Reply to Donut hole families: Did you scrimp/save/take out loans to go to Ivies/Top privates?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The whole concept of a donut hole is bullshit.  All it means is that you don't want to pay for a private college when you can afford it.  People making less can't afford it and get aid.  People making more can afford it but don't bitch as loudly.  There is no "hole."[/quote]

There is, actually.  There are plenty of data on this.  And you are indeed a ‘hole.

[/quote]

Not the person who posted this, but i would have thought the same for schools like the ivies, Stanford, MIT. They have huge endowments and tend to give rather generous need-based financial aid so I would expect that families who truly cannot pay would be taken care of. Is this not the case? [/quote]

Assuming that you will not permit your child to take out loans, then that is not the case.

A family with a HHI of e.g. $250K and two kids "truly cannot pay" $70K/year/child (and rising) for an undergraduate degree without taking out significant loans for that child.  Or at least, this family can't.  We have saved very aggressively, have forgone fancy vacations, shop at thrift stores, live in eastern MoCo, etc., and can handle (if we stretch) about $50K/child/year.  If we took out loans to bridge that gap, each child would end up with about $80K in student loans.  That is not acceptable to us.  We are nearing retirement and will not take on that debt ourselves, either.

It used to be that if you could get into a given school, elite or not, the money would work out.  Your parents could scrimp a little, and you could help - when I was in college in the early 80s and saved a couple of thousand dollars over each summer, I handed those earnings over to my parents to cover some of the college expenses.  My elite school cost about $8K at the time, so my contribution was meaningful.  Even if I'd taken out student loans, as many of my friends did, they would not have been crippling, because costs were reasonable.

A student today can expect to save about the same amount of money over a summer, maybe a bit more - but relative to the cost of a year of tuition at an elite school, it is a drop in the bucket.

Also, American incomes have been flatlining over that time.

My not-rich parents put five children through elite schools, debt-free.  That would be impossible today for all but the top 1%.

This graph is startling:

https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/tuition-fees-room-and-board-over-time

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