<p>Several elite universities have announced increases in cost of about 4% for 2013-2014. Factoring in increased transportation costs, especially airfares, the cost of attendance continues to skyrocket far ahead of incomes. How many of us will net a 4% after tax increase in income this year to keep us even? The people being squeezed the worst are those who have worked hard, saved, and are just wealthy enough not to qualify for any significant aid. Even with financial aid, many schools employ bait-and-switch tactics after freshman year with decreased grants and increased loans. Does anyone else feel punished by defacto price discrimination for all your hard work and financial discipline? I favor a new paradigm where financial aid is curtailed and tuition/fees are reduced for ALL students. In the mean time, yield is down at some of these schools; perhaps some people are voting with their feet after receiving a reality check, if no other.</p>
<p>The cost of a gallon of gas and a loaf of bread is outstripping inflation as well–meaningless if you ask me. </p>
<p>“Even with financial aid, many schools employ bait-and-switch tactics after freshman year with decreased grants and increased loans” really-bait and switch–in our experience financial aid and merit awards got better after freshman year because they were then open to their freshman year merit awards along with departmental scholarships. Yes, the federal loan program increases the amount one can borrow each year, so what, it’s a set rate over 4 years and certainly not “bait and switch” Yawn…</p>
<p>I suppose if you or your spouse lose your job or your house the package could get better. Not my experience. When I attended school long ago, my widowed mother of three was told to sell our middle-class house after my freshman year financial aid package was cut. Thankfully I had a grandmother who paid the difference and died penniless on Medicaid. Wake up.</p>
<p>“The cost of a gallon of gas and a loaf of bread is outstripping inflation as well–meaningless if you ask me.”</p>
<p>Not so meaningless to most of us, but certainly arrogant. Increases in pita bread prices have stoked revolutions elsewhere in the world.</p>
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<p>You’re right. Colleges charge what the market will bear. Anyway, why should the costs of college be indexed to inflation? Is there a particular reason why college, and not other experiences or commodities, should be so indexed? One reason why college costs outstrip inflation is because it’s a credit-fuelled bubble. The other reason is because colleges are human-labor-intensive industries and they are expensive to run. Sort of like health care, the costs of which have also outstripped the general inflation rate.</p>
<p>It’s a mistake to take the cost of a commodity personally. No one is being “punished.” We all have a choice about how to spend our money, how much debt to take on, what is prudent given our other needs, etc. For a good student, it’s still possible to find reasonably priced quality educational options. There is not a person in this country who must go to a 60K/year school or face poverty. There is always a choice.</p>
<p>What may be more relevant for all but the very wealthiest families is to compare the net price after financial aid year to year.</p>
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<p>In both cases, the real net price is different for each user, and calculated in a somewhat opaque manner, which makes actual price comparisons between providers more difficult.</p>
<p>This topic has been done to death and the “rate of inflation” compared to college costs is meaningless. You need to compare the costs based on the percent of salary. I’ve posted link after link after link in other threads on this topic and over the past 40+ years the cost of college compared to salaries has remained constant, and in fact is slightly lower now then it was 20 years ago. Someone is now going to hop on here and say “but the median salary is…” meaningless, you have to compare apples to apples and job for job. There have been a lot of low wage jobs created in the past 20 years. Those same jobs compared to the low wages in 1970 still match this same trend. The average cost of college compared to the average salary of a mid-career worker (so parents of college students–not some 25 year old kid right out of college because they typically don’t have college aged kids) has maintained a steady 8.5% ratio of salary to college cost for over 40 years…</p>
<p>College costs have about doubled in the past 20 years. If we looked at the price of gas in the past 20 years at that same rate, we would be paying $1.69/gallon or so. :D.</p>
