Reply to Are top private colleges mainly for poor people now?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My spouse and I combined make just over $400k and live in Chevy Chase. My kid got into ND for class of 2027. But we are seriously thinking about sending her to UMD or Clemson, where she has money at both. We haven’t always made $400k, we have three kids and $330k is a lot for undergrad. Point is that you need to make a lot of money to not have to think twice about pricey privates. [/quote]

You are the exact point of this thread. Even up to 400k of income, well beyond the threshold of financial aid, full pay at a private college is an iffy proposition. The upper middle class is being hollowed out at these schools, where the pricing architecture favors middle to low income and the very affluent. [/quote]

But it’s always been an iffy proposition.  Families have always decided (correctly) that a state school education was great.  My own parents in the 90’s decided that they didn’t want to pay for an Ivy education since there were three of us and sent me to the state flagship honors program for basically free.  Great decision.   We will make a different decision for their grandchildren even though the relative cost is higher for us than it was for them.  Making choices about whether to splurge on something that is not necessary will always be a personal choice.  [/quote]

But the point is, the math has changed over the decades.  The cost of attendance has risen faster than inflation.  Meanwhile, financial aid for low income students has become more generous thanks to swollen endowments. The top schools are increasingly becoming filled with kids who qualify for substantial aid (in fact a majority of students) and kids who qualify for no aid and their parents still send them there because they are very wealthy and money is not an object.  This trend is only continuing.  Perhaps soon all the top schools will look like Trinity College.  A bunch of kids on financial aid and then like half the class filled with rich white prep school kids who like to party and don't really have much interest in books.  This is where we are headed because pretty soon it will be 100k/yr and the number of families prepared to pay that kind of money will become lower and lower.[/quote]

I cannot tell you what the market forces will do in the years to come but for now, this is simply not true.

http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/college/

Take a look at this graphic.  Most people at Columbia (over 60%) is from the top quintile.  "only" 14% are from the 1%.  So 45% of the university is from the top 20% who are not "rich".
[/quote]

The wealthiest people I know around here are not high income. Trust fund babies where maybe one parent works a glamour job. They aren’t collecting FA due to assets but their incomes put them in lower percentiles. Do these stats consider assets?[/quote]

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