Despite all of the dorms that many colleges have built in the last half century to provide the all inclusive residential college experience once associated with a small number of elite colleges, isn’t it still true that most bachelor’s degree seeking students commute from wherever they lived before to a local community college (hoping to transfer to a four year school) or a local four year university?
I.e. the all inclusive residential college experience is still a luxury for students who are either among the most accomplished (who can earn scholarships or admission to good-financial-aid schools), or who have some large source of funding (often parents’ money) than a high school graduate typically has or can earn.
It is also the case that many of the more residential colleges (both public and private) are much less all-inclusive in the experience. For example, at many of them, dorms are mainly populated by frosh, with upperclass students moving into off-campus housing. They may not have even had dorms for much of their earlier history.
It depends on the school. I just looked up a couple regional LACs that I know have merit aid tables on their sites, and a 3.3/24 gives an automatic $10k give or take a couple thousand (and being regional LACs, their tuition cost tends to be lower than most other privates.
Now, as for whether $10k is enough help, yeah, that’s an open question—but merit aid is a lot more widely available than a lot of people think.
Hmmm, the college mentioned is a small, non-elite, not-well-known women’s college. Seems like another of that type of college was having financial difficulties in the news recently.
There were reputable people two years ago predicting that gas would cost $8 a gallon by now in the US- similar to pricing in much of Europe. I am leery of anyone claiming to know that the price of something or other is going up up up with no reprieve. A tree doesn’t grow to the sky.
The weird thing about the education market is that the sellers care very much who exactly buys their product. At the same time students are trying to decide which college to attend, the colleges are deciding which students they want to attend. Elite schools have plenty of desirable students to choose from and make sure the students they want can afford to attend. They are choosing students based on what will enhance their own prestige, and offer the price they think each student will pay. As you head down the prestige ladder, the schools may still have plenty of applicants but want some more than others, and arrange their financial offers accordingly.
The financial aid and scholarship offers function like salaries to the students and their parents. You might take a lower salary to work for a better company, and a company may offer a much higher salary to an employee it really wants, if it thinks that employee may have other good offers. Much like actual college prices, salaries are generally negotiated after the application process. Much like a job search, in the college application process it’s very useful to know your strengths and weaknesses in relation to what each “employer” is looking for so you can find the most desirable “job” with the best possible financial package.
@blossom, yes this is very true. Of course, gas prices in the US have a US demand, since you have to be here to buy it and use it here. This localized supply and demand operates as a sort-of check on runaway gas prices, though they certainly were running up alarmingly for a while there, that’s for sure.
Colleges have tapped into an international market with seemingly very great unmet demand. Quite possibly, the prices could continue to climb substantially and that demand would still be there.
I do hope that college prices do not continue to go up up up with no reprieve, as this would not be a good thing for future generations of US children. Of course, as you point, nobody has any crystal balls. Elections, legislation, boom economies, bust economies…all of these things can affect all sorts of industries, not just colleges.
China, the biggest driver of foreign demand for US colleges, has an economy that is slowing down quite rapidly, if you’ve noticed.
While foreign demand may be sustaining the tuition rates at research unis a step down from the elites that are still research powerhouses, the elites don’t really need foreign demand to keep their prices high. Even if there isn’t a single foreign applicant, the Ivies and equivalents still can fill their student body with qualified applicants several times over.
I agree with the Converse thought process that if everyone is getting merit aid just to go to the school, what is the point? Just charge less and eliminate the merit aid. Yes, it’s fun to say “My child got $60k in merit aid” but if your OOP is the same without the extra step of applying and having someone at the school award the merit and then post the merit, why bother. Saves the school money not to have the administrative work, and I think having a lower tuition might attract some applicants who don’t understand the merit award game and just look at the higher price and think “I can’t afford that” so never apply. Another private school that has a fairly low tuition is Flagler. I considered it for my daughter because it was so reasonable at about $16k sticker price. If it had been $30k, I’d never have looked at it twice.
At my second daughter’s school, almost everyone gets the merit. There are three levels of the merit award, so that does make a difference, but if the tuition was lower for everyone, I wouldn’t care that someone who got less before now gets more. My daughter has 10 line items of school awards and state and federal grants and loans on her bill this year. That means if anything is off, I have to talk to up to 10 people (no one at her school handles more than one thing!). It would be so nice if they just dropped the tuition $15k and got rid of the merit awards.
