<p>Yes, I get it. For a full pay student this amount will be subtracted from the total tuition cost. For a FA student it will make no difference… unless the outside awards are able to be stacked until they are greater than COA.</p>
<p>cobrat - you seem to know a lot of gossipy Ivy profs. And those gossipy Ivy profs seem to have a lot of time on their hand to . . . gossip!</p>
<p>If you’d like to swap anecdotes – here’s one: Son had three roommates freshman year. Two of the four boys were full pay; two were on FA. The two full pays were named John Harvard Scholars, top 5 percent of the freshman class the following fall when grades were tabulated. The other two were placed on academic probation. One was fairly earnest but woefully unprepared for the work. The other devoted freshman year to alcohol and weed. </p>
<p>FWIW, I don’t think there’s any cause & effect to be drawn here. I think FA kids work just as hard or slack off just as much as full pay. I do think full pay kids like mine and Bay’s may be somewhat more mindful of the need to earn money upon graduation and that this might inform their choices on concentration and pursuit of internships and perhaps make them less set on the summers abroad – which from all accounts are often party fests.</p>
<p>But it does make a nice narrative, doesn’t it? The spoiled rich kid whose parents sue over grades? I will go so far as to flatly call your gossipy prof friends bitter old liars.</p>
<p>Thanks for clarifying cobart.</p>
<p>I certainly wasn’t trying to argue that attendance wasn’t important. I don’t see how you can pass a course without attending. I just never had a professor who took attendance.</p>
<p>My husband is a teacher on the college level and both he and his colleagues have the occasional parent who schedules a meeting to micromanage something. I can’t even remember off the top of my head what the issues have been.</p>
<p>Without exception in the meetings these parents are bossy and obnoxious and the students are embarrassed by what their parents are doing. My husband and his colleagues do what they can to manage the situation and in the end they feel very sorry for the students to have parents who would overstep this type of boundary.</p>
<p>parent1986 -</p>
<p>Your specialty seems to be income class warfare:</p>
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<p>By plebian I think it was quite clear I meant not a research position but a clerical one and my son tried for many at Harvard – including Dorm Crew (the guys who cleaned the residence hall bathrooms). He was turned down repeatedly because he was not on FA.</p>
<p>And actually, this did annoy us a good deal. First of all, the bathrooms were usually filthy so the FA kids with those jobs were very often not really doing the work. Second of all, any kid who wants to work should, imo, have a shot at a campus job, especially the ones whose parents are spending so much to have them there.</p>
<p>In truth, these super elite schools with the enormous FA are engaged in a very frank, social engineering mission to insert low income kids into the upper echelons of the educated class. That is admirable. It has definitely made me feel from time to time that our son was not particularly valued there, he was not part of the larger purpose.</p>
<p>And this does affect my thinking somewhat for kid #2.</p>
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<p>IPEDS website doesn’t just include the cost of undergraduate education at an institute but the total financials of an institute.</p>
<p>You are wrongly applying the total cost of establishing an institute toward cost of undergraduate education.</p>
<p>MIT is not only providing an undergraduate education. It support labs and research and bulk of it’s resources and cost is associated with maintaing those professional labs. Look at the revenues and most of them are from contracts or grants for research.</p>
<p>You can’t just pick up the Institute support cost of professional research labs to undergraduate education.</p>
<p>And regarding merit scholarships at schools like Harvard, a huge chunk of the students are NMSFs and apply the rather small NMSF scholarship toward their cost of attendance. Those kids, believe it or not, are actually counted as receiving FA. So my son is part of the 65 percent or so even though we spend about $155K over the three years he attended.</p>
<p>^^^
They are receiving financial aid. You may have noticed another thread where a student needs less than what a NM gets to have enough to attend college.</p>
<p>sewhappy, that’s really too bad about your S not being able to get a part-time position at Harvard. It also shoots down my theory that a school with a large endowment would be able to provide jobs to all. 
