@JustOneDad, the only types of financial assistance that Stanford gives out are fin aid and athletic scholarships. Guess athletic scholarships could be given to 1/6th the student body.
@circuitrider, um, note that I said “average”, not “median”. If the average grant to 4K students is $40K, the total has to be $160M, regardless of the distribution.
Nevertheless.
One hundred and sixty million would be pretty high for even a very generous, need-blind institution of 4,000 undergraduates. Dartmouth is a four thousand undergraduate Ivy and clocks in at $116 million in student aid. I would agree with your more general point that whatever the average total is, it’s going to be less a function of how many students are full pay or otherwise, and more a function of how high the tuition is.
Standford Athletics: "The Department of Athletics offers 36 varsity sports—20 for women, 16 for men (sailing is a co-ed sport.) Also offered are 26 club sports. Stanford offers 300 athletic scholarships. About 900 student participate in intercollegiate sports. Fifty three percent are men, and 47 percent are women. Stanford scholar-athletics have earned 153 NCAA Postgraduate Scholarships—a national best. "
The 300 scholarships may not all be full scholarships, and there is an issue when trying to combine need based scholarships and athletic scholarships, so some athletic scholarships may be lost to a student getting full need based. I’m sure there is some cpa auditing all the combinations before reporting to the NCAA.
@northwesty - It’s amazing the amounts of debt the O’Malleys took on, especially since the main attraction of Georgetown is it’s DC location. It is also very telling that these not-for-profit universities are more than willing to burden families that cannot afford $250K in debt for an undergraduate education.
@zinhead, good point, and you made me think of an interesting question. How many of these “full pay” students in actuality have parents who are taking on huge parent loans? Is this disclosed anywhere by the universities? Or are only student loans disclosed?
In other words, can we trust that at these elites approximately 50% (or whatever) are truly full pay/can afford families, or is it really just a fraction of these families who are easily affording this tuition? Is the problem of the sticker price of college even bigger than the university-released statistics show?
@circuitrider, actually, in my hypothetical example, half the school of 8K get money from the school. Regardless, we seem to agree that except for the very wealthiest privates, endowment income is unlikely to be able to pay for all fin aid and merit aid (so at many other schools, full-pays are subsidizing other students).
I don’t know how much weight to give this - but I was at an event with a board member from large prestigious New England university. He had recently come from their board meetings and I asked him about undergraduate tuition. He was candid that the topic didn’t even come up during the meetings - that they were concerned with graduate research projects, attracting talent and grants. It was clear that the undergrad parent and student pain was not being felt at those levels. In that context I would say it’s a matter of charge what you can to support the grand plans of these institutions.
“@northwesty - It’s amazing the amounts of debt the O’Malleys took on, especially since the main attraction of Georgetown is it’s DC location. It is also very telling that these not-for-profit universities are more than willing to burden families that cannot afford $250K in debt for an undergraduate education.”
For most people like O’Malley, the typical decision is to tell the kid that Gtown is off the table, but that Mom and Dad will gladly pay for UMD in-state or Fordham with a merit scholarship. Those are better options than what most kids have, so no tears for the kid who gets shut out of Gtown.
But it is a myth that those fancy schools are available to all families. The families that can attend are actually quite bar-belled.
The O’Malley college decision is one I for sure would not make.
But I wonder: do you think that the O’Malleys made this poor financial decision in part due to his position or fame or standing in the community? Like the realtor who drives a car waaay beyond his/her means just to look successful to the clients?
If this was their thinking, it sure did backfire as their finances have been exposed.
I don’t think it was a poor financial decision for the O’Malleys. They were/are a double income family making at least $300k at the time, already paying about $20k/yr for high school, and at the time were living in ‘state housing’. They chose to borrow the money, I think, to free up cash flow for his political life.
His using the ‘poor poor pitiful me I had to borrow money for college’ is what back fired on him. He thought it would make him one of the middle class that needs to borrow for college, and what it got him was a lot of criticism for not making a better choice.