<p>Don’t know where some of you live, or what you read, but US college cost inflation has vastly outstripped wage growth for decades. To deny this fact is a disservice or worse to other parents and students. And most of us with decent family incomes now have two working parents instead of one. The elite college I attended in the mid eighties has increased in cost over 300% since I graduated, from $13,000 total per year to $60,000 per year. Administrative salaries have risen 9% at schools in my state over the past two years, not coincidentally about the same rate as tuition has risen. Wages in my profession, and I suspect for many of us, have been flat in nominal terms and negative in real terms over the past 20 years. Just the facts.</p>
<p>From Forbes 3/2012 (of course the disparity is no doubt even larger in 2013):</p>
<p>Since 1982 a typical family income increased by 147%, more than inflation but significantly behind the huge increase in college costs. College costs have been rising roughly at a rate of 7% per year for decades. Since 1985, the overall consumer price index has risen 115% while the college education inflation rate has risen nearly 500%. According to Gordon Wadsworth, author of The College Trap, “…if the cost of college tuition was $10,000 in 1986, it would now cost the same student over $21,500 if education had increased as much as the average inflation rate but instead education is $59,800 or over 2 ½ times the inflation rate.”</p>
<p>And don’t get me started about how financial aid negates these cost increases. There is actually very little in the way of merit-based aid without financial need or having to be a URM at most elite schools. Even merit-based achievement like the National Merit Scholarship is unfunded at many of these schools. Those ants who have done the right thing, saved and invested, and lived below our means, are subsidizing the grasshoppers well beyond our perpetual annual giving, capital campaign donations, and bequests. We must pay full-freight wherever our children choose to attend, but not without a wee bit of angst and resentment.</p>
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<p>I don’t understand exactly what you mean by this. At “elite” schools (need-blind admission, no merit aid, financial aid only), URM status may be a boost to admissions, but it doesn’t affect financial aid status in and of itself. The child of affluent URMs will pay more than a lower-middle-class white student.</p>
<p>Many perfectly good, if not tippy-top, private schools offer very generous merit aid to students with good stats. The inflation of elite college prices is not really a societal problem, as no one needs to attend such schools. A bigger potential problem is public institutions pricing themselves out of reach of middle-class families in their own states. That really is worth being outraged over.</p>
<p>It is true that merit-based aid may be limited even at non-elites. My son was offered a generous merit-based scholarship to a top-20 school and nothing, not even NMS which he was eligible for elsewhere, at our state flagship, which he chose to attend.</p>
<p>URM/Race may not affect the need for financial aid in and of itself; however, it most definitely does affect eligibility for many scholarships, though financial need usually must be demonstrated. The National Hispanic Merit Scholarship is an example of a merit-based scholarship independent of financial need limited to a certain URM status.</p>
<p>Agree that the societal concern is much more at the level of colleges as a whole, not elite private schools in particular. If a bachelor’s degree is indeed becoming a prerequisite for almost any job, an argument may be made that public institutions need to charge no tuition and be taxpayer supported like k-12 if higher education is really that essential. If we are at that point, we probably need to revamp what is being taught starting with k-12 and encourage more vocational training. College should not be necessary for every job.</p>
<p>AlmaPater–the problem is you are using the wrong index–inflation doesn’t directly relate to price increases–like I said, we would be paying under $2.00 a gallon if inflation was the driver of prices.</p>
<p>I also doubt your “elite” school was $13,000 sticker price in the 80’s. My private school was more than that back then and the elite schools cost a lot more than my private school in the 80’s. </p>
<p>What did your parents do for a living back then, what did they make. Compare THAT wage to the same job in the same town today and tell me that tuition is any more or less affordable today then it was back in the 80’s. As for merit aid, I got plenty of it back in the 80’s, basically the same ratio as offered today. State schools back in the 80’s gave no merit aid for the most part and like today, were still more expensive than private schools for better students. I think you are just not remembering things correctly. Unless you had to pay every dime of your own schooling like I did, are you sure you really knew the costs. Would your parents agree with what you think were costs? Probably not.</p>
