Are top private colleges mainly for poor people now?

[Anonymous]

If teachers and “civil servants” get such “great benefits,” go be one. I hear it’s awesome. There’s such a glut of teachers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A lot of people who claim to be "donut hole" families have lived lives of increasing lifestyle creep as their incomes have climbed up 200k, and then want to complain that they don't get enough need-based aid. Well, did you really need a new car every 5 years? Expensive vacations? To redo the kitchen?

If you want to argue that a family making over 200k is middle class, then live like middle class people -- budget, accept you won't be able to afford everything you want to do, and sock money away for retirement and college.

We make well under 200k and this is what we do, and we have friends making over who go out to eat three nights a week, drive luxury cars, and take multiple vacations overseas every year, have weekly cleaners, etc. Those people are not entitled to need-based aid. It's not my fault, or the college's fault, that they chose to just live nicer, more luxurious, easier lives instead of saving their additional income for their child's education. We've scrimped and saved and still won't have enough. AND work in helping professions. I don't cry myself to sleep over the doctors and consultants and well-paid feds who will be disappointed in their FA award while crying into their Tesla upholstery and trying to console themselves on the flight to Aruba. Boo freaking hoo.

We make around 200k. Kids have never been abroad. Most vacations are to relatives, but we'll do long weekends at a cheap OBX hotel. Our cars get replaced at the 15 year mark and are not luxury. We still will not be able to pay 4x our annual income to put two kids through college. It's not a big deal because they can go to state school, but people pretending that people should attempt to live in poverty for the off chance that their kid gets into Harvard are insufferable.

+1 My kid is going to a great state school, but that's because we can't afford expensive private -- donut family. It's ridiculous for UMC to be expected to pay the same as wealthy families. $220K in the DC area is considered MC, btw. A HHI of $280K is not *that* different to $220K after taxes.

It's $20-25K extra per year. That's a huge difference. If you have been making that for at least 4 years before college you could have saved $80K in just that timeframe.

Why does everyone feel entitled to expensive private college? Just like most things in life, you go with what you can afford. There are literally still the majority of colleges that are/can be affordable for your family. Making $280K/year puts you in the Top 7-8% of all people in the USA. Let that sink in. You have so many more privileges than 92% of the people in our country.

I would ask, then, why do low income people think they are entitled to expensive private college? People who aren't even paying a penny--not just UMC types who wish it was 30% cheaper.

LOL do you think top private colleges care what low-income people think or want? The colleges are running the show here. They’re deciding, on their own, to be giving generous financial aid to students from low-income families.

Well, that is what we are talking about here. The mentality of the schools who obviously control everything. They favor low income people (and this is largely tied to their ideological views around race) and the very rich. So they are making their schools accessible to low income people and the very rich. The (largely white) comfortable middle class is not of interest to them, and they really don't care if the kids of these people attend their schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Frankly, I’m not worried about any of this from a “life competition” perspective because the folks I’ve known throughout my life who’ve gone to top schools on significant FA or as FGLI students didn’t much out of the experience. They’re not more conventionally successful than they would’ve been if they’d gone to a state school. I am not at all saying this is their fault. However, many had difficulty succeeding academically in their original chosen major and switched to ones that were more manageable (but less conventionally employable), didn’t feel like they fit in socially, had no family connections when applying for internships, were far away from home, didn’t know the timelines for job recruiting processes or weren’t aware of certain etiquette rules. They’d also, for example, never been exposed to scientific research and didn’t know how to go about finding opportunities for that.

I’m not worried because my kids can go to almost any college and will still do very well in life. This is in equal parts due to having family backing from us, excellent academic preparation from their independent school, luck thus far and their own hard work.

\

Translation, I'm not worried because I'm rich and worrying is a poor person problem

Be honest. Middle/upper class kids attending state schools generally end up doing better career-wise versus poor kids attending Ivies majoring in non-STEM and non-economics.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Often 2/3 of students at top ranked schools are getting need based aid that covers the vast majority of costs, on average.

200k is the typical cut off for need based aid (about the income level of a couple of school teachers at the peak of their careers aka “the wealthy”)

It just seems these schools must be populated primarily with lower income kids and then 1/3 rich kids.

I guess middle class kids end up at state school.

Poverty line is $35k per year. Median American income is $69k. $200 k annual warning is top 10% nationally.

