How does most of America pay for these elite schools?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In our case - both sets of grandparents are also paying, we only have two kids, and we can live comfortably from the lowest salary, so we also pay as he goes for DC1's med school. We make almost 500K/year and we moved to a lower COL area, so our mortgage is low.

so basically you didn't need to save anything and you could still fund your kids' college and beyond. the vast majority of parents whose kids go to elite colleges have big homes AND fancy vacations AND nice purses AND fancy clothing. you can't save your way to 80k/year tuition, and even if you can, you shouldn't. it's like private k-12. if you need to eat $1 ramen noodles to pay tuition, it's not for you.

You sound bitter. Smile more,talk less....

no, not really. we moved to europe and kids will go to college here.

I'm the first PP, I'm very aware, as I went to an Ivy decades ago. I remember the sociology professor telling us that the average family at my college had an income of $250K, which is over $400K in today's money. It's changing tremendously now, as the tuition is zero for those making under $125K/year. So yes, if you have a brilliant child and you are not wealthy, an elite college is a better bargain than UVA or UMD.
I'm European by birth and we looked into that option too. However, for med school, is not great, as the medical students from foreign universities have a much harder time getting a residency here in the US.

It's changing in that they've replaced the middle and barely upper middle class kids whose parents used to be able to stretch to afford those schools out and replaced them with poorer kids. The rich kids are still there, it's just more of a barbell than ever

Exactly. I think the high income / low income divide is fueling divisiveness at these schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most high stats kids from donuts hole families give up on elite schools and go to the in state flagship

This is us. Our HHI is $145K. We didn't qualify for much FA, despite the fact that $80K per year is more than half our HHI!! Crazy.
State schools for our kids.
Meaning, the best and the brightest are NOT going to the Ivies or the SLACs like Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, etc.
My kids should be at these schools, but we can't afford to send them there.

Do you have a kid in college? Have you actually applied for financial aid? Our HHi is a bit higher than yours (in the 180ish range), and we have definitely qualified for significant financial aid at "expensive" schools. I could see that you don't qualify if you have other significant non-retirement assets, but, if you are making less than $150,000 and don't own multiple properties or have 6 figures in stocks/brokerage accounts/or shares of a private corp., you will get financial aid at a lot of schools. It may not be enough, but, that is a different argument.

Nope, NPC was way the hell off for my kid last year. NPC stated we would get ~40K yr/aid, we weren’t offered anything and our HHI is lower than yours. How on earth did you get aid with that HHI? Impressive, though, good for you.
Recognizing that everyone’s financial situation differs, it’s still a frustrating process.

That sucks. What college? Call them out. Colleges are required by law to have them and keep them accurate.

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-03-27-some-colleges-are-failing-to-comply-with-cost-calculator-requirements.

You should report them for this error. I realize that may be too late to help you but you might help others from the same fate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The same way you pay for non-elite schools. In general, elite schools don't cost more than their counterpart.

it depends on the kid. many middle class kids can get merit aid at non-elite schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:"Most of America" hasn't heard of many of these elite schools and doesn't care. But I know to many UMC people those people don't count.

It’s very important for them to believe that they were in competition with every valedictorian from every high school across America, because that’s what makes their T20 admission so impressive. UMC people don’t want to accept that they were only competing with themselves. Oh, and also, the kids from my high school that had 99th percentile ACTs didn’t have any prep classes. Because there weren’t any. They were just that smart. But they still only applied to Flagship U.

A classmate of mine in Rochester Hills, Michigan, turned down MIT to go to engineering school at U of Michigan. His family was middle class, and would have had to take out loans for him to go. They had two younger kids, as well, so they wanted to be able to afford to send all three kids to college. This is a pretty common story around the country.

Yes, so so true.

[Anonymous]

this is us. Our HHI is $145K. We didn't qualify for much FA, despite the fact that $80K per year is more than half our HHI!! Crazy.
State schools for our kids.
Meaning, the best and the brightest are NOT going to the Ivies or the SLACs like Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, etc.

You must have some special circumstances for the EPC to be that high.

I just ran the net price calculator for Swarthmore with an adjusted income of $140,000--probably higher than yours, student income of $1500, 1 sibling aged 15, a house worth $900,000 purchased in 2006 for $500,000 in a DC neighborhood with $100,000 still owed on mortgage, about $40,000 in sibling's name, some retirement savings, etc. and the cost of attendance at Swarthmore was $42,000 a year, which is lower than UMaryland instate and about $8500 a year more than UVA instate for arts and sciences and just about the same for first year students in engineering at UVA.

