Reply to Do families with $250K in income get financial aid? If not, how do they afford college?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Four kids with an income maybe 20K higher than OP here. We started saving before they were born when we earned significantly less and had our own student loans, live in a small house that needs work, husband and I share one old car, no fancy vacations or extravagant lifestyle and have made saving for our retirement a priority too. Youngest of the 4 is now 2 years from finishing college.  Three have gone to instate to UVA and the 4th was awarded a scholarship at a SLAC that made the cost of attending same as if she was in-state Virginia.

It’s called lots of sacrifice OP. [/quote]

[b]and that's something wrong in the US for the hard working middle class[/b][/quote]

Right here is the real point OP isn’t saying. You make $250k and you want a nice house, multiple nice cars, 2 vacations a year, AND be able to afford to send your kids to private university on someone else’s dime. You can afford public universities, OP. That is fine. Your kids will be fine. They aren’t “owed” an education at a $90k a year school. They aren’t “owed” financial aid. You could pay for it if you made a lot of sacrifices for many, many years. You didn’t and now you are annoyed. Why does everyone think private universities are meant for the middle class? They are not. [/quote]

That’s a lot of rationalizing on your part. While I agree that public universities are more than sufficient and in many cases superior, I disagree that some “blame” should be lodged at OP or other families in question.  No where else in the world charges students $90-$100k each year to attend college. It’s absurd. Most families can not save $360-$400k…PER CHILD.

So yes, public university it is! No arguing there. I dislike this rationalizing and blame people start getting into “you aren’t owed anything” blah blah, as if people are the problem. People are not the problem. Most people are doing the best they can with little resources and in a punishing system where we have expensive health care, no pensions, no child care and exorbitant college. [/quote]

+1 People on this board are always blaming other people for objecting to the insane cost of college. But as this poster notes, no where else in the world is college, public or private, so expensive.  And even here it wasn’t this expensive until recently.  While private college has always been considered expensive, if you apply a regular inflation adjustment to tuition, room and board cost from 1985 it would be about $50K not the nearly $90k it costs today (for those not getting aid). That is a big deviation. It is fair for people to have the opinion that things could and should be done differently at these schools.[/quote]

Yeah. I have neighbors that went to a well-known private that was around $60-65k tuition/room&board about 15 years ago and did not understand that tuition at their school is now just a few thousand short of $100k/year.  It spiked insanely from the 80s-2024.  It was not a slow incremental increase. [/quote]

Tuition is not 100k. Tuition room and board is between 85 and 90 at almost all elite colleges, NOT counting the “personal expenses “ and insurance fees the vast majority do not have to pay. Personal expenses is no different than one pays for them in high school; clothing, shoes, books etc, so it is not an additional cost to the family. in fact often one gets to save by not having sports , music and dance fees in college. We have kids at different T10/ivy and they have both been 3-4k less than the estimated total cost. 
It is a lot of money but there are plenty of on campus jobs and access to paid TA or other jobs at ivies and the T10privates. These jobs often are 8-12 hrs per week and pay 2k-5k per semester! Summer jobs are not too hard to get and can net at least 5k (more if they work and live at home in summer). Anyone who did private school in DMV is already used to shelling out 30k+ per kid, so that shifts to college spending, plus anyone who saved minimum over the last 18 yrs should at least have 40k in 529. Even with a 3500 per month mortgage there is money enough on 250k to pay for one kid in private college, with the kid helping out if needed, from semester and summer jobs. [/quote]

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