@ucbalumnus: Glass half empty viewpoint is unreasonably negative, in my opinion. Many privates, especially the elites with large endowments, are very generous with grant aid to over 40% of the undergraduate student body.
With the advent of the endowment tax, expect to see the wealthy privates expand their generosity.
^^. Agree with @publisher on the glass half empty viewpoint. If 1/2 the class at selective private school is Full Pay students, that makes 50% of the rest of the student body eligible for Financial Aid based on demonstrated need. That’s not adequate? What are you hoping for @ucbalumnus, 85% Need Based Aid kids and 15% Full pay? No one is making the financial aid needed kids apply to the private school. Why should these kids be given more preferential treatment for admissions slots over the kids that have the grades, stats, Ec’s etc that match the school’s typical student profile and can actually afford to go there?
There are lots of ways to get a college education ( some less expensive than others) and I personally don’t think that people are born with the “right” to attend any school they want. That seems to be quite the entitled sentiment.
I think families need to find a way to get their kids a college education and raise their "Family boat” up instead of relying on everybody else to help them. If you want to apply to college in the hopes of getting a full ride because you need it, I’m fine with that. The schools are trying to help “some” people out. They can’t help everyone, and certainly not a majority. That doesn’t make any sense.
Kids aren’t just looking for prestige or for the academic programs. My kids grew up in a mid-sized town in the Midwest. Both kids wanted to attend colleges where they could pursue their intellectual interests. But they also wanted external (non-school) settings to pursue their extracurricular interests or passions.
The older one wanted to attend a college “where it’s safe to be a thinker.” But he also wanted to be in a city with “major league sports.” While he liked my alma mater (Reed), Portland had a fatal flaw: it had NBA basketball but it did not have major league baseball or football. We respected his priorities. Had he attended the top public university in our state (which offered him a lot of money as well), he’d have immersed himself in spectating at major college sports, and intellectually he’d probably have found a home in the honors college, and possibly a residential one. But Chicago/UChicago was a perfect setting for him. Now he lives in NYC, just 2 blocks from Madison Sq Garden.
The younger one also wanted a college in “a real city” – not for sports spectating, but to take advantage of metropolitan life. As it turned out, attending RISD in Providence was fine not only from a curricular perspective but also from an environmental one because she could take a bus or train and in 2-3 hours be visiting her friends in NYC (who were attending NYU and Columbia) for a day or two. Boston was closer (1 hour) but less interesting because she didn’t know anyone there. What city does she live and work in now? NYC, just like her brother.
Right- colleges CAN help everyone- that’s why the public U system was created. I think the outrage over how many full pay kids there are at Northwestern or JHU is quite misplaced- why not get outraged over the costs of a plain vanilla State U (U Conn, Penn State-- not talking Michigan or Berkeley here) which many, many middle class people cannot afford for their kids.
For those of us who went to college in the 1970’s when it was possible for a middle class family to send all of their kids to a public U-- the sticker price of our own flagship U’s is astonishing. And in the states where a decision was made to locate the flagship out in a rural area where land was cheap-- admittedly, an understandable decision back then- there are states where the flagship is uncommutable, thus driving up the costs even further.
Nobody wants higher taxes but I’d rather be supporting my state’s public college system than many other things.
And let the private colleges do THEIR thing. I’m good with that.
In the real world, the (few) kids who have wealthier parents (who can afford to pay list price) have a much greater range of choices for college than those who have middle income or poor parents. Such choice is basically a default entitlement for having won the parental wealth birth lottery.
Agreed @Blossum.
In MA, Umass just announced a plan to start offering some sort of online degree program. Hopefully that should help some of the families here in our state afford to send their kids to school. Right now, at UMass Amherst it’s really not all that affordable in my opinion. I do think it would be wise for us to look at plans to make State schools affordable for all that want to attend AND have the actual credentials to get in.
I think that online learning could be used to help in this regard.
@bopper - Going to a challenging college where you are not the biggest fish need not equate with lowered self-esteem or lowered performance. My own kid has gotten extremely high grades in college so far. But he loves that he can feel in awe of some of his classmates as they brilliantly articulate ideas. It is such a stimulating environment when almost all the people around you are smart and really excited about ideas and learning, and where their thoughts prompt you to new thinking and raise your own level of analysis.