And, I know that SATs aren't the be all and end all--especially right now--but ,most of the top publics measured by SAT scores are in states like Michigan and California that don't give much FA to OOS students.
Now, if your kids got merit at instate public Us that's a different story.
I don't think you can concluce that the best and brightest are going to their instate flagships in the vast majority of US states for financial reasons.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I get that most people on DCUM have $80k saved per year of college and much of America (HHI under $125k) gets aid but do these two realities really cover these gigantic pools of applicants to all the top 50 schools? has the rest of America also saved $80k/year/kid? am I missing something? thinking about this tonight as friends of ours just had their daughter (one of 6 kids, first in college) commit to Carnegie Mellon. I know for a fact that they make more than $150k but I had no idea that $&0k/year was in their budget.

Responsible parents save for their kids' education.

I’m a responsible parent but I don’t make enough to save much. I’m a single parent and a teacher. I have about $5K saved with two years left before college. I make around $70K. Plenty of parents don’t make enough to save for retirement and college. I took out loans and paid them back and so will my kid. That doesn’t make me an irresponsible parent.

+1. I hate the attitude on this board that one can just "plan and save!1!!" and all will be well. Most of us don't make enough to salt away multiple thousands per year.

"cut the cable!"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

this is us. Our HHI is $145K. We didn't qualify for much FA, despite the fact that $80K per year is more than half our HHI!! Crazy.
State schools for our kids.
Meaning, the best and the brightest are NOT going to the Ivies or the SLACs like Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, etc.

You must have some special circumstances for the EPC to be that high.

I just ran the net price calculator for Swarthmore with an adjusted income of $140,000--probably higher than yours, student income of $1500, 1 sibling aged 15, a house worth $900,000 purchased in 2006 for $500,000 in a DC neighborhood with $100,000 still owed on mortgage, about $40,000 in sibling's name, some retirement savings, etc. and the cost of attendance at Swarthmore was $42,000 a year, which is lower than UMaryland instate and about $8500 a year more than UVA instate for arts and sciences and just about the same for first year students in engineering at UVA.

And, I know that SATs aren't the be all and end all--especially right now--but ,most of the top publics measured by SAT scores are in states like Michigan and California that don't give much FA to OOS students.
Now, if your kids got merit at instate public Us that's a different story.
I don't think you can concluce that the best and brightest are going to their instate flagships in the vast majority of US states for financial reasons.

yes you can. academic reputation of the ivies relies on the sliver of top performers among the very rich.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most high stats kids from donuts hole families give up on elite schools and go to the in state flagship

This is us. Our HHI is $145K. We didn't qualify for much FA, despite the fact that $80K per year is more than half our HHI!! Crazy.
State schools for our kids.
Meaning, the best and the brightest are NOT going to the Ivies or the SLACs like Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, etc.
My kids should be at these schools, but we can't afford to send them there.

Do you have a kid in college? Have you actually applied for financial aid? Our HHi is a bit higher than yours (in the 180ish range), and we have definitely qualified for significant financial aid at "expensive" schools. I could see that you don't qualify if you have other significant non-retirement assets, but, if you are making less than $150,000 and don't own multiple properties or have 6 figures in stocks/brokerage accounts/or shares of a private corp., you will get financial aid at a lot of schools. It may not be enough, but, that is a different argument.

Responding to pp and 8:48. We’re the ones with the millions in retirement but little in 529s. Our income is between yours (180ish and 145ish) for a family of four. We’re also the ones paying $30k a year in out of pocket medical expenses out of salary, and we live in this High Cost of Living DCUMLand. Please share at which institutions you received financial aid. I’ll have my second kid think about applying to those schools.

In my opinion, retirement accounts should be off the table for college purposes. Who else will fund your retirement? Our parents had no big estate to pass on to us; as I posted earlier, we helped them financially. We don't want to burden our kids, so we prioritized retirement savings. My husband came up in an era where you could fairly easily gain entrance to your state flagship (yes, even UVA if you were from NoVa), and he was against funding a 529. We really could not afford it anyway; we had a lot of medical debt on credit cards.