$220K in DC area is considered MC. It depends on where you live.

[Anonymous]

Lots of kids who would’ve been really successful as math, engineering, CS or biology majors at smaller privates or state schools are instead getting weeded out of those majors at top privates. It’s a shame.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Often 2/3 of students at top ranked schools are getting need based aid that covers the vast majority of costs, on average.

200k is the typical cut off for need based aid (about the income level of a couple of school teachers at the peak of their careers aka “the wealthy”)

It just seems these schools must be populated primarily with lower income kids and then 1/3 rich kids.

I guess middle class kids end up at state school.

Poverty line is $35k per year. Median American income is $69k. $200 k annual warning is top 10% nationally.

$220K in DC area is considered MC. It depends on where you live.

In your head it is. It’s around the median income for McLean, which is by no means MC. Median HHI in DC is in the low 100,000s.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Often 2/3 of students at top ranked schools are getting need based aid that covers the vast majority of costs, on average.

200k is the typical cut off for need based aid (about the income level of a couple of school teachers at the peak of their careers aka “the wealthy”)

It just seems these schools must be populated primarily with lower income kids and then 1/3 rich kids.

I guess middle class kids end up at state school.

Poverty line is $35k per year. Median American income is $69k. $200 k annual warning is top 10% nationally.

$220K in DC area is considered MC. It depends on where you live.

Choosing to live in an expensive zip code doesn’t change what socioeconomic class you’re in.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A lot of people who claim to be "donut hole" families have lived lives of increasing lifestyle creep as their incomes have climbed up 200k, and then want to complain that they don't get enough need-based aid. Well, did you really need a new car every 5 years? Expensive vacations? To redo the kitchen?

If you want to argue that a family making over 200k is middle class, then live like middle class people -- budget, accept you won't be able to afford everything you want to do, and sock money away for retirement and college.

We make well under 200k and this is what we do, and we have friends making over who go out to eat three nights a week, drive luxury cars, and take multiple vacations overseas every year, have weekly cleaners, etc. Those people are not entitled to need-based aid. It's not my fault, or the college's fault, that they chose to just live nicer, more luxurious, easier lives instead of saving their additional income for their child's education. We've scrimped and saved and still won't have enough. AND work in helping professions. I don't cry myself to sleep over the doctors and consultants and well-paid feds who will be disappointed in their FA award while crying into their Tesla upholstery and trying to console themselves on the flight to Aruba. Boo freaking hoo.

That's fine but look what you've done. You've sacrificed your whole life only to be ripped off by a system where more than half the kids are practically going for free, while maybe a quarter of the parents are rich people for whom $320k is a fraction of an annual bonus. You are kind of the sucker here.

Nope, we will qualify for considerable financial aid. If my kid gets into one of these tippy top schools, we will pay nowhere near the sticker price because they do in fact have need blind admissions and there is no accounting of our finances that wouldn't find plenty of "need" in that situation.

However we have saved money so that if our kid isn't both incredibly accomplished AND win the admissions lottery (those odds are so slim as to be non-existent), we will be able to help pay for another school, whether that's an in-state school or a small private that offers aid or what. We will need help to pay for school and we will look to minimize or avoid loans as much as possible. This is almost certainly what paying for college will look like for us, and we will be glad we have saved as much as we can to pay for it. If you have a family making upwards of 200k per year, the idea that you are somehow too good to do the same, or that your kid deserves one of those lottery spots at Harvard or whatever, is just entitlement. That's it.

Now if you want to advocate for affordable, or even free, public universities so that it is possible for anyone who is qualified to get a college education, I'd be right there with you. If you want to talk about the funding of PUBLIC higher education and how we actually make this affordable and accessible for kids of all backgrounds, sounds great.

But this thread is just about UMC people who feel entitled to send their kids to "T25" schools whining about how much it costs. You're not mad about the cost of college generally, you're mad about access to a certain brand of "elite" education that you think will mark your kid as worthy and better than other people, and you're mad that you see rich kids who didn't really earn it, and poor kids who don't have to pay for it, getting this thing you've decided is your kid's birthright. Get over yourself.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A lot of people who claim to be "donut hole" families have lived lives of increasing lifestyle creep as their incomes have climbed up 200k, and then want to complain that they don't get enough need-based aid. Well, did you really need a new car every 5 years? Expensive vacations? To redo the kitchen?

