And then what?
Does it make sense to you, that as society increases both in complexity and information availability, that people who can process the information and cogitate well will have an advantage?
@collegebound1516
You’re probably too ignorant about fin aid to realize that even most colleges who promise to meet full need leave a gap of a few thousand dollars that needs to be filled by family contributions.
Try having to come up with a few thousand dollars when your family makes less than $20K a year. Then get back to me.
And yes, some of us here have lived through such a situation.
@collegebound1516 - What you describe reveals the hypocrisy of the Ivies and wanna-be-Ivies that only provide “need based aid” coupled with astronomical tuition. With this system, you end up with is a student body composed of only the very poor or the very rich. The middle class cannot afford the $250,000 for four years tuition, and, if they try to attend these institutions, they risk a lifetime of crushing debt.
A few days ago there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about a 30 year old Columbia University graduate with $180,000 in debt who waited tables for living while working part-time at a public radio station. This young woman would have been better off never attending college, but the Columbia admins get to feel all smug about themselves declaring “100% need based scholarships” while ruining this woman’s life for a useless degree.
These colleges and universities are the moral equivalent of a payday loan store charging 300% interest for a weekly loan, or the “buy here, pay here” used car dealerships selling a $1,500 jalopy for $5,000 by stretching out the interest payments.
@PurpleTitan Ive never gotten an allowance or money for my birthday/christmas, but I haven’t spent a cent of my money since I was 8 years old. I’ve been saving for college for all this time, all the while making lemonade stands, pet-sitting for neighbors, babysitting up to six days a week, and working a job while maintaining a 4.7 gpa. So yes, I can come up with a few thousand dollars. I’m not saying that people who live off small paychecks have it easy; I believe quite the opposite. What I am saying is that my parents shouldn’t have to help send me to a mediocre school because my family isn’t poor or racially diverse enough to receive financial aid.
Not sure what you mean by “middle class”, but https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculator indicates, for a family of 3 in California with 1 in college with various parental income levels and parental cash and investment asset levels, the net prices are:
Assets-> 0 100000 200000 500000 1000000
Income
0 4600 4600 9600 24600 49600
50000 4600 4600 9600 24600 49600
75000 7975 7975 12975 27975 52975
100000 12600 12600 17600 32600 57600
150000 19600 19600 24600 39600 63150
200000 49200 51700 56700 63150 63150
250000 63150 63150 63150 63150 63150
It takes quite a bit of income and/or assets to be full pay at Harvard. About 42% of Harvard students are full pay. But the average award amount of those who do get financial aid at Harvard indicates that the average financial aid recipient is still significantly above median in parental income and/or assets.
I.e. Harvard gives plenty of financial aid to students from lower, middle, and “lower upper” income and wealth families, but, for whatever reason, its admits are very skewed toward those from the highest income and wealth families.
@collegebound1516, fin aid isn’t dependent on race (though some merit scholarships are).
Also, depending on what schools your parents can pay for, what state you’re in, what major you are interested in, as well as what qualities/stats you bring to the table, it’s far from certain that you have to settle for a “mediocre school”. Plus, you may not know this, but academic talent extends very deep in this country. What you perceive to be a mediocre school may very well have top-notch faculty. And many schools that you perceive as mediocre have honors colleges where the caliber of the students could be high and you may get as much opportunity/attention/advising as at an elite school (depending what you want to do; quality of honors colleges can vary a lot, and they can match an elite college in some ways but not others).
@Zinhead, no one pointed a gun to the head of that lady and forced her to take out gigantic loans (almost certainly to a grad program since you can’t borrow that much as an undergrad).
Also, @collegebound1516, I see that you’re in CA, so . . . what the heck are you complaining about?
You are in the state that I think has the best public higher education setup for its residents as well as a flagship (Cal) that I consider to be an Ivy-equivalent (because it produces high-achieving grads at the same rate as some Ivies/equivalents) as well as a plethora of non-mediocre options besides Cal like UCLA and UCSD which would be flagships in many other states, College of Creative Studies at UCSB, honors college at UCI, Cal-Poly, etc.
