<p>I’m a junior in Taiwan and I’ve started looking up colleges to apply to, and all I can say is “mother*****er” when I see the price tags. I have no residency, so no use suggesting state schools over private schools. My grades aren’t amazing, I’m an average student. My dad has a home office that generates enough so that we’re above the average income of Taiwan, but it isn’t impressive at all compared to American salaries. Yet he’s willing to send himself and my brother and I to college in the States because to us it’s more than just a diploma, or even to learn a trade. It’s an experience that will most likely change our lives, having grown up here in Taiwan most our lives. I can see how for American kids college can seem like it isn’t worth it, and I completely understand, but I guess what I’m saying is despite the BS prices, not going to college simply wasn’t an option for me. But now I’ve spent some times on these forums, I see that there can be alternatives for a good education and experience.</p>
<p>What are some other paths one might take other than forking out a goddam 45k a year if this “bubble” does burst?</p>
<p>Well I am American, but with the pound and euro coming close to dirt I’m honestly considering. I’m from California, and I don’t get residency if I go there, so with the price increase of Californian colleges, budget cut, and Californian sh1t in general, I’ve pretty much ruled it out. </p>
<p>I’m in a very prestigious private school and my extracurriculars are pretty flashy, so I’m sort of counting on my transcript to get me a scholarship at some small private schools despite my average grades. My family really can’t afford 50k a year…</p>
<p>I was accepted to Ohio State and Arizona State this year. Being from Arizona, ASU was already much cheaper to attend. However, I liked the fact that OSU is more prestigious (compared to ASU…). Both schools offered me a scholarship, and OSU actually offered me more money, however, it only made the price tag equal to ASU’s price tag before a scholarship.</p>
<p>My family (we’re upper middle class) has been saving money for college since I was little, however, because of this super increase in tuition, we can only PAY about $20k a year, a price that at the time, my parents had figured would be the going rate of the most expensive colleges. Now that I’m actually GOING to college and $20k a year doesn’t even cover the IN-STATE rate at ASU (and let’s face it, do many people really CHOOSE to go to ASU for any reason other than money?) We’re relying on the fact that Arizona somehow found the money to cover my tuition for all four years.</p>
<p>It’s amazing how few people can actually afford to go to college. I won’t even start on how difficult it is to get ANY sort of scholarship when you’re white, upper middle class and have a 3.9.</p>
<p>I can’t even apply for a good 7/8ths of scholarships out there… I’m sorry my grandfather was never a prisoner of war, but REALLY?!</p>
<p>Personally, I think the people who buy too much college are probably the SAME people who bought too much house. As long as there are people like my neighbors, whose child won’t consider any school where the buildings smell musty and there isn’t, like, any good pizza – there will be suckers who think a state school is the equivalent of vacationing at the Days Inn instead of the Ritz Carleton. Personally, I like to pay cash for my vacations and don’t like paying for them for a year after they have occurred. But it seems that a lot of people do.</p>
The nearly unobstructed access to credit (mostly private) is a huge enabler. Colleges have taken this as an open invitation to obscenely inflate tuition to their heart’s content. Loans should bridge the (ideally) few thousand dollar gap between COA and other sources only after parental contribution, FA, scholarship, and work-study have been exhausted. Obviously the reality is that huge amounts of private loans are the bread and butter of many students’ funding and through inertia this has become accepted practice, which signals to the colleges that they wont ever lose their middle/upper-middle class base because they’re blindly willing do whatever it takes. It’s sad.</p>
<p>To some of the international students who consider American schools…</p>
<p>I’m in an Engineering PhD program at the University of Michigan, and a significant majority of the graduate students got their undergrads in their own respective countries. The school doesn’t care and will look favorably on a strong student no matter where he or she is from. Also, many of the graduate degrees are fully funded(almost all the PhDs…and some of the masters degrees.)</p>
<p>These top US undergrad programs do give great educations, but you can get into a great grad school in the US from practically anywhere. It seems that the top student from Canada, Europe, UK, China, Iran, Korea etc. will be accepted over the mediocre student from a top tier US undergrad program any day.</p>
<p>…so yea…you wonder if the money these students pay for these top US undergraduate schools is always worth it…Its complicated.</p>
<p>Ironic isn’t it, that it’s getting to the point where it’s cheaper for students to attend elite schools in other countries than to attend US schools? HKU…is only about 13,000 a year…</p>
I don’t know about engineering programs, but math programs certainly do care. It’s no secret that admission is significantly more competitive for foreign students applying from abroad, if only because there are so many of them. (Or as a professor announced at an undergraduate conference, “If you score at the 90th percentile of the subject GRE, you are better than most of our American applicants and worse than any of the Chinese.”)</p>