Does anyone pay full price? A few, I’m sure. I also think they charge too much for R&B. It’s kind of like buying food and beers at a ball game. Sure, you know it’s going to cost a little more for the hot dog and you are willing to pay $2 or even $3 for the convenience, but when they charge $7 you just pass. When parking goes to $50 at the ball park, you take the bus or, eventually, stay home. I like my child in the dorm, but she wasn’t really exaggerating when she said EVERYONE on her team moved off campus (except her and one who is an RA). The room charge is high, but the meal plan is ridiculous.
@twoinanddone, do you think that getting rid of fake merit aid and just lowering the price across the board devalues the brand? That seems to be what the article was suggesting: it’s a marketing ploy, a psychological game, that if it’s expensive it must be better, and the prize of the discount is compelling. Or, do you think most people are onto this game by now and would rather just see lower, firm, transparent prices?
I think some people like to feel like they are getting merit money, plus a top secret super break deal on everything else. My sister loves to tell people that her son got a billion dollars in scholarships, but since he didn’t take any of those scholarships, does it matter? He’s full pay at the instate school and is very happy. That’s where he always wanted to go. Sister is happy too. I just think it was a lot of work for both him and the schools putting together FA packages when in the end, he would have paid the same at these schools as at the public, about $30k per year.
I don’t think my one daughter is getting a better education because her tuition is $39k and my other daughter’s is $15k. I don’t pay the $39k and I do pay a lot of the $15k. I almost rejected the expensive school right off the top because, well, I didn’t have $39k (plus another $15k for R&B), but because my daughter was recruited, we gave them a shot. Other schools were the same. I’d see the $60k sticker price, run the NPC and still think they were going to be too much so often we’d just move on.
Like with perfume, some will always want to buy the more expensive one, even if there is no coupon to bring down the price. I just like a fair price without needing the coupon.
I would have greatly preferred transparency too, when my kids were applying. Just not sure how it can be achieved if a college really needs to fool/convince 1/2 the student body to pay full price in order to make ends meet. Cutting everyone down to one price just lets the really wealthy families off with a discount they don’t need, and takes away the possibility of really poor families paying what they can afford. But it would really help the vast middle to be able to shop around with confidence; know what the cost will be before they apply.
But it is not necessarily the wealthy families paying full price and the poor families getting to pay nothing. The merit at my daughter’s school is based purely on scores and gpa, and many of those with high numbers are the wealthy who have had test prep and private schools and great counselors directing their students to the big merit awards. So say tuition is $40k and the top award is $25k, the next $20k, and the lowest $15k (and some do not get merit aid, but I believe more do than don’t). That might be all the wealthy students get. The students who have need get Pell, SEOG, school grants, state grants, etc. If the school just charged everyone $20k for tuition assuming that’s the average after merit, school would probably get about the same in money coming in with less paperwork.
The question then is whether the same caliber of students would still apply if they were no longer ‘winning’ the discount in tuition but actually paying about the same amount, around $20k? I don’t know.
There were probably lots of school where we could have figured out a similar deal, but after doing all the work for this one school, I was pretty much done with the game (and this school did spell out a lot more for us than others had, including state money available, extra scholarships, loans, etc). DD was happy, I was happy, why keep looking? At one school we had looked at earlier the coach said “I don’t give money to freshmen.” Well, she didn’t take the time or have FA take the time to show me how that school would work for us, and I was staring at a sticker price of $50k. We walked. Now I know that there probably would have been a way to stack other aid, but at the time all I could see was that $50k sticker.
Ample dorm space for all frosh may be a relatively recent thing at many schools, so the high dorm charges may in part be due to paying off the costs of building (or renovating) them. Of course, that is a response to market demand, since a school that is seen as a commuter school, or one where resident students need to look for off-campus housing on their own as frosh, tends to be seen as less attractive.
@twoinanddone, your story brought back to me the tremendous amount of time and effort, not to mention costly resources (visits, app fees, test prep, etcetera) it takes to play this college game properly and get all the best discounts. It’s exhausting and pricey.
These resources are not available to everyone equally.
Another reason why transparent upfront pricing would be so nice. Save everyone so much time and $$.