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<p>parent1986, a full-pay student at Harvard with a National Merit scholarship is most likely receiving one of NM’s $2k scholarships. That’s definitely awarded by the NM folks as merit money, not need-based. $2k spread over 4 years isn’t going to come anywhere near covering COA.</p>
<p>xiggi - I will tell you in both my daughter’s study abroad experiences, I made the same monthly payment to their schools as I would have had they been state side. One of the study abroad schools actually has their own campus in London, so they’re registered as they would were they here. The other actually attended another school in London, but I made the same payment to our school as if she were here, too.</p>
<p>What DOES add to study abroad expenses is the cost of getting there and home, and any additional travel the student does while abroad. </p>
<p>With D1, she ended up sharing a very nice 3-bedroom flat with five other girls in a very safe area, her room (of R & B) actually was less than had she been on campus at school, or in an apartment. I know a lot of parents whose kids have studied abroad, and no one has said that it was more than what their university would charge if they’d not gone abroad. It’s the travel that can kill you.</p>
<p>D1 was able to get a job on campus at Cornell working in an office, TA for a class, and off campus in Ithaca. I would have to think living in Harvard, it would be easy to get a job in Boston. If my kid was going to Harvard, I think she probably could get paid a lot of money for being a tutor to high schoolers. When D1 was going to a highly regarded private high school in NJ, parents were paying her $50/hr to tutor their kids, and she had to turn away some work. I could just imagine if she was going to Harvard, how much she could have charged.</p>
<p>The study abroad programs I was referring to (and I think sewhappy was, also) are the summer abroad programs, which in my mind are completely optional boondoggles at Harvard. I don’t know of any reason why a student would need to attend a summer abroad in order to graduate. So I admit that when I see these free trips going to some, but not full-pay, Harvard students, it does enter my mind that my bill might be less if those monies were used to lower tuition instead. </p>
<p>My full-pay D at H was unable to find an on-campus part-time job, but did find one off campus. My full-pay D at Yale did find an on-campus job. My D at Yale attended a summer study abroad program that cost us $10K+ for eight weeks, four of which was on campus and four of which was in Europe.</p>
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In my family’s experience, schools with solid - and even struggling - endowments do routinely hire non-FA students for campus jobs. All three of my ds, who have never qualified for finaid, have had jobs at school with as many shifts as they could schedule, working at the same kinds of jobs the work-study kids have - running a cash register, manning a check-in desk, busing tables in a dining hall, etc. It surprises me that Harvard would choose to hire work-study recipients to clean bathrooms. Considering how befuddled many college students, FA OR full-freight, are about how to keep a suite bathroom clean, it would seem that bathrooms are best left to the professionals.</p>
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<p>I don’t quite understand this. I grew up in a lower-middle-class home and was mindful every day of the need to earn money after graduation - and before. It doesn’t follow, to me, that kids who’ve received FA for college would feel any less pressure to earn a living. Their savings have been spent down, their parents don’t have large portfolios or second homes or thriving businesses for the kids to fall back on. Why wouldn’t finaid recipients be just as mindful of the need to earn money? Are there many non-wealthy people who aren’t?</p>
<p>oldfort - you are exactly right about tutoring. Son tutored both as a Harvard tutor (for that you just need to have gotten an A in a specific class to tutor for it). He made three times as much, however, by tutoring for a national company. He also did eventually work for a professor his last year. The professor had to jump through a few hoops to allow it because he was not on FA.</p>
<p>The more we talk on this whole aspect of these colleges the more inclined I am to send my DD to Rutgers . . .</p>
<p>Frazzled . . . I think after the endowment losses things tightened up considerably on who could get the campus jobs.</p>
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<p>Curious as to where one can find this out. Never heard of it.</p>
<p>Full pay D had 2 jobs at Harvard over her 4 years (worked for the mail office and as a peer tutor for freshman). Now that I think about it, in both cases, her FA roommate learned about these jobs and then roped my D in to apply with her, to keep her company.</p>
<p>At D2’s college, when she went on a quarter abroad, we paid tuition, but instead of the room and board that we would normally pay, we paid a sum to the school for the cost of the housing and then sent D2 money to buy food. Quarter abroad cost about $3-4K more than a normal quarter, but Vienna isn’t cheap. So not all schools handle it the same way.</p>
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<p>I disagree with that as most FA/scholarship kids like myself have a far less margin for screwing up than most full-pays except those at the very margins of being ineligible for any FA…in which case they’re in the same effective position. If anything, it was FA/scholarship kids such as myself who were much more likely to work part-time during the year and being mindful of course choices, internships, and using one’s free time to pick up relevant career skills such as computers and technology. In most of their families, they’re expected to not only get a job immediately upon graduation, but also start contributing to support their families and especially their younger siblings. </p>
<p>While there are a minute number of FA/scholarship kids who do slack off, most of the slackers, partiers, and drinkers/drug users tend to be upper-middle class and wealthy kids because most with the few noted exceptions have a greater margin to screw up due to the greater financial resources along with knowledge, resources and social capital to ameliorate the effects/find alternate routes not usually available to most FA/scholarship kids.</p>
<p>As for study abroad, whether they are party fests or not varies greatly by the program concerned. Some less rigorous ones can be while others will provide great academic and cultural enrichment for serious students looking to broaden their horizons. </p>
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<p>This wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t used the term “plebian”. Other than publications on Roman history, the only times I’ve heard such a term used…especially on on-line forums/conversations was in the context of someone of a real/perceived greater social class exhibiting disdain against anyone or anything he/she perceives as “lower” than themselves.</p>
<p>Ellemenope, National merit scholarships are sent directly to the FA office of your college but I do not know whether recipients are counted in the FA statistics.</p>
<p>cobrat:
You know that because…? I was a full FA student. I worked really hard. D1 was a full pay student, she worked while in college, she interned, she has a job at graduation, and is self supporting now. D1 is not special, all of her friends are working just as hard.</p>
<p>I would like to know if there was study done that full pay students do not do as well in life compared to full FA students, or is this just perception and is taken as truth.</p>
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<p>I also have wondered about this for quite some time.</p>
<p>There are valid arguments on both sides, so I would expect the results to be a wash. I imagine that full-pay students are under much more pressure to perform “on par” with family success, and have more drive to preserve their standard of living. Full FA students may not appreciate this. Full FA students have in-born drive, imo, which is what got them where they are, and they also have little at stake which I think bodes well for taking risks that can pay off in a big way.</p>
<p>There is also the argument that the more one pays for something, the more they covet/appreciate it. If the FA are paying nothing and the rich are being supported by their parents, this bodes well for the middle group who must work and pay back loans for their education.</p>
<p>I think there are many FA and full pay students who come from families whose incomes aren’t that far apart. In some cases it may be the number of kids in a family or the # in college at the same time. There is no way to know what Bay is asking.</p>
<p>^exactly.
There are also cases of kids on FA who have far more spending money than many full pay students (those without the trust funds). Because of how FA is determined either the families have undisclosed or otherwise unaffected assets or because the FA frees up discretionary income to give to the student in the form of spending money.</p>