Reply to Middle class families - Are you willing to take on a ton of debt for a top college?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]People make the best decisions they can, so I would never begrudge a family that decided they couldn't afford the difference.

But, Columbia has very generous financial aid and it is less expensive than public colleges, including UVA, for almost everyone who is not in the top 20% of incomes. Columbia also has a no loan policy in their financial aid packages. Nor does it include retirement plan assets in calculating expected financial contributions.

So many of these posts are deeply misunderstand how much financial aid is available at Columbia and similar institutions. It would be a shame if others did not consider Columbia because of misinformation.

[b]A "DCUM lower middle class family" earning $150,000/year with $150,000 in home equity and $20,000 in cash/marketable securities would have to contribute about $34,000 at Columbia. That's a relatively small difference from UVA's $30,500 cost of attendance.  [/b]
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That may be, but in the example OP provided to set up this discussion, there was NO aid provided and cost would be $70K per year.  Probably because the student wasn't a top applicant and/or family income is over $200K.  They may also have younger children and parents' taking loans for one child may be manageable but then you really need to be willing to do it for the other children.  If they can reasonably pay for UVA (and maybe some of that is loans), Columbia is going to be maybe $40K more per year.  For about $160K after 4 years.    That's a huge amount of debt for a questionable return vs. UVa.  Maybe if the student was 100% set on going into investment banking it might, maybe, be worth it.  But I can't think of many career paths that would benefit so much from an Ivy league brand + earn the student enough to not care about that level of debt.

I have friends who were always firmly in the state school camp but their oldest has always been a super-high achieving student through his own drive and got into Brown.  He wants to work on Wall St. so they decided that for him the investment would be worthwhile.  They have three younger children, two whom are old enough to have ideas about careers and college and are more interested in teaching and engineering and will be happy to go to state Us so they decided to do this being fairly confident it would not lock them into feeling they had to provide the same for the others.  But, if all the kids were high-achieving Ivy-type students they probably would have said 'no.'  They really can't afford to do it for all the kids and it would poison the kids' relationship if they all wanted it but the parents only could help one of the kids.
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