As he has said, “I’ve gotten so much smarter since I started college.” And a lot of that learning has gone on outside the classroom, as well as in it. It’s what he wanted- full immersion in the world of ideas.
Right- the U Mass situation pains me as a former Bay-Stater. I hope the online option works. I know many kids who commute to U Mass Boston, or one of the other branches (Lowell is popular) or end up at Framingham et al… but those are not the flagship. Not that every single kid has the right to attend the state flagship, but with more limited majors, some of the branch colleges are not good substitutes.
I watched Mary’s address and UMass plans to use this online school (they already have one but our community colleges are way more successful in this space) to boost enrollment in the forthcoming huge demo decrease years starting at about 2025. He said they will be targeting returning adults for this new endeavor. They have yet to build anything though.
@ucbalumnus you wrote:
"In the real world, the (few) kids who have wealthier parents (who can afford to pay list price) have a much greater range of choices for college than those who have middle income or poor parents. Such choice is basically a default entitlement for having won the parental wealth birth lottery.”
I disagree to an extent. Being born into a family of substantial wealth is akin to winning the lottery, agreed. But I don’t think most of the full pay kids have the Rockefeller’s as parents. I think most of the full pay kids come from families that are doing well and have maybe saved some money, have a 529 in place, and have real estate assets to consider.
I can tell you from my personal situation that we make a decent living, but have made more from investments and real estate valuations. Being a full pay parent of 2 private college kids at a COA of about $150K is going to seriously cut into our yearly salary next year. They’ll hardly be anything left, LOL. So while my kids may be fortunate to have a choice of schools to attend, they certainly weren’t “entitled” to our money. Our kids certainly understand the financials behind their decision to attend their schools of choice, we definitely made a point to discuss the reality of being full pay, and the pros and cons of attending less expensive choices.
I think there are more people like my wife and I sending kids off to college than the uber wealthy elite. I don’t think my kids won the birth lottery. They were born into a family of 2 parents who worked hard and SAVED along the way.
Anyways I don’t want to derail this thread into a “us” vs “them” thread. I think it’s wise for our all families to have their kids apply to a wide range of schools that meet their kids needs/wants - from big to small, private and public, less pricey to more expensive. Then pick the one that works best for your kid in the end.
@Publisher makes a very interesting point in his comparison of Princeton and smart kids at state flagship. This scenario, although different schools involved, was similar to S’s situation. He did apply to state flagship and was admitted to the honors program with a scholarship. He chose a small private top academic school instead. A major part of his reasoning, and I agreed with him, is the flagship tried to make it sound like you can find very bright kids (especially in honors - very true) to make this more what you’re looking for OR you could go to a school where essentially 100% of the student body was an honor student and approached their 4 yrs from that perspective. He’s almost 2 yrs in and that has come to fruition. They horse around and have a lot of fun, but academics is by far their top priority (followed or joined by career potential). Hard to explain to people who haven’t seen that but it’s just a different environment.
I attended large state flagship, as did my brothers, and we all did just fine. However, I(and they) was definitely an outlier in my group of friends in terms of motivation, discipline, study habits, etc. Although I didn’t have the same opportunities, looking back, I would have loved to attend a highly selective, academically rigorous university. I think the environment would have been extraordinary. My parents couldn’t afford that. We can…so we did.
Rightcoaster- our family is like yours (or so it seems) but for sure I believe that my kids won the birth lottery- even though we are not mega- wealthy, and my kids (now out of college and launched professionally) absolutely understand that they did.
Two healthy, working adults in the family. Check. Two jobs with health insurance, life insurance, retirement benefits- check. No divorce (a wealth killer for sure, particularly among the “we’re not mega rich but supporting two homes is a stretch” affluent families)- check. One unemployed parent during one of the college years, but with some maneuvering we made it work (just not possible for families who are two paychecks away from getting evicted, or one broken muffler away from having the other parent not able to get to work).
And the intangibles- no tv until the homework is done. Couldn’t afford the karate classes and traveling soccer after school activities (we were saving for college!) but the library is free. Couldn’t afford the fancy teen travel programs over the summer, so kids worked normal, boring jobs which yielded abnormally interesting college essays (do you know how to get grease stains out of a polyester fast-food uniform? My kid does!)
It would be hard for my kids to either look up the income ladder or down and NOT be grateful of the birth lottery! To grow up financially secure is a blessing that low income kids don’t have, but to have to be a “striver” in some ways is a blessing that the uber wealthy don’t often get.
