Are privates that don’t offer merit aid still enrolling the best students?

[Anonymous]

If what you want to hear and believe is that students at state schools are the best then sure go ahead and believe this. But this looks to be a question begging for a specific answer for the purpose of soothing someone’s feelings. You can be very smart and talented and choose to go to a state school for a variety of reasons.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why does this thread feel like sour grapes for those who can not afford to attend the Ivy they are qualified to attend?
Ivy level schools will not ever hurt for students of the highest caliber. There is way more qualified applicants than seats at those schools. If your child can not attend such a highly rated school that is fine and your child will do well wherever they attend but the T30 schools will still have an overabundance of the top qualified students to choose from. Parents have always looked at their children with bias thinking they are more unique than they really are.

+1000

There will also be "donut hole" families who have managed to save/make saving for education a priority. Schools like Harvard make it affordable for families making up to 150-200K. So while your family making 150-200K may not choose to save, there will still be plenty who do, so it will not be all "low income" and wealthy students.

Then again, it's the wealthy students who largely have the means to do the pointy ECs and win national awards, and have tutors to take 13+APs and still get all As. So the wealthy have an easier path to "having the resume for HYPSM

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:To answer OP’s question, schools that offer merit aid will outperform in an environment where full retail price has become borderline ridiculous even for those who can afford it. They will get the best and the brightest and eventually become the schools with the strongest student bodies (which will even attract students who are indifferent to cost). Need blind financial aid will be a problem esp for schools below the Ivy tier. Merit aid schools will scoop up all those super qualified donut hole kids (whose numbers grow every year). Smart need blind schools will start initiating merit aid programs fast.

1000%. That's why schools like F&M have backpedaled on the "no merit" business. Not a lot but it's something.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why does this thread feel like sour grapes for those who can not afford to attend the Ivy they are qualified to attend?
Ivy level schools will not ever hurt for students of the highest caliber. There is way more qualified applicants than seats at those schools. If your child can not attend such a highly rated school that is fine and your child will do well wherever they attend but the T30 schools will still have an overabundance of the top qualified students to choose from. Parents have always looked at their children with bias thinking they are more unique than they really are.

+1000

There will also be "donut hole" families who have managed to save/make saving for education a priority. Schools like Harvard make it affordable for families making up to 150-200K. So while your family making 150-200K may not choose to save, there will still be plenty who do, so it will not be all "low income" and wealthy students.

Then again, it's the wealthy students who largely have the means to do the pointy ECs and win national awards, and have tutors to take 13+APs and still get all As. So the wealthy have an easier path to "having the resume for HYPSM

Oh please. Not all donut hold families can save $80/year per kid. Esp in high COLA areas where their jobs are. Between medical, taxes, child care early on, expenses associated with school, car payments (on very basic cars, no suburbans or Teslas here), mortgage (still in our starter home). . . . it's just not possible for two stable paid, but not wealthy, civil servants (non-SES).

So it is sour grapes. That doesn't mean that those families, like us, are wrong.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why does this thread feel like sour grapes for those who can not afford to attend the Ivy they are qualified to attend?
Ivy level schools will not ever hurt for students of the highest caliber. There is way more qualified applicants than seats at those schools. If your child can not attend such a highly rated school that is fine and your child will do well wherever they attend but the T30 schools will still have an overabundance of the top qualified students to choose from. Parents have always looked at their children with bias thinking they are more unique than they really are.

+1000

There will also be "donut hole" families who have managed to save/make saving for education a priority. Schools like Harvard make it affordable for families making up to 150-200K. So while your family making 150-200K may not choose to save, there will still be plenty who do, so it will not be all "low income" and wealthy students.

Then again, it's the wealthy students who largely have the means to do the pointy ECs and win national awards, and have tutors to take 13+APs and still get all As. So the wealthy have an easier path to "having the resume for HYPSM

Oh please. Not all donut hold families can save $80/year per kid. Esp in high COLA areas where their jobs are. Between medical, taxes, child care early on, expenses associated with school, car payments (on very basic cars, no suburbans or Teslas here), mortgage (still in our starter home). . . . it's just not possible for two stable paid, but not wealthy, civil servants (non-SES).

So it is sour grapes. That doesn't mean that those families, like us, are wrong.