Our country will be in a heap of trouble if people empty 401ks to pay for college. Yet that is exactly what my A+ Forbes-financial health alma mater asked me to do. Ironically, they place a lot of grads into finance, presumably at places where they dream up college loan direct marketing campaigns to HS seniors.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Some private colleges have so much money that they could go completely tuition-free, only charging for room/board, yet they charge $80k+ a year to people with $150k HHI and some 529 savings. (Net price calculators demonstrate this). It needs to be more reasonable.
I read in higher ed expert Jeff Selingo's newsletter that so-called "nonprofit" universities get average federal subsidies of about $41k/year per student.
Everyone agrees college costs too much. There's a lot of anger in this thread about the overcharging and it's sad to see qualified students denied opportunities. The main question is: What are we going to do about this? Is there any organization that's really trying to work with colleges and Congress to change this?

If congress ever cared, they could fix it. These schools are all reliant to some degree on federal student loans, parent plus loans having special protections in bankruptcy, and just plain old federal research funding. That money could be easily be premised on tuition as a multiple of the Stafford loan limit.

I loved this idea! I hope people on Capitol Hill are reading this thread!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Also, we had DC 1 not work because it's likely she'll get into a top school that will offer need based aid, and they value the student's income 4x more than parents'. Seems a shame but it is what it is.

That may have affected other people around 150K who got little or no FA at a top school.

It is sick that people have to game the system level like this - it shows how broken it is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most high stats kids from donuts hole families give up on elite schools and go to the in state flagship

This is us. Our HHI is $145K. We didn't qualify for much FA, despite the fact that $80K per year is more than half our HHI!! Crazy.
State schools for our kids.
Meaning, the best and the brightest are NOT going to the Ivies or the SLACs like Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, etc.
My kids should be at these schools, but we can't afford to send them there.

Do you have a kid in college? Have you actually applied for financial aid? Our HHi is a bit higher than yours (in the 180ish range), and we have definitely qualified for significant financial aid at "expensive" schools. I could see that you don't qualify if you have other significant non-retirement assets, but, if you are making less than $150,000 and don't own multiple properties or have 6 figures in stocks/brokerage accounts/or shares of a private corp., you will get financial aid at a lot of schools. It may not be enough, but, that is a different argument.

Nope, NPC was way the hell off for my kid last year. NPC stated we would get ~40K yr/aid, we weren’t offered anything and our HHI is lower than yours. How on earth did you get aid with that HHI? Impressive, though, good for you.
Recognizing that everyone’s financial situation differs, it’s still a frustrating process.

I think you can get aid with a 180HHI if you live in a huge house with a huge mortgage, have large car payments (you can pay $50K+ for a Toyota, which is not considered a "luxury" car), and very little non-retirement savings.

We had $350K saved for college, and the colleges wanted us to spend it all on Child #1, leaving almost nothing for Child $2 and Child #3.

Our oldest child got a gigantic merit aid (full tuition) at an OOS public, so that's where she went.

We'd thought $100K per child was a reasonable amount of college savings. We were so wrong, but we do not have the income to save the $1M some earlier posters on this thread bragged about saving for college.

It's a very broken system when college costs about $10K per month!

Againn, more evidence of how people try to game the system. I guess we were stupid for driving old cars until they died and saving for retirement.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most high stats kids from donuts hole families give up on elite schools and go to the in state flagship

This is us. Our HHI is $145K. We didn't qualify for much FA, despite the fact that $80K per year is more than half our HHI!! Crazy.
State schools for our kids.
Meaning, the best and the brightest are NOT going to the Ivies or the SLACs like Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, etc.
My kids should be at these schools, but we can't afford to send them there.

Do you have a kid in college? Have you actually applied for financial aid? Our HHi is a bit higher than yours (in the 180ish range), and we have definitely qualified for significant financial aid at "expensive" schools. I could see that you don't qualify if you have other significant non-retirement assets, but, if you are making less than $150,000 and don't own multiple properties or have 6 figures in stocks/brokerage accounts/or shares of a private corp., you will get financial aid at a lot of schools. It may not be enough, but, that is a different argument.

I'm the PP. Yes, my kid applied to very selective SLACS and got accepted, but received very little FA. These schools don't offer merit aid. The private colleges wanted us to take out a mortgage on our house to pay for DC's college! Nope. not us. The public colleges cost so much less, so that's where my child went.