If you want to argue that a family making over 200k is middle class, then live like middle class people -- budget, accept you won't be able to afford everything you want to do, and sock money away for retirement and college.

We make well under 200k and this is what we do, and we have friends making over who go out to eat three nights a week, drive luxury cars, and take multiple vacations overseas every year, have weekly cleaners, etc. Those people are not entitled to need-based aid. It's not my fault, or the college's fault, that they chose to just live nicer, more luxurious, easier lives instead of saving their additional income for their child's education. We've scrimped and saved and still won't have enough. AND work in helping professions. I don't cry myself to sleep over the doctors and consultants and well-paid feds who will be disappointed in their FA award while crying into their Tesla upholstery and trying to console themselves on the flight to Aruba. Boo freaking hoo.

We make around 200k. Kids have never been abroad. Most vacations are to relatives, but we'll do long weekends at a cheap OBX hotel. Our cars get replaced at the 15 year mark and are not luxury. We still will not be able to pay 4x our annual income to put two kids through college. It's not a big deal because they can go to state school, but people pretending that people should attempt to live in poverty for the off chance that their kid gets into Harvard are insufferable.

+1 My kid is going to a great state school, but that's because we can't afford expensive private -- donut family. It's ridiculous for UMC to be expected to pay the same as wealthy families. $220K in the DC area is considered MC, btw. A HHI of $280K is not *that* different to $220K after taxes.

It's $20-25K extra per year. That's a huge difference. If you have been making that for at least 4 years before college you could have saved $80K in just that timeframe.

Why does everyone feel entitled to expensive private college? Just like most things in life, you go with what you can afford. There are literally still the majority of colleges that are/can be affordable for your family. Making $280K/year puts you in the Top 7-8% of all people in the USA. Let that sink in. You have so many more privileges than 92% of the people in our country.

Sure, but those expensive colleges are $80k per year, and we have multiple kids.

4 years to save $80K, so you'd have to work 16 years to cover $320K full four years of college, maybe a bit less if the markets were favorable during that time, and 32 years to cover two kids at $320K each, assuming you are making the same for 32 years and zero inflation. Let that sink in.

Maybe you only read the parts you wanted to read in my post, but I did say that my kid is going to a great state school with some merit aid.

Also, you have zero knowledge of my background. I didn't grow up UMC. My parents don't even speak English.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A lot of people who claim to be "donut hole" families have lived lives of increasing lifestyle creep as their incomes have climbed up 200k, and then want to complain that they don't get enough need-based aid. Well, did you really need a new car every 5 years? Expensive vacations? To redo the kitchen?

If you want to argue that a family making over 200k is middle class, then live like middle class people -- budget, accept you won't be able to afford everything you want to do, and sock money away for retirement and college.

We make well under 200k and this is what we do, and we have friends making over who go out to eat three nights a week, drive luxury cars, and take multiple vacations overseas every year, have weekly cleaners, etc. Those people are not entitled to need-based aid. It's not my fault, or the college's fault, that they chose to just live nicer, more luxurious, easier lives instead of saving their additional income for their child's education. We've scrimped and saved and still won't have enough. AND work in helping professions. I don't cry myself to sleep over the doctors and consultants and well-paid feds who will be disappointed in their FA award while crying into their Tesla upholstery and trying to console themselves on the flight to Aruba. Boo freaking hoo.

We make around 200k. Kids have never been abroad. Most vacations are to relatives, but we'll do long weekends at a cheap OBX hotel. Our cars get replaced at the 15 year mark and are not luxury. We still will not be able to pay 4x our annual income to put two kids through college. It's not a big deal because they can go to state school, but people pretending that people should attempt to live in poverty for the off chance that their kid gets into Harvard are insufferable.

+1 My kid is going to a great state school, but that's because we can't afford expensive private -- donut family. It's ridiculous for UMC to be expected to pay the same as wealthy families. $220K in the DC area is considered MC, btw. A HHI of $280K is not *that* different to $220K after taxes.

It's $20-25K extra per year. That's a huge difference. If you have been making that for at least 4 years before college you could have saved $80K in just that timeframe.

Why does everyone feel entitled to expensive private college? Just like most things in life, you go with what you can afford. There are literally still the majority of colleges that are/can be affordable for your family. Making $280K/year puts you in the Top 7-8% of all people in the USA. Let that sink in. You have so many more privileges than 92% of the people in our country.

I would ask, then, why do low income people think they are entitled to expensive private college? People who aren't even paying a penny--not just UMC types who wish it was 30% cheaper.

Well, do you think that expensive private college experiences should be able to just be bought? That wouldn’t make the degrees supposedly earned from them worth much, would it?

Isn't that exactly what is happening? If you don't make less than $100k or whatever it is, you are required to pay $320k to get the degree. So only people who can afford that will buy the degree. In the case of Harvard etc, there is a long waiting list. But the more expensive these schools become, with $400k around the corner, the fewer people there will be who can or want to pay full price. Eventually, the pool of full pay families will shrink (ok perhaps never at Harvard but down the list) and you will have a very mediocre student body where you practically let in any rich kid whose family is essentially willing to pay twice the real price--first to cover their own costs and then to cover the costs of a financial aid recipient. This is what is happening at schools like Trinity College. I can assure you, the quality level of full pay admitted students ain't that great at Trinity now.

The best way out of this mess is merit aid. Give a discount to excellent students even if their parents make more than $150k. The lower ranked schools already understand this. They have no choice to stay competitive. But more and more schools need to start doing this, and the schools that do will have the strongest student profiles, because they are making themselves available to what is really the strongest cohort of students out there: the children of the hard workinig and highly educated upper middle class. The top 20 schools will be fine--they have billions and 200 years of reputation. But below that, there will be degradation and the merit aid schools will continue to surpass them. A tipping point happens when the merit aid school has higher average SATs then the need-only peer, at which point everyone gets the memo that the merit aid school is actually now better than the need-only school, at which point kids who don't even need merit aid prefer to attend the merit aid school, just because it is more selective and has a higher quality student body.

[Anonymous]

I’d have a lot more sympathy for this conversation if it was about nobody having to turn down state schools due to money. Like kids having to turn down UVa or VT to go to ODU or NVCC. That, I have sympathy for.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Often 2/3 of students at top ranked schools are getting need based aid that covers the vast majority of costs, on average.

200k is the typical cut off for need based aid (about the income level of a couple of school teachers at the peak of their careers aka “the wealthy”)

It just seems these schools must be populated primarily with lower income kids and then 1/3 rich kids.

I guess middle class kids end up at state school.

Poverty line is $35k per year. Median American income is $69k. $200 k annual warning is top 10% nationally.

$220K in DC area is considered MC. It depends on where you live.

Choosing to live in an expensive zip code doesn’t change what socioeconomic class you’re in.

Once again, people don't necessarily "choose" to live in a hcol; they go where the jobs are. Notice how during the pandemic when people could wfh, a lot of people moved out of higher col areas. But, now many are returning because companies are requiring RTO.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Often 2/3 of students at top ranked schools are getting need based aid that covers the vast majority of costs, on average.

200k is the typical cut off for need based aid (about the income level of a couple of school teachers at the peak of their careers aka “the wealthy”)

It just seems these schools must be populated primarily with lower income kids and then 1/3 rich kids.

I guess middle class kids end up at state school.

Poverty line is $35k per year. Median American income is $69k. $200 k annual warning is top 10% nationally.

$220K in DC area is considered MC. It depends on where you live.

Nope. Actual middle class person living DC here. Family of 3, lives in DC proper, no family money and no, we did not buy a home for cheap back when you could buy a home for cheap in DC. HHI of 130k. Like middle class people everywhere, we make a lot of compromises to live within our means. In DC this means a condo instead of a house, one old car, minimal travel, we almost never eat out, we have tight budgets for clothes and entertainment, etc. That's what it means to be middle class, especially living in a high COL area. We could live much more comfortable in a lower COL area, and we'd still be middle class. Like if we moved to Des Moines tomorrow and keep our salaries, we wouldn't magically be UMC. We'd be middle class people living in a low COL area and it would allow us to afford nice-to-haves like a bigger home, a second car, more money in retirement and college funds, some extra spending money, etc.