Not to mention a public fin aid system that provides better fin aid to its residents than pretty much any other state.
I really imagine what it’s like growing up in a family where money is abundant and life is luxurious. Must be nice to be apart of affluent communities like Beverly Hills.
Rich people don’t have perfect lives. No one does.
“A few days ago there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about a 30 year old Columbia University graduate with $180,000 in debt who waited tables for living while working part-time at a public radio station. This young woman would have been better off never attending college, but the Columbia admins get to feel all smug about themselves declaring “100% need based scholarships” while ruining this woman’s life for a useless degree.”
Zinhead- you missed the point of this article. The woman profiled refused to consider moving to a lower cost of living area where she could get a full time job, pay off her loans, and live a lifestyle commensurate with a college graduates.
Her life is hardly ruined- and her degree is hardly useless- but she has made some choices which have severely hampered her standard of living. HER CHOICES.
To me, this is one key point from the links that OP posted:
“Thanks to hyperlocal funding, America is one of only three advanced countries where the government spends more on schools in rich areas than in poor ones. Its university fees have risen 17 times as fast as median incomes since 1980, partly to pay for pointless bureaucracy and flashy buildings. And many universities offer “legacy” preferences, favouring the children of alumni in admissions.”
Xiggi’s comments about public high schools are not accurate in wealthy suburban areas where kids regularly get to college and find it easier than their high school (certainly in the first couple of years). Many high schools in this country do a very good job, but many do an exceedingly poor job. Even when wealthy school districts don’t spend as much per pupil as poor districts, they often have the ability to spend more of that money on education and less on things like security or remedial classes, since more kids are better prepared and have parents who will pay for private tutors. Also, teachers tend to make more money in wealthier districts - a pretty big incentive for a teacher in a poor district to move out.
I disagree that a high level of blame for this situation rests on the teacher unions. I think the situation would be even worse for teachers in poor districts if there weren’t some sort of collective bargaining process and good benefits to back up their relatively lower wages. The reality is that most teachers are OK, not great, not terrible. The reality is that most kids learn just fine with OK teachers. I totally agree that it should be much easier to fire terrible teachers and that teacher unions should actually support getting rid of bad teachers. But I don’t think doing away with unions will solve this problem. I am not sure that increasing teacher pay will either, since teaching in those areas is so very difficult no matter how much teachers are paid.
Some of the “elitism” issue is the progress of immigrants working hard for their kids to have a better life. Those kids (our parents in many instances) worked at blue collar or lower level white collar jobs, inched their way into the middle class and sent their kids to college, often with financial aid. We, the first generation to go to college, then were able to move to better neighborhoods and give our kids a high quality education. Of course, for many of us the cost of private college is still out of reach (assuming our kids are not Ivy level) as we make too much for financial aid and given how fast tuition has risen, the loss of defined benefit pensions requiring us to save for retirement and with no grandparent money or anticipated inheritance.
Exactly. It’s hard to see how many posters don’t pick up on this. She made the decision to take out $180k in loans, she made the decision to attend Columbia, she made the decision to study whatever she studied, and she made the decision to stay in a city with an extremely high COL; it’s ridiculous to blame Columbia for her problems, and even more ridiculous to expect others, who didn’t make these foolish decisions, to bail her out through any type of loan assistance. Look at many of the posters this cycle. I was browsing through one member of the incoming 2019 class and saw he was accepted to Caltech, but couldn’t attend without (IIRC) $150k-$200k in loans. He made the decision to take Caltech off his list, and is looking for a full ride at a state school. Ten years down the road, he’ll be an engineer without student loans; but his counterpart who bought a prestigious degree with money they didn’t have is making headlines garnering pity because of “what the school and evil banks did to them.”
They make their own choices and should suffer the consequences.
