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

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

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

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]A lot of people who claim to be "donut hole" families have lived lives of increasing lifestyle creep as their incomes have climbed up 200k, and then want to complain that they don't get enough need-based aid. Well, did you really need a new car every 5 years? Expensive vacations? To redo the kitchen?

If you want to argue that a family making over 200k is middle class, then live like middle class people -- budget, accept you won't be able to afford everything you want to do, and sock money away for retirement and college.

We make well under 200k and this is what we do, and we have friends making over who go out to eat three nights a week, drive luxury cars, and take multiple vacations overseas every year, have weekly cleaners, etc. Those people are not entitled to need-based aid. It's not my fault, or the college's fault, that they chose to just live nicer, more luxurious, easier lives instead of saving their additional income for their child's education. We've scrimped and saved and still won't have enough. AND work in helping professions. I don't cry myself to sleep over the doctors and consultants and well-paid feds who will be disappointed in their FA award while crying into their Tesla upholstery and trying to console themselves on the flight to Aruba. Boo freaking hoo.[/quote]

We make around 200k. Kids have never been abroad. Most vacations are to relatives, but we'll do long weekends at a cheap OBX hotel. Our cars get replaced at the 15 year mark and are not luxury. We still will not be able to pay 4x our annual income to put two kids through college. It's not a big deal because they can go to state school, but people pretending that people should attempt to live in poverty for the off chance that their kid gets into Harvard are insufferable. [/quote]
+1 My kid is going to a great state school, but that's because we can't afford expensive private -- donut family.  It's ridiculous for UMC to be expected to pay the same as wealthy families.   $220K in the DC area is considered MC, btw.    A HHI of $280K is not *that* different to $220K after taxes.
[/quote]

It's $20-25K extra per year.  That's a huge difference.  If you have been making that for at least 4 years before college you could have saved $80K in just that timeframe.

Why does everyone feel entitled to expensive private college?  Just like most things in life, you go with what you can afford.  There are literally still the majority of colleges that are/can be affordable for your family.  Making $280K/year puts you in the Top 7-8% of all people in the USA.  Let that sink in.  You have so many more privileges than 92% of the people in our country.  
[/quote]

I would ask, then, why do low income people think they are entitled to expensive private college?  People who aren't even paying a penny--not just UMC types who wish it was 30% cheaper.[/quote]

Well, do you think that expensive private college experiences should be able to just be bought? That wouldn’t make the degrees supposedly earned from them worth much, would it? [/quote]

Isn't that exactly what is happening? If you don't make less than $100k or whatever it is, you are required to pay $320k to get the degree.  So only people who can afford that will buy the degree.  In the case of Harvard etc, there is a long waiting list.  But the more expensive these schools become, with $400k around the corner, the fewer people there will be who can or want to pay full price.  Eventually, the pool of full pay families will shrink (ok perhaps never at Harvard but down the list) and you will have a very mediocre student body where you practically let in any rich kid whose family is essentially willing to pay twice the real price--first to cover their own costs and then to cover the costs of a financial aid recipient.  This is what is happening at schools like Trinity College.  I can assure you, the quality level of full pay admitted students ain't that great at Trinity now.

The best way out of this mess is merit aid.  Give a discount to excellent students even if their parents make more than $150k.  The lower ranked schools already understand this.  They have no choice to stay competitive.  But more and more schools need to start doing this, and the schools that do will have the strongest student profiles, because they are making themselves available to what is really the strongest cohort of students out there: the children of the hard workinig and highly educated upper middle class.  The top 20 schools will be fine--they have billions and 200 years of reputation.  But below that, there will be degradation and the merit aid schools will continue to surpass them. A tipping point happens when the merit aid school has higher average SATs then the need-only peer, at which point everyone gets the memo that the merit aid school is actually now better than the need-only school, at which point kids who don't even need merit aid prefer to attend the merit aid school, just because it is more selective and has a higher quality student body.[/quote]

Why would Harvard give merit aid?  Everyone is top notch? The lower ranked schools do it to attract more top students.  The t25 do not need to do that, as is evidenced with their single digit acceptance rates[/quote

Harvard doesn’t have to do anything. They have unlimited resources. I can still be concerned that it and peer institutions aren’t serving the public interest by limiting access to their school to the low end of the income spectrum and the very high end of the income spectrum.

Second tier schools that mimic Harvard’s financial aid policies like Trinity are going to have problems though as the pool of highly intelligent full pay students disappears on them as the price tag goes up and up and up.

Ultimately as college becomes just totally exorbitant if you don’t qualify for need based aid the best and the brightest will chase and receive merit aid and attend those institutions. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics