purpletitan I do not want it but it is logical and dare I say fair.
You should have suggested University of Central Florida. All their dorms have A/C and are fairly new. But I imagine she would have objected to that school too.
I could have suggested 50 schools for her. But the idea that you’re evaluating an educational and intellectual experience on the basis of the A/C (particularly in a region which isn’t hot 10-12 months a year) strikes me as bizarre.
I know people “back in the day” who didn’t want their kids applying to Johns Hopkins because the campus looked shabby. Then Michael Bloomberg paid for extreme landscaping and upkeep and the entire place looks like a botanical garden (when it’s in season). Again- a world class research university, whose capabilities in the intellectual realm did not change one iota. But Hopkins is back to being a “hot” school- maybe the flowers make a difference to enough people? To me it’s crazy.
Re: #19 and housing choices at public and private schools
Remember, most public schools have a substantial percentage of commuter students, and even the more residential flagships have many or most resident students moving to nearby off-campus housing in their second or third year. Indeed, many public schools may not have even had dorms until after several decades of their existence (e.g. Berkeley did not have any dorms for the first 60 years of its existence as a university). So the choice of different kinds and prices of housing is pretty much the default situation, when one considers that many students live in housing other than the on-campus dorms.
It would not be surprising if the same existed for many private schools (e.g. at USC, only 33% of all students live in on-campus dorms). Indeed, the fully integrated college experience including residential life aspects may exist at schools that only a small percentage of students attend.
18 Prospect --
Unfortunately, the net pricing under the high sticker/high discount model has to be kept somewhat non-transparent in order for it to work.
The school really has to pretend that the actual price is $60k. If they don’t “anchor” people on the full sticker price, then they will have a hard time getting some people to pay the full $60k (since the “real price” is actually much less). Also, the $35k payors will be less excited about the “great deal just for you” they are getting if everybody else gets the same deal.
I didn’t understand the model when my first kid applied to college, but it was easy to be an educated shopper with kid #2. All the data is public and easily accessible once you know the game being played.
When we were looking at colleges the buildings, grass, food, dorms weren’t considered individually but were in the category of ‘feel’. If two schools seemed to offer the right courses, departments, and cost, where did the student ‘feel’ most comfortable? It did not come down to that as in both cases the #1 choice was clear and we live with the fact that one has to bring her own towel to the gym (didn’t even know this when making the decision! bad mother). The food and where it was located was not even a factor. It all seemed the same to us.
One child did pick the more expensive ‘freshmen’ housing because that’s where 90% of the freshmen live and she wanted to be like everyone else. Because of a mix-up, she was offered to move to a different complex that would have been cheaper, but to me, not as safe. Freshmen all seem to have similar classes and can travel back and forth together, eat at the central dining hall together, walk home from the library together.
Financial aid is really based on your expected family contribution and is sort of the same in most places (Profile vs FAFSA, etc, you can look it all up). Becomes a question on how much of this need a particular school chooses to meet. Ivies and most top tier schools meet all, which can be a good opportunity if those numbers work for you.
Merit aid is based on how much of a recruitment tool a particular school wants to make it, and whether you someone they want to recruit.
Things change, but here is a good start. If a college gives a substantial % of students aid, and the aid is substantial, then the likelihood of it affecting your cost is much higher than if these aren’t true.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/local/college-grants-for-the-affluent/1526/
note some schools are not alphabetically listed and are at the end.
You also need to know for schools of interest the cost of attendance (use as google search term for standard numbers) and how your student ranks compared to the 25-75% published elsewhere.
For example, Duke gives 4% of their students mega-awards ($50K) but those are special people, especially if you consider most well qualified students don’t even get accepted.
Tulane gives 37% of students $22K in merit aid.
Northwestern give 5% of people $3K
The cost of attendance numbers in this table are wildly too low, up to $10K.
Actually each school’s EFC can differ by quite a bit from another school’s EFC (or the FAFSA EFC).
Wow - what shallow parent said that?
Oh wait, perhaps it was me, along with, I’m guessing, lots of other parents and students.
There’s nothing wrong with a student wanting (or a parent wanting for their student) to be in an attractive environment for 4 years.
But it’s not necessary to renovate every building on a 15 year schedule to have a pretty campus. Obviously, you need to maintain what you’ve got, and spend some reasonable amount on landscaping. But much of what constitutes prettiness, to me, are the aspects of a college that were largely put in place 100+ years ago for many contenders - an attractive overall setting, with enough land (and thus green space), and attractive buildings in the core of the campus (i.e. many of the buildings built 50+ years ago).
Conversely, people make a big deal out of lazy rivers and climbing walls and such as if that’s the primary source of sky high tuitions these days. Color me skeptical - both of the amount of such silly things built, and their impact on tuition…
Lazy rivers don’t cost $100 million dollars. But creating a master plan out of a hundred year old campus, wiring every building for modern technology and new energy consumption patterns, knocking down the old gymnasium to create the kind of Olympic-level sports training facility every kid seems to want, AND having the staff to man the 24/7 nature of a university costs really big bucks. Taking an old style dining hall and turning it into a food court with pizza ovens and stations and a full complement of dietitians and nutritional counselors to keep the gluten free/peanut free/diabetic kids safe and healthy costs big bucks.