Lottery winners for sure. We lived on one income and saved the other for college from the day they were born. That’s a choice- yes, but it presumes an awful lot of luck to be able to do that.
“Originally, as a resident of CA, I just assumed my kids would attend one of our very good in-state universities (UC or CSU) as did my wife and myself but as we talked with many families, some of their kids have no desire to go to a large public university and have opted to attend top 50-100 private universities instead”
A lot depends on the state, in CA, most students,even the top ones will apply to a UC/CSU as a safety, both admission and FA. You need to find out if the families you talked with applied to public schools and didn’t attend or,just didn’t apply, which would seem unusual in CA. I grew up in upstate NY, and very few of the top students applied to SUNY’s or frankly any public OOS in the northeast. Michigan was the only OOS kids applied to, maybe Rutgers. Even though we complained about the costs, things were much different back then wrt affordability by middle class families.
“In the real world, the (few) kids who have wealthier parents (who can afford to pay list price) have a much greater range of choices for college than those who have middle income or poor parents. Such choice is basically a default entitlement for having won the parental wealth birth lottery.”
@ucbalumnus …very true statement above…“parental wealth birth lottery” gives kids so many more options of the Privates compared to the Publics. University of California System was just fine for me here in California…even if becoming much more expensive for the “average” state resident.
D applied to a mix of public and private. We are squarely in the middle class - making too much for financial aid, but not enough to want to pay COA of up to $70,000/year. If any of the privates had thrown enough money at D to bring them closer to her top public instate choices, they would have seriously been considered. Because they didn’t (and now that I am older and wiser, I see why they didn’t), the only decisions were between the publics. Fortunately, she got into a top-rated UC (Berkeley) which is going to be less than half of the private schools she applied to, and we can give her a debt-free undergraduate education. If she had not, well, I still don’t think we (or she) would have been willing to take on the debt of going the private route with the schools she chose to apply to.
@blossom It looks like Smith is quite successful at finding innovative ways to keep students in STEM. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=2ahUKEwibwabAvuzgAhUMTd8KHVp0AJcQFjACegQIBxAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.science.smith.edu%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F11%2Fdibartolo_hhmiposter_060515.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1920FuBctn0e2kZhzlIia-
My kid really wanted a LAC type school, so those were her primary focus, and most of these in her match range, were private. She also looked at public schools and other large research universities. For that category, she mostly looked at nearby public schools, a couple of farther public schools, and some private R1s. Because my wife and I did our PhDs at UIUC, we have a wide network of friends and colleagues, and my wife still has research collaborations with people there in my kid’s chosen major. We also qualify for employee discount, since my wife works for the U of I system. So the reason that my kid was only considering a few public R1 was that there were few large public schools which could compete with that combination of opportunities and low cost.
So the list was more or less mostly LACs, and an even split between a small number of private and public R1s.
We weren’t sure that we’d be able to afford some of the more expensive LACs, though a couple that she looked at had merit aid, which she would have qualified for.
It did not matter, though, since the actual college she’ll be going to was decided before most applications were due, though she did apply EA to UIUC and UMN.
Both my son and daughter applied to public and private schools. They both knew that they should be open to many different schools which would offer their major and give them the education they wanted. They each had choices of where to go, and the financial aid packages at the private schools were much better; it cost us less to send out kids to private schools (with smaller class sizes and much better facilities) than it would have to send them to the public schools (in-state) that they were also accepted to.
In addition, if your child’s intended major is anything “slightly different” I recommend researching colleges a LOT. Our daughter is a graphic design major, and there was not much money out there from any “traditional” school of art (some merit, but we would have still been paying over $32,000 a year, at least, out of pocket. Most would have cost in the $45,000+ range. The college she attends, RIT, has a top-10 program, and offered her a very decent package. Neither the high school teachers nor the high school counselors (and it is a well-regarded high school) knew anything about RIT having a highly ranked school of design. It costs us less to send her there than it would to our state art college.
My brother contributed heavily to the Private College 529 for his two children, so the only schools his family considers are the private colleges. The older child applied to 10 private schools and was accepted to all but her dad’s alma mater (Princeton). She is a junior at Carnegie Mellon.
What do you mean by private college 529? 529s can be used for any type of college.