@mom2and I agree with you entirely - I was surprised to read @xiggi being so negative about teachers and schools in the US. I don’t know what schools xiggi is referring to, but at the HS where I teach, nearly all the faculty have MS/MA/PhD degrees in our fields, most from schools highly venerated on CC, as well as the state-required Education credentials and background. Our teachers are experienced and rarely leave except for retirement.
And our school routinely sends lots of kids to the “best” colleges where they report being extremely well-prepared. Yes, it’s a public school, in a wealthy-ish district. I have the option to send my own children to this district, and I value that benefit at about $30,000+ per kid per year because it’s really comparable to the best private schools.
That said, would I have picked a teaching career without the kinds of benefits, pension, etc. offered to me [via a union]? No I would not; I would have gone into a more lucrative career if I didn’t have the job security or lifestyle/etc. benefits to make up for the lower pay. And teachers like me and my colleagues would all have that option [to leave]. The teachers schools will still keep, getting rid of unions/benefits, would be the teachers without good other employment options (which will skew toward those with less education in all likelihood).
I was interested in this thread because I do think that parents who are connected intellectually can leverage their kids for even greater success. For instance, it was no accident that I ended up teaching in a great district that lets my kids attend (instead of the poorer area where we live). My husband works for a college that gives him some help depending on where they go, when our kids get to college. So despite being solidly middle-class, we are able to take advantage of more academic advantages.
This isn’t limited to teachers or college employees - there are lots of “Choice” or busing programs where parents who are in-the-know can grab opportunities for their own kids. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it is an American ideal that the go-getters can achieve more because of their own effort. On the other hand, some kids are left out in the cold through no fault of their own, and honestly it does no one a public good if we develop an undereducated underclass. I.e. it’s better to fund preschools than prisons, no matter how conservative you are politically.
Randomly, this reminds me of a time when I was in Ed. school and our oldest (DS16) was a toddler. We read about a study that correlated linear feet of bookshelves in the home, with kids’ eventual academic achievement. I went home and told this to DH and panicked because we didn’t have any bookshelves up. He said, sensibly, “That’s because we just moved and all of our [hundreds of] books are in boxes. It’s the same.” But I didn’t feel 100% comfortable until they were unpacked onto the bookshelves for DS to “experience”. 
ETA - before anyone starts saying that I don’t understand correlations etc. - I totally do understand; this was a story of me as a new mom wanting to make sure that “every advantage” was given to the kid, no matter how potentially inconsequential. So if it was correlated to achievement that he would see the books in person, then that’s what we were going to do.
We picked a daycare/preschool for our kids that is really wonderful - and that also takes a fairly diverse mix including kids on vouchers from the state. Sadly, the daycare is the best “parenting” that some of those kids ever get. Happily, it’s pretty damned good “parenting”. I do realize that parents like me can pick that kind of daycare, buy old “School House Rock” DVDs, engage on high levels with my kids about all kinds of topics, etc. The confusing part to me, is, how much of that is “unearned privilege” and how much is “choices”.
I’ve noticed that threads with those -ocracy words in them really tend to get Americans stirred up.
Do we know how much our government spends on our “worst” schools versus those in the other “advanced countries” the article refers to?
For intelligence, nature wins out over nurture. It’s primarily genetic based on studies of identical twins raised apart.
@ucbalumnus - Thanks for posting the stats for the school with an endowment of $1,540,000 per student. Try looking up the stats for a school with an endowment of $300,000 per student. They will not be anywhere near as generous as Harvard.
@PurpleTitan - No one points a gun at people’s head when they visit a payday lender or loan shark. That doesn’t make what what those business’s do ethical either.
However, while identical twins tend to have similar intelligence, non-identical siblings’ intelligence varied considerably more, and raising apart made a greater difference for them. Since a parent and child have the same genetic commonality as non-identical siblings, the “nature” aspect of parentage is likely to be similar to them, rather than for identical twins.
You did write about “hypocrisy of Ivies”, so I merely used the one whose net price calculator was most convenient to do “what if” scenarios.
Not to poor kids either. Which Ivies and “wanna be Ivies” were you referring to?