This. In Fairfax county, teacher and police officers are donut hole.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why does this thread feel like sour grapes for those who can not afford to attend the Ivy they are qualified to attend?
Ivy level schools will not ever hurt for students of the highest caliber. There is way more qualified applicants than seats at those schools. If your child can not attend such a highly rated school that is fine and your child will do well wherever they attend but the T30 schools will still have an overabundance of the top qualified students to choose from. Parents have always looked at their children with bias thinking they are more unique than they really are.

You’re close but missing an important nuance. This is another example of DCUM downward mobility sour grapes.

I grew up middle class in flyover country. I was at the top of my HS class and I didn’t know anyone who even applied to an Ivy School. And I am 100% sure no one attended one in any of the graduation classes I was around for. It just wasn’t on anyone’s radar, because of the expense relative to State Flagship U. Even if they would have qualified for aid, it was just out of reach.

Now OP clearly didn’t grow up in a community like that. Where she’s from, the best kids applied to the best schools and, if they got in, attended. The sour grapes stems from the fact she cannot give her kids that which she had growing up. It’s a very difficult thing to accept.

It is hard to accept. But also, consider that there are lots of employers who place a lot of emphasis on the Top schools. You see it all the time discussed on here. So, people want their kids to have those opportunities. And maybe UMCP is growing in equality to HYP, etc. but lbh it's just not there yet for a lot of people. So pricing them out of those opportunities is already tracking them in their careers in a lot of instances.

That resentment is understandable (and before you sling some accusation at me/my kid, my DC is not in this process yet).

[Anonymous]

My kid turned down Caltech and went to Berkeley since Berkeley gave much more money. OOS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To answer OP’s question, schools that offer merit aid will outperform in an environment where full retail price has become borderline ridiculous even for those who can afford it. They will get the best and the brightest and eventually become the schools with the strongest student bodies (which will even attract students who are indifferent to cost). Need blind financial aid will be a problem esp for schools below the Ivy tier. Merit aid schools will scoop up all those super qualified donut hole kids (whose numbers grow every year). Smart need blind schools will start initiating merit aid programs fast.

1000%. That's why schools like F&M have backpedaled on the "no merit" business. Not a lot but it's something.

And in the not so distant future, high stat kids will be going to F&M for 50k instead of Colby for 100k and F&M will become the better school, as Colby will have low income kids and rich kids who couldn’t get merit aid at F&M

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kid is turning down an Ivy that’s $85k/year for a full ride at a flagship. According to my kid, they are far from the only one of their classmates making such a decision. Kids talk.

What are the consequences to this as the years go on & so many top students can’t afford elite privates?

It is an intriguing question. The demographics at the elite colleges have changed significantly in the last 20 years and what are the long term implications of this?

There were already kids turning down Ivies for full rides at state universities or just attending a much cheaper flagship honors program in the past. But I can easily see how this would be far more kids now than 20 years ago due to the rise of the donut hole families. I do think that Ivy prestige has steadily weakened over time, they no longer have the perceived lock on the best and brightest, especially as the professional classes now really understands the cost/benefit analysis, and also that Ivy admission is hardly meritocratic and is based on very different factors that have little to do with achievement. And others are less impressed by the behaviors and attitudes of elite college grads, fair or not, especially with cancel culture and the growth of rigid ideological outlooks that these schools have embraced (with some exceptions, like Chicago). Then we do have that there are many more best and brightest chasing after a limited number of spots, which actually means they end up being dispersed among a wider range of schools.

All in all, I am no longer "impressed" when I see an elite college decal on a car. I do think nice kid, bit lucky, and not much more than that. When evaluating candidates, if I notice their college on the resumes, I don't give weight to elite college grads over lesser college grads once above a certain threshold. What they actually did is much more important, along with impression in the interviews. Having said that, the Ivies will still produce genuinely impressive graduates who go on to achieve great things, but this is probably no more than 1/4 - 1/3 of their student body, with the rest not really meaningfully different from comparable students at UVA or College Park or Vanderbilt or whatever.

Where did you get your 1/4-1/3 stat?

FWIW, people have been turning down Ivies due to cost for more than 20 years. This isn't a new phenomenon.