This is a big country. We choose to live here. So do you. The fact that we BOTH chose to live here and it's expensive does not suddenly alter the class differences between us. If you make over 220k in DC, you are not middle class (and by the way, a LOT of the people I know making this much in DC also have little inheritances or family that is kicking in for their childcare expenses or sending 5k to their kid's college fund every year or whatever).

There are people living in DC on 40 or 50k, by the way. Not comfortably but they do it. And if their kids get into Harvard, they won't pay a dime and they shouldn't. They will have beaten the odds.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Often 2/3 of students at top ranked schools are getting need based aid that covers the vast majority of costs, on average.

200k is the typical cut off for need based aid (about the income level of a couple of school teachers at the peak of their careers aka “the wealthy”)

It just seems these schools must be populated primarily with lower income kids and then 1/3 rich kids.

I guess middle class kids end up at state school.

Poverty line is $35k per year. Median American income is $69k. $200 k annual warning is top 10% nationally.

$220K in DC area is considered MC. It depends on where you live.

In your head it is. It’s around the median income for McLean, which is by no means MC. Median HHI in DC is in the low 100,000s.

Sorry, but CNBC isn't in my head.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/02/middle-class-income-in-major-us-cities.html

DC area -- upper band of MC is $221K.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A lot of people who claim to be "donut hole" families have lived lives of increasing lifestyle creep as their incomes have climbed up 200k, and then want to complain that they don't get enough need-based aid. Well, did you really need a new car every 5 years? Expensive vacations? To redo the kitchen?

If you want to argue that a family making over 200k is middle class, then live like middle class people -- budget, accept you won't be able to afford everything you want to do, and sock money away for retirement and college.

We make well under 200k and this is what we do, and we have friends making over who go out to eat three nights a week, drive luxury cars, and take multiple vacations overseas every year, have weekly cleaners, etc. Those people are not entitled to need-based aid. It's not my fault, or the college's fault, that they chose to just live nicer, more luxurious, easier lives instead of saving their additional income for their child's education. We've scrimped and saved and still won't have enough. AND work in helping professions. I don't cry myself to sleep over the doctors and consultants and well-paid feds who will be disappointed in their FA award while crying into their Tesla upholstery and trying to console themselves on the flight to Aruba. Boo freaking hoo.

That's fine but look what you've done. You've sacrificed your whole life only to be ripped off by a system where more than half the kids are practically going for free, while maybe a quarter of the parents are rich people for whom $320k is a fraction of an annual bonus. You are kind of the sucker here.

Nope, we will qualify for considerable financial aid. If my kid gets into one of these tippy top schools, we will pay nowhere near the sticker price because they do in fact have need blind admissions and there is no accounting of our finances that wouldn't find plenty of "need" in that situation.

However we have saved money so that if our kid isn't both incredibly accomplished AND win the admissions lottery (those odds are so slim as to be non-existent), we will be able to help pay for another school, whether that's an in-state school or a small private that offers aid or what. We will need help to pay for school and we will look to minimize or avoid loans as much as possible. This is almost certainly what paying for college will look like for us, and we will be glad we have saved as much as we can to pay for it. If you have a family making upwards of 200k per year, the idea that you are somehow too good to do the same, or that your kid deserves one of those lottery spots at Harvard or whatever, is just entitlement. That's it.

Now if you want to advocate for affordable, or even free, public universities so that it is possible for anyone who is qualified to get a college education, I'd be right there with you. If you want to talk about the funding of PUBLIC higher education and how we actually make this affordable and accessible for kids of all backgrounds, sounds great.

But this thread is just about UMC people who feel entitled to send their kids to "T25" schools whining about how much it costs. You're not mad about the cost of college generally, you're mad about access to a certain brand of "elite" education that you think will mark your kid as worthy and better than other people, and you're mad that you see rich kids who didn't really earn it, and poor kids who don't have to pay for it, getting this thing you've decided is your kid's birthright. Get over yourself.

OP here. As I said, I'm full pay and nowhere near qualifying for financial aid under any conceivable scenario. My kid is going to a private college full pay and I'm delighted. But as someone who came from an upper middle class background, I don't like what I see happening at my alma mater and peer schools. I don't think it's right, and I know for a fact that a lot of people at elite colleges are worried about this as well, especially as the price tag approaches the dreaded $100k/yr. I don't think it's healthy when America's bests colleges consist only of children from very modest backgrounds and children from very immodest backgrounds.