discounting goes on "behind closed doors"
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Anonymous
Total cost of attendance at Pepperdine is $95k. Some of us are not going to qualify for need based aid, so everything other than in state is expensive. We may be suckers but we don't want to let our kids down, so we pay full price. |
Anonymous
True, but what is the cut off? $60K? That's how much oos publics are. And in state publics aren't always the best option, depending on the situation. |
Anonymous
Life is full of disappointments. I'm sure your kid would eventually be fine wherever they went. Having stated that, if you can afford to spend this much money because you are wealthy, then that's a different calculus, even as the article and many are saying that it's not worth that much money from an ROI perspective. But, I guess if you are wealthy, you can make emotional purchases. |
Anonymous
Pepperdine is a good school. |
Anonymous
Many (most?) private schools out of the top 50 give generous merit aid to virtually everyone they accept. There is no reason to pay full price for a school the caliber of Pepperdine. |
Anonymous
Depends on the kid's level and where else they could have attended. At any ranking, some families prefer paying full price so their child can attend the top-ranked school among the schools they were accepted to, rather than attend a lower-ranking school that gives them merit aid. |
Anonymous
This is overall. Most colleges are community colleges where Pell covers most of it. Look at stats for top 100 universities plus top 50 LACs and it’s more like 30-50% paying full price. You can get merit at Wooster level colleges but it’s 25k off 90k. Is that a better deal than 90k for BC? Not sure. Is it a better deal than 90k for Yale. No. |
Anonymous
Yes, but as someone else said, this is not news, it’s discussed frequently, there are whole subreddits and FB groups devoted to it, many books and podcasts devoted to it and so on. Sounds like someone is just promoting a book! |
Anonymous
| I’ve seen this firsthand. DS applied to lower tier schools for affordability. His budget was in-state MD but he wasn’t competitive for UMD and none of the other options felt like a good fit. The schools he applied to provide merit aid to the majority of students - some private and some OOS public. Better students get more merit aid but it seems everybody gets something. With merit aid, he has options that cost the same or less than in-state and he is excited about them. He can absolutely get into higher ranked schools than he applied to but we can’t afford them and he wouldn’t shine enough to get the top awards. Were a donut hole family. If you can get past rankings, there are a lot of good deals out there. |
Anonymous
That's us. We superfunded 529 plans and our original investment has more than doubled with market gains, so kids can go wherever they want; we view it as their money. |
Anonymous
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For high net worth families the cost of college is a non issue.
The 529s can already easily cover undergrad and there is more than enough in other pots to cover any other educational need. I'm not going to insist that my kid go to a no name college because of cost. The money doesn't matter. The fit, quality, and experience do. |
Anonymous
Yep. We do for both of our kids. Sigh. No discounts the higher the school is ranked. |
Anonymous
| Get that MERIT MONEY DCUM! We can do this. |
Anonymous
It very much depends on the school. Secret merit aid is not being handed out behind the scenes at T20 schools. |
Anonymous
there are 4000+ colleges in America. MOST dont have any residential community (ie dorms). You can't really look at anything about "college" and have it reflect what people on this site care about. This site cares about the 320 colleges in the Fiske Guide - and that's the outside number. More than 11% pay full price at these schools |