The gulf in price between Ivies & state schools has exploded over the past 20 years. Lots of state schools have frozen tuition or let you lock in your tuition for all four years the year you enroll.

Yeah, but there were still kids with middle class parents turning down the Ivies in the '80s because the parents couldn't afford that tuition. The group may be larger now than then, but this isn't new though may be to you.

True. My brother and I were among them. Also most of the top students at my middle class suburban high school didn't even bother applying to schools they knew they couldn't afford because even the application fee was too much to pay for a lottery ticket.

When I graduated from high school in 1980, the mantra was that if you could get into a school, you could find a way to attend. At that time the tuition, room, and board at the NESCAC school I attended cost about $8K. Many of my middle and upper-middle class New England high school classmates went to private schools, as well.

I contributed about $2K/year towards the cost from summer earnings, covered my own books and miscellaneous expenses, took out a student loan for $1500-$2K/year, and my parents paid the rest. They did this for all six of their kids at private schools, paying over time (not in a lump sum) under arrangements with each school. It was a stretch for them relative to what the state flagship would have been, but it was doable, and the modest low-interest student debt we incurred was manageable.

The year I went abroad, the tuition cost $800 because the program was at the European university through an American school. My room and board was $300 a month. My parents saved a lot of money that year relative to what they would have paid for my on-campus costs.

Fast-forward, the same NESCAC school now costs $86K/year. A family like the one I grew up in could never in a million years pull off what my parents did.

Apples and oranges.

[Anonymous]

Look at the stats in the Harvard lawsuit. They aren't accepting "the best" in terms of stats, that's for sure.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why does this thread feel like sour grapes for those who can not afford to attend the Ivy they are qualified to attend?
Ivy level schools will not ever hurt for students of the highest caliber. There is way more qualified applicants than seats at those schools. If your child can not attend such a highly rated school that is fine and your child will do well wherever they attend but the T30 schools will still have an overabundance of the top qualified students to choose from. Parents have always looked at their children with bias thinking they are more unique than they really are.

+1000

There will also be "donut hole" families who have managed to save/make saving for education a priority. Schools like Harvard make it affordable for families making up to 150-200K. So while your family making 150-200K may not choose to save, there will still be plenty who do, so it will not be all "low income" and wealthy students.

Then again, it's the wealthy students who largely have the means to do the pointy ECs and win national awards, and have tutors to take 13+APs and still get all As. So the wealthy have an easier path to "having the resume for HYPSM

Oh please. Not all donut hold families can save $80/year per kid. Esp in high COLA areas where their jobs are. Between medical, taxes, child care early on, expenses associated with school, car payments (on very basic cars, no suburbans or Teslas here), mortgage (still in our starter home). . . . it's just not possible for two stable paid, but not wealthy, civil servants (non-SES).

So it is sour grapes. That doesn't mean that those families, like us, are wrong.

Don't forget saving for retirement too! And a lot of schools are having issues and more and more parents are putting their kids in private school. It's hard to pay for everything.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kid is turning down an Ivy that’s $85k/year for a full ride at a flagship. According to my kid, they are far from the only one of their classmates making such a decision. Kids talk.

What are the consequences to this as the years go on & so many top students can’t afford elite privates?

Haven't you been reading these boards? There are more than enough bright students to go around.

One outcome may be that parents will learn how to save, starting at birth, instead of depending on the overpayment and generosity of others to fund their merit aid pools. Perhaps also have a family size you can afford the education of.

Some of us do and still cannot afford $85K a year. We had one child. Saved since birth. Bought a small sh@t shack (as in under 1000) square feet in a not so great neighborhood. So, our kid knows they can go to a school we can afford. Simple.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kid is turning down an Ivy that’s $85k/year for a full ride at a flagship. According to my kid, they are far from the only one of their classmates making such a decision. Kids talk.

What are the consequences to this as the years go on & so many top students can’t afford elite privates?

Haven't you been reading these boards? There are more than enough bright students to go around.

One outcome may be that parents will learn how to save, starting at birth, instead of depending on the overpayment and generosity of others to fund their merit aid pools. Perhaps also have a family size you can afford the education of.

Are you still going to be reciting these lines when annual tuition, room & board hit $200K? $300K?

At what point if any will you see that the issue is systemic and not about individuals' financial discipline?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kid is turning down an Ivy that’s $85k/year for a full ride at a flagship. According to my kid, they are far from the only one of their classmates making such a decision. Kids talk.

What are the consequences to this as the years go on & so many top students can’t afford elite privates?

It is an intriguing question. The demographics at the elite colleges have changed significantly in the last 20 years and what are the long term implications of this?

There were already kids turning down Ivies for full rides at state universities or just attending a much cheaper flagship honors program in the past. But I can easily see how this would be far more kids now than 20 years ago due to the rise of the donut hole families. I do think that Ivy prestige has steadily weakened over time, they no longer have the perceived lock on the best and brightest, especially as the professional classes now really understands the cost/benefit analysis, and also that Ivy admission is hardly meritocratic and is based on very different factors that have little to do with achievement. And others are less impressed by the behaviors and attitudes of elite college grads, fair or not, especially with cancel culture and the growth of rigid ideological outlooks that these schools have embraced (with some exceptions, like Chicago). Then we do have that there are many more best and brightest chasing after a limited number of spots, which actually means they end up being dispersed among a wider range of schools.

All in all, I am no longer "impressed" when I see an elite college decal on a car. I do think nice kid, bit lucky, and not much more than that. When evaluating candidates, if I notice their college on the resumes, I don't give weight to elite college grads over lesser college grads once above a certain threshold. What they actually did is much more important, along with impression in the interviews. Having said that, the Ivies will still produce genuinely impressive graduates who go on to achieve great things, but this is probably no more than 1/4 - 1/3 of their student body, with the rest not really meaningfully different from comparable students at UVA or College Park or Vanderbilt or whatever.

Where did you get your 1/4-1/3 stat?

FWIW, people have been turning down Ivies due to cost for more than 20 years. This isn't a new phenomenon.

The gulf in price between Ivies & state schools has exploded over the past 20 years. Lots of state schools have frozen tuition or let you lock in your tuition for all four years the year you enroll.

Yeah, but there were still kids with middle class parents turning down the Ivies in the '80s because the parents couldn't afford that tuition. The group may be larger now than then, but this isn't new though may be to you.

True. My brother and I were among them. Also most of the top students at my middle class suburban high school didn't even bother applying to schools they knew they couldn't afford because even the application fee was too much to pay for a lottery ticket.

+100

Youngest of 3 siblings and we only applied in-state. Very similar.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why does this thread feel like sour grapes for those who can not afford to attend the Ivy they are qualified to attend?
Ivy level schools will not ever hurt for students of the highest caliber. There is way more qualified applicants than seats at those schools. If your child can not attend such a highly rated school that is fine and your child will do well wherever they attend but the T30 schools will still have an overabundance of the top qualified students to choose from. Parents have always looked at their children with bias thinking they are more unique than they really are.

You’re close but missing an important nuance. This is another example of DCUM downward mobility sour grapes.

I grew up middle class in flyover country. I was at the top of my HS class and I didn’t know anyone who even applied to an Ivy School. And I am 100% sure no one attended one in any of the graduation classes I was around for. It just wasn’t on anyone’s radar, because of the expense relative to State Flagship U. Even if they would have qualified for aid, it was just out of reach.

Now OP clearly didn’t grow up in a community like that. Where she’s from, the best kids applied to the best schools and, if they got in, attended. The sour grapes stems from the fact she cannot give her kids that which she had growing up. It’s a very difficult thing to accept.

It is hard to accept. But also, consider that there are lots of employers who place a lot of emphasis on the Top schools. You see it all the time discussed on here. So, people want their kids to have those opportunities. And maybe UMCP is growing in equality to HYP, etc. but lbh it's just not there yet for a lot of people. So pricing them out of those opportunities is already tracking them in their careers in a lot of instances.

That resentment is understandable (and before you sling some accusation at me/my kid, my DC is not in this process yet).

I’m not going to sling anything at you because everything you say is completely true! I never had access to those top employers out of college, because my parents couldn’t (or wouldn’t) afford to send me to the kind of school I needed to go to for that to happen. So of course I have known my whole life that the process was never meritocratic, and that kids from the right families got to go to the right schools and then get the right jobs.

My only point is that this is news to some DCUMers, because they had access to all that, and credited their merit rather than the lucky circumstances of their birth.