<p>In response to post #5, I know someone quickly jumped on the fact that research actually brings in a lot of money and would like to point out that the nationally ranked football team usually brings in a lot of money as well. At U Texas, for example, I know the athletic program is set apart from the academic funds and doesn’t receive a dime from tuition money and actually has donated over 60 million per year the past couple of years to the academic funds.</p>
<p>It’s not the research or athletic opportunities that need to be done away with, it’s actually all these scholarships that are inflating the price. This is very similar to what happened to healthcare because people are paying for something and usually not receiving the full bill themselves. It’s now the norm for private colleges to raise their tuition and offer financial aid, but it really screws the middle class because we can’t shell out 30, 40 or 50k per year in costs and probably make too much to qualify for much less than that, since aid is mostly need-based.</p>
<p>The true travesty here is the people who tell students to go wherever they want and not worry about money. You should always make your college decision with money in mind and if students really want to not only give all of their current money, but tens of thousands of dollars of future earnings to attend the private or out-of-state school of their dreams, then colleges are going to get away with raising tuition like crazy.</p>
<p>It’s supply and demand. If students want to go to your college and people around them are telling them it’s okay to take on a lot of debt to do so, you’re in a position where you can start raising tuition instead of being more efficient. Let’s face it, academia and efficiency don’t usually go hand-in-hand to begin with.</p>
<p>The moral of the story: STOP TELLING KIDS NOT TO WORRY ABOUT HOW MUCH THEIR DREAM SCHOOL COSTS! You’re just doing them a disservice.</p>
<p>Other than a small number of elites, over the last decade aid has shifted at most schools from a need based model to a primarily merit based model. This practice allows schools to compete for qualified higher income students and is central to most schools marketing tuition discounting strategies. Most privates have to compete with state flags for qualified students and they use tuition discounting to do that. Outside of the elites who operate on a “sliding scale”, very few savvy customers pay full price at the privates, unless they are underqualified or really want to attend a specific “dream” school.</p>
<p>The problem middle class and lower income apps face at state flags and other state schools is that state subsidies have not kept up with rising costs. A typical state flag on the East coast is 25K and provides very little per student need based aid. Increasingly, these schools are filling up with wealthier students while less fortunate students have to meet increased COA with gapping and loans. Of course, these schools also have to keep attracting wealthier instate and out of state students and they have to keep upgrading their facilities, sports programs etc to do so. It’s pretty much become an endless cycle.</p>
<p>^a lot of liberal arts colleges in the south are relatively inexpensive when compared with the LAC’s in the northeast (maybe that’s a generalization)</p>
<p>and Christian colleges manage to keep their costs low overall (look at Calvin $33,000 total, and Wheaton $38,000 total)</p>
<p>US graduate programs that are not top-rated in engineering, CS, math, and science are fairly desperate for decent US PhD students. It’s very true that the bar is much lower for US students, but only because there are so few.</p>
<p>The main reason tuition increases to outstrip inflation is because unlike every other area of the economy, there have been few if any gains in efficiency in the education sphere. Research takes the time and money it takes, period. Teachers need to be paid. A PhD doesn’t take any less time just because we want it to and the rest of society lets us do things faster. As such, you can’t exactly pay a professor that much less. Further, there are actually market forces pushing the costs UP: the Financial aid people are discussing is one aspect, certainly, but you also have the pressure to attract better students with better faculty: student ratios, which in turn increases the number of faculty you want to have on staff. </p>
<p>None of this is wrong from the institutional standpoint, since a university is not a business. But this all keeps a university’s costs up, and prevents costs from decreasing at the same rate as the rest of the market. As such, the relative costs of college actually HAVE been increasing compared to the rest of the market, hence costs multiplying faster than inflation.</p>
<p>^True, but you’re assuming that universities are as efficient as possible at the moment (without decreasing research and teaching abilities.) </p>
<p>The fact is, schools are extremely inefficient. They hire more administrators, secretaries, and professors than needed, needlessly spend money on glamorous sports stadiums, catered food, etc.</p>
<p>You’re assuming certain things are not functions of the university. There is needless spending, certainly, but most universities grossly underpay staff, I would argue “unnecesary professors” is a ridiculous point, since the goal is to deliver the best education possible, and smaller student: faculty ratios is part of that.</p>
<p>In my opinion, higher education has fallen to the more = better myth. More students, more professors, more secretaries, more administrators, more this, more that. </p>
<p>I’d rather have a great professor teach 30 students than a mediocre professor who should have retired years ago teach 20 students.</p>