<p>State schools have shifted more of the costs of educating students to the students themselves so the student portion has gone up significantly over the years. I don’t know that overall costs have changed as dramatically in relation to time as people think. Also consider that in states like CA, the first 2 years of college for free, now they pay for it. That’s a lot of people to skew the stats.</p>
<p>I highly doubt that wages have been flat over the past 20 years. You would have to take out the HUGE gains in the 90’s to achieve that and for the past 6 years there really has been no inflation to speak of. We are also slowly coming out of the worst recession in years. Compare salaries from 2007 to 1987 for a more realistic view, but unless you are comparing apples to apples, it’s meaningless to throw out stats like “wages haven’t increased in 20 years”–sure, if you add in all the jobs at McDonalds, it LOOKS like wages haven’t increased but I know that MOST people in professional careers, teachers, doctors, businessmen, have seen significant increases in wages over the past 20 years.</p>
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<p>I agree with you and have written similar messages in other threads.</p>
<p>You have an easy choice. Give away the money you have saved; sell your house and move into a housing project, and get all excited about the terrific financial and educational opportunities which suddenly open up for your children.</p>
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<p>Pennsylvania, where the flagship public universities do not give out much financial aid to low income in-state students, follows your model. Of course, that makes the flagship public universities financially inaccessible to students from lower and middle income families living in the state.</p>
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<p>ucbalumnus, do you have any insights as to the best public alternatives for PA residents who fit that description, particularly for those in the SE corner of the state and where travel costs are going to factor in to any decisions made? </p>
<p>While I empathize with the OP, I don’t have the energy to rage against the system, especially when the history is so complicated. All I can do is focus on my kid, his strengths/weaknesses and our particular financial situation at this time. With thousands of colleges in the US, there have to be some decent, affordable options for most kids. </p>
<p>And for any child who has had the privilege of being raised by hard-working, thrifty parents, who want to help him go to college, he’s already ahead of the vast majority of kids here in the US. He’ll do well wherever he goes if he can strike the right balance between quality and affordability. It’s poor kids who stand to benefit the most from the education afforded by generous FA awards. I don’t waste energy begrudging them the opportunity to attend schools I can’t afford to send my own kids to. What would be the point?</p>
<p>LucieTheLakie-look at the PA/WV private schools–run some NPC’s and see. Good chance those will come in very affordably for low income students with good grades/test scores. Dickinson is one I would specifically suggest-depending on if that is too far away or not. They have amazing financial aid.</p>
<p>How much choice you are likely to have depends on the student’s academic credentials. In general, the better the academic credentials, the better than chance of gaining admission to schools with good need-based financial aid (generally wealthier private schools, plus rare public schools like UVA and UNC-CH that meet need for OOS students; check their net price calculators), and the better the chance of getting large merit scholarships (at public or private schools).</p>
<p>Thanks, SteveMA. Will do that. We’re looking at public, private, in-state and out, big LACs, small unis, and everything in between. 
Really a little bit of every category and then we’re going to roll the dice. </p>
<p>Dickinson is definitely on the list of schools to consider. We’re actually in the SE corner, closer to Delaware (visiting UDel over spring break), Jersey and MD. We’re not low income; we’re in that pretty solidly “middle class” range, so we’re going to need S to apply to a wide range of types of schools and see who’s offering what AFTER they decide if they want him at all!</p>
<p>Public honors colleges hold great appeal to me; unfortunately, Schreyer sounds as if it’s as hard to gain entry to as the Ivy League and, as has been pointed out, Penn State and Pitt don’t really offer much FA in general (although Pitt’s Honors program may be easier to get into than PSU’s). Pitt is pretty far from us though (five hours). I wish PA offered reciprocity with other surrounding states, but I guess because Penn State draws so many full-paying OOS students, there’s no incentive.</p>
<p>ETA: Thanks, ucb, that’s basically our approach. I didn’t realize UVA and UNC-CH were so generous with OOS students, though. Will definitely check out!</p>