Really? A marketing professor asks this question? Maybe he needs to talk to someone in the economics department.
There are people who will pay those higher prices, people who will pay a medium price and of course people who will pay that idealized lower price. Does he think everyone pays the same price for a particular car model, does he not understand that some people will outbid others for a house?
And of course there is the social engineering…it isn’t “fair” that a richer person gets to pay the same as a poorer person for the same education.
Colleges and universities, both private and public to differing degrees, do the following: price discriminate (charge different students different prices not based on cost of delivery); price discount (have an actual net price, for many but necessarily all students, that is substantially different from their posted sticker price); and price differentiate for different educational services and packages, through fees etc and the bundling of amenity services with primary learning services. None of this is unexpected or inconsistent with a monopolistically competitive industry. And to the extent in different states that we decrease the level of public support for colleges, then the more the publics have to price and compete similarly to the privates. They do all this to generate revenue to cover their costs. They can subsidize both overall and for particular students depending on endowment, and then they can cross-subsidize further internally between those that pay above their costs and those that pay below. These trends have been in play for at least several decades now.
But buying a college education is not like buying a house or a car. If you don’t get the price you like, you can shop around at many other dealerships, without time pressures. If you get outbid for the house, you can then move on and look at other houses.
If you find yourself in April, having applied to a reasonable 8-10 colleges, with no good “bids” then you either suck it up and pay more than you wanted to, or you don’t go to a 4-year college and try again next year. You can’t turn back the calendar to the prior fall and choose different schools to apply to…and even if you could, you would STILL be bidding “blind” to what your cost will be in many cases because the pricing structure is opaque for everyone except those willing to pay full sticker.
@prospect1, which is why people are urged to find acceptance and financial safeties. Are you saying that there are no in-state and automatic merit schools that are affordable enough for you?
Also, in some states, CC is a viable oorion for many.
One aspect of buying the services of a college that differs from normal markets is that the user (student) is often different from the main buyer/payer (often the student’s parents).
The user often being different from the main buyer/payer is a characteristic shared by the medical care market (user is a person seeking medical care, main buyer/payer is a third party insurance company paid by the employer or government to cover those seeking medical care).
@purpletitan, luckily mine are all in, or done with, college.
But for future kids, yes, I am saying that there is a large segment of the college bound population for which financial safeties are becoming a thing of the past. Think 3.3 gpa/24-25 ACT with 75k income. This is a HUGE population often ignored on CC. They will not attract merit aid. That $10k instate tuition plus $10k room and board if there’s no close by public is very tough on some families, and prices are going up up up .
I am talking about 4yr college not CC. Yes CC remains an option, although there are many studies showing that starting at a CC if you have the stats for a 4-year (and 3.3/25 is 4yr ready), is far from ideal for a variety of reasons. it is an excellent option to bridge HS/4yr for many students; I am not talking about such students. Also, CC quality varies very significantly from CC to CC.
I do not like the direction of college pricing. We’ve gone from affordable (my generation), to well, just start at a CC for two years (this generation) to…what? What’s this going to look like in ten years?
@ucbalumnus, medical care pricing is a good analogy. Another huge problem. Don’t get me started.
@prospect1, online and hybrid (residential only a portion of the degree) next generation.
As for your hypothetical kid, commuting if one is nearby. Otherwise, yes, CC/online or some other way.
@purpletitan, if future generations will be forced, by pricing, to online models, then how will that affect the college pricing structure? Will it become a pure luxury item? Will colleges open the doors even further to rich internationals to pick up the tab? Just don’t see the upward pricing trend reversing itself. Middle (both in stats and income) is already being cut out, in 10-20 years we might only see the truly filthy rich and those very few kids who are BOTH high stat and low income.
@prospect1, yes, I see 4-year residential colleges going back to being the luxury items they were a hundred years ago.
Oh, I forgot: online, hybrid, as well as proficiency-based degrees next generation.
And your hypothetical kid also has Germany as a tuition-free option.
BTW, note that net tuition has increased far slower than list-price tuition, being not much above inflation.