Reply to Why pay $90K for a less competitive private vs. far less $$ for a less competitive public?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I fell in love with Sewanee at the same time as DC. Basically signed the check as quick as possible and have no regrets. It's a beautiful place and small environment for learning that my child will thrive in. I'd prefer that for her than a large place she feels she'll drown in.[/quote]

Paying full price for it though?

Nice campus and it’s on our list but there has to be a big reduction in sticker price.[/quote]
It's expensive, but I know my child will thrive there compared to their other options, and that means the world to me. I am in a fortunate position to where this isn't a big dip for my family, but I also understand that it is outrageously expensive.[/quote]

First, reality is reality. If people in the donut hole can’t afford to send their chuldren to Williams or Tufts, that’s life. The door to Williams and Tufts isn’t opening.

And I don’t think that whether a school is public or private necessarily has much to do with the characteristics of the school or the net cost of the school for a given family.

Example: If my child had gotten into Princeton, the EFC might have only been $22,000. Princeton might have been cheaper than the third-tier state university down the road.

For many great students, not-so-selective schools like Seton Hall or Temple will offer enough merit aid that the full net cost is comparable to the full net cost of the state flagship.

But, if you have a lot of money, and the only question is value, then one question is whether you think that financial ROI, based on current conditions, should be the main factor you use to pick a college for your kid.

This might be a good strategy for kids who aren’t too interested in college, don’t have any strong preferences or simply love the idea of maximizing educational ROI.

But I think it’s a bad strategy right now for a bright kid who loves learning, or who seems likely to be much happier at one type of school than another type of school, because:

- Having a bright, lively, reasonably healthy kid who enjoys learning is one of the greatest privileges  a person can have, and it seems like a desecration to make a decision about what could be a fun, important, soul-enriching experience for a great kid based solely on financial ROI. I might have been barren. I might have miscarried. My child and I could have died when I started to have HELLP.  My child could have died before turning 18. My child could have had trouble learning or lacked an interest in learning. I could be too poor to have any choice about where to send my kid to college. If I get to this stage and I have the ability to send my kid to the preferred college, how dare I repay the universe for all the kindness bestowed on me by nickel and diming my kid over something as wholesome as college tuition?

- Most of the people talking about college ROI don’t know anything about economics and have no idea how to calculate ROI. Because of their ignorance, they just take some magazine’s ROI figures and run with that. If they have a little more sense than God gave a turnip, maybe they use the ROi figures for specific majors.

But most of those folks don’t make a serious effort to personalize the ROI calculations.

The real ROI projections include:

- Grave uncertainty over what majors will make money. When I was in college, pre-law liberal arts majors were hot and engineering was stone cold. I told people I might consider going into engineering, and they asked, “How can you get a job in that?” All they knew was that the end of the Cold War had killed aerospace jobs.

- The odds the kid will get a degree in a particular major within four years. Kids who go to the wrong school or pick an unsuitable major have to build two or three extra years of tuition and underemployment into their lifetime financial performance stats. They may also run the risk of getting no degree and no good career prep of any kind. You have to build the risk of bad outcomes into the ROI projections, and the bad-outcome adjustment will strongly favor even moderately selective private schools over public universities that take big freshman classes and focus on weeding kids out.

- The impact of educational choices on cost of living. People who follow certain education paths tend to live more standard, suburb-oriented lifestyles and probably have higher lifetime living costs than siblings who take other routes and have an inner city or inner suburb kind of life. In other words: Business majors at big state schools may make more than music history professors majors who come out of SLACs, but suits, big cars and lawn service might eat up a lot of the difference without having a big impact on happiness.

- The nature of the kid. A kid who has a strong urge to major in music or comparative literature rather than business may not be a high-starting-income business major. Simple tables that give earnings by major don’t really show how much of the income difference is due to major and how much to people’s abilities and personalities.

- The kid’s projected lifetime earnings trajectory. A kid with a liberal arts major or social sciences major from a T30 through T150 school might have flatter but steadier earnings level and earn at around the peak level for a lot longer than a typical CS major from comparable school s. 
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