When I went to college back in the stone age, dinner ended at 6:30 pm. Period. You got hungry after that, there was a 7/11 in town and a few diners and a campus “snack bar” which was literally snacks as in vending machines.
Kids today would be horrified at the idea that food service workers had 8 hour shifts, and when the shift ended, food stopped and workers went home.
It costs a lot of money to run a Westin hotel AKA university.
Not a fan of the lazy rivers and similar such silly upgrades, BUT…
Buildings that are old tend to develop failing systems that can be legitimate safety concerns (structural, electrical, plumbing) or environmental concerns (water hogging landscape, inefficient systems), etc.
When renovations are necessary (and with buildings and campuses this old, they ARE), upgrades need to comply with modern codes.
This does not excuse lazy rivers, but it certainly could explain modern food courts and pretty landscaping and dorms with better amenities like wifi. If you are required to sink in a ton of money to create safe, compliant spaces, some of these things are just a couple pennies extra to deliver bigger bang for the buck.
Thanks for posting that WP link, @PickOne1. Nice to have all that information summarized in one location.
Based on all the talk here on CC of how affordable the Ivies and other elites are, even for upper-middle class families, it was a little disconcerting to see how few students receive need-based aid at some of those schools (Duke-38%; Middlebury-45%; Yale-50%)!
And don’t even get me started on Penn State at just 22%!!! Yet OOS kids will continue applying there hoping they get enough “aid” to be able to attend.
Really, tax-exempt colleges and universities should have to disclose that percentage at the top of their applications for admission!
Even at Stanford, one of the most generous schools in terms of financial aid, not even 50% of families receive aid. I suspect from my very limited research that at least 50% of students at the elite schools are full pay. My alma mater is very generous to certain income brackets and does offer merit scholarships, but it has become largely unaffordable to many alumni families. I wish there were more transparency in this process. My DS is pursuing merit scholarships, and the only certainty in this process is applying for guaranteed stats scholarships. All the other applications are largely a crapshoot,
@MWDadOf3, you may like the facade of centuries-old buildings, but how much do you like the heating, cooling, and electric systems of 100 years ago?
There was another parent who, on a campus visit, was turned off by broken windows and dirty windows, but windows don’t mend and clean themselves. For that matter, greens don’t manicure themselves either.
@LucieTheLakie,???
There are a fair number of rich families in this country. Roughly 3% of them are in the top 3%.
4M born every year. 3% of that is 120K. The Ivies and equivalents take in roughly 25K a year. Half of that is 12.5K.
@PurpleTitan - Of course buildings should be updated (and that costs money)
But I was trying to distinguish the aspects of a campus that are aesthetically pleasing (good location, green space, attractive core buildings), from the more general operational cost of a Uni.
Attractive campuses are often that way due largely to decisions and expenditures made decades or even centuries ago. In contrast, most college expenses (faculty salaries, or even renovating the guts of a 30 year old building), are not especially linked to how pretty the campus is.
(Of course, a few things, like landscaping are, but I’d guess the delta for landscaping among comparable prestige 4 year universities is not that big of a component of their overall cost structures).
“One number you don’t see published is what the true average cost was for students attending a particular college or what percentage of students pay the full sticker price without either merit aid or financial aid”
@Wje9164be
That information can easily be found for colleges on
for instance- here is a breakdown of what % of students received FA and Merit aid at USC and what the average awards were.
This site is a wealth of information
http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg03_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=1138
@MWDadOf3, personally, I think that how attractive a campus is perceived to be is a product of marketing and maintenance.
I can think of a state school quad that is one of the most striking ones I’ve been to, but it doesn’t market so much and also isn’t lauded as a beautiful school by most people. Also, its state has let old buildings go to pot and the grass in the quad is patchy at spots instead of the verdant green at an elite private in its region.
If it spent as much money on the physical plant as the elite private, it would probably look prettier.
By your logic, because it made good decisions over a century ago, it should be seen as a beautiful campus, but most people don’t seem to think so.
An attractive campus matters to me, too. Not that everything need be perfect, but some places felt extremely cinder-blocky. I definitely felt one of my kids’ campuses was prettier aesthetically than the other with charming, gorgeous old buildings that could have come straight from a novel – but maintaining those buildings is not inexpensive to do. I’ve pored over the master campus plans for both my kids’ schools - as well I should, given that my tuition is paying for some of these renovations :-).
60% of Stanford freshmen receive financial aid and the average award is $42,000. That’s out of a student budget of $64,000 for this year.
At Harvard, it’s about 65% receiving an average of $46,000 against costs of $60,000.