My kid graduated a couple years ago, and she says now that she wished she'd gone to a more selective, better college. She's in a top grad program, where she's finally among her peers. I wish I'd been able to send her to Amherst, etc., but it was financially impossible.

More people need to tell stories like this. Maybe we should all go testify on Capitol Hill.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most high stats kids from donuts hole families give up on elite schools and go to the in state flagship

This is us. Our HHI is $145K. We didn't qualify for much FA, despite the fact that $80K per year is more than half our HHI!! Crazy.
State schools for our kids.
Meaning, the best and the brightest are NOT going to the Ivies or the SLACs like Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, etc.
My kids should be at these schools, but we can't afford to send them there.

Do you have a kid in college? Have you actually applied for financial aid? Our HHi is a bit higher than yours (in the 180ish range), and we have definitely qualified for significant financial aid at "expensive" schools. I could see that you don't qualify if you have other significant non-retirement assets, but, if you are making less than $150,000 and don't own multiple properties or have 6 figures in stocks/brokerage accounts/or shares of a private corp., you will get financial aid at a lot of schools. It may not be enough, but, that is a different argument.

Nope, NPC was way the hell off for my kid last year. NPC stated we would get ~40K yr/aid, we weren’t offered anything and our HHI is lower than yours. How on earth did you get aid with that HHI? Impressive, though, good for you.
Recognizing that everyone’s financial situation differs, it’s still a frustrating process.

I think you can get aid with a 180HHI if you live in a huge house with a huge mortgage, have large car payments (you can pay $50K+ for a Toyota, which is not considered a "luxury" car), and very little non-retirement savings.

We had $350K saved for college, and the colleges wanted us to spend it all on Child #1, leaving almost nothing for Child $2 and Child #3.

Our oldest child got a gigantic merit aid (full tuition) at an OOS public, so that's where she went.

We'd thought $100K per child was a reasonable amount of college savings. We were so wrong, but we do not have the income to save the $1M some earlier posters on this thread bragged about saving for college.

It's a very broken system when college costs about $10K per month!

Againn, more evidence of how people try to game the system. I guess we were stupid for driving old cars until they died and saving for retirement.

yes

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

this is us. Our HHI is $145K. We didn't qualify for much FA, despite the fact that $80K per year is more than half our HHI!! Crazy.
State schools for our kids.
Meaning, the best and the brightest are NOT going to the Ivies or the SLACs like Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, etc.

You must have some special circumstances for the EPC to be that high.

I just ran the net price calculator for Swarthmore with an adjusted income of $140,000--probably higher than yours, student income of $1500, 1 sibling aged 15, a house worth $900,000 purchased in 2006 for $500,000 in a DC neighborhood with $100,000 still owed on mortgage, about $40,000 in sibling's name, some retirement savings, etc. and the cost of attendance at Swarthmore was $42,000 a year, which is lower than UMaryland instate and about $8500 a year more than UVA instate for arts and sciences and just about the same for first year students in engineering at UVA.

And, I know that SATs aren't the be all and end all--especially right now--but ,most of the top publics measured by SAT scores are in states like Michigan and California that don't give much FA to OOS students.
Now, if your kids got merit at instate public Us that's a different story.
I don't think you can concluce that the best and brightest are going to their instate flagships in the vast majority of US states for financial reasons.

Some of the best and brightest are not at Ivies or selective SLACs, but many are there. There are the best and brightest at many income levels. In states around the country, many of their best and brightest are at their state flagships because that is what their families can afford or that is the family school. Yes, financing higher education needs to be transformed, but this problem has been building since the early 1980s when Reagan began slashing federal budgets and states began contracting expenses, forcing some schools (I see you MI) to rely on OOS tuition to maintain their programs.. It's just no one really cared about this crisis until it started affecting middle and UMC families.

[Anonymous]

Three kids, 2 in state public and 1 Top 10 private. We're also a two fed family. We've maxed out both retirement and college savings. Old cars, house we could afford, no cable, family visit vacations yada yada yada. We knew we'd never be eligible for aid, knew we had to save for our retirement and prioritized college savings. It's actually becoming an issue as last kid almost through school and spouse and I are having serious discussions about now what. We've lived so far beneath our means for so long that thinking we can now "go spend" is hard to wrap our heads around. More so for my spouse, but still............