We were looking only at UCs and OOS with merit money based on National Merit Finalist until our kid in his senior year sheepishly confessed to us that he wanted to apply to Stanford as an early applicant. Based on my experience, 90% of kids in Southern CA who got into Stanford and Berkeley would choose to go to Stanford. Now, I am sure there are families whose kids will not even apply to Stanford because Berkeley cost is lower. But for me, the difference between costs of Berkeley and Stanford is not that big — maybe 25k to 30k per year — to let the cost difference determine the choice between Berkeley and Stanford. Call me dumb but that’s my viewpoint.
Only college that would have trumped the full pay at Stanford for me was an OOS public Honors with merit money. I can easily see that many middle class families would not even have their kids apply to Stanford and instead go to the Honors with the merit money route because I was very attracted to that possibility myself even though I could afford full private pay at Stanford. The only problem was I think the only person in my family who was seriously attracted to the OOS Honors with merit money route was me, not my kid or my spouse.
Ultimately, I said to myself “at least our kid is happy at Stanford and seems to be learning a lot, so it’s not that bad being a full pay there.” And I am wearing Stanford t-shirt as often as I can while my kid is going there. I think Stanford should sell school t-shirts with phrase “full paying parent”.
Only ~1% of HS students in the West apply to Stanford. Some of the publics with larger numbers of applicants from the West than Stanford are UCLA, UCSD, UCI, UCB, USSB, UCD, CSLB, SDSU, USC, UCSC, CalPoly SLO, CSF, UW, UCR, CSLA, NAU, CalPoly P, SFSU, and UA. Stanford does not make the top 20. It’s quite common to not apply to Stanford among nearly all larger groups including kids from the East, kids from the West, full pay kids, high stat kids, and presumably kids who could get into Stanford (not sure how to define this group). There are a wide variety of reasons why some students choose to not apply to Stanford. Being lower cost for full pay applicants has been emphasized in this thread, but there are countless others. Instead it’s more the oddity that a high achieving student would choose to apply to Stanford than that one would not, although applying to Stanford is obviously more common among certain groups than others.
A comparison of number of applicants from California who apply to Stanford and Berkeley is below, as well as the cost to parents reported in their NPC for the median Berkeley family income, as listed in the NYT report. Berkeley costs more than Stanford for this group, yet the number of CA Berkeley applicants still triples the number of CA Stanford applicants.
Berkeley: 52k CA applicants, $17k cost to parents + $9k student loan/work
Stanford:~17k CA applicants, $11k cost to parents + $5k student work
There are a variety of contributing factors to this result – some students didn’t apply to Stanford because they thought they didn’t have a shot or because they didn’t know about the lower cost after FA. However, there also many students who are not trying to save money, yet still choose Berkeley over Stanford (by not applying to the latter). Many students grow up in an environment where most people they know who attended college went to state, and they don’t know anyone attended Stanford or the like. They are not encouraged to favor top prestige private colleges by parents, friends, family, teachers, etc. Instead applying to the CA state system is the common path, with the least resistance. It’s a very different environment from the CC forums.
@Data10 I am sure you are right, and I agree with your post. My point is for those families from Southern CA, whose kids applied to and got into both Stanford and Berkeley, an overwhelming percentage choose to attend Stanford. I mean if there was no strong desire by both parents and kids to attend Stanford, Stanford would not be voted number 1 Dream school for both parents and kids for 5 years running in the annual survey done by Princeton Review. I am actually curious to see if there is something about the survey that is suspect. For example, did they just focus on families from Western states?
Rivet, why not? Maybe 20,000 freshmen at the Ivies and Duke MIT Stanford Chicago, out of 2.2 million total US freshmen. Why not allot half of CC threads/posts to the elite of the Elite 1%? (Wish there were more threads on schools like Dickinson, Whitman, Muhlenberg, other places my daughters can maybe get in).
I really think if 25-30K over 4+ years (X a possible 2 or 3+ kids) is not a big deal to you, you come from a place of privilege that plenty of families do not. Including some full pay families.
My 99% stat full pay kid is not applying to any schools where he might not get merit. We have some give but not 30K give above a well regarded flagship honors program (where both spouse and I are alum). Our financial adviser recommends spending about 1/3 give or take of our EFC. The number computed by the FAFSA or a particular school’s NPC might work for your family and if so that is great. There are plenty of reasons why that number might not be realistic for another family. The FAFSA really doesn’t care at all about the fine details of your financial situation. It’s also a huge gift to your kids to be in a good position for retirement at a reasonable age and to be able to deal with unexpected crises (health, job loss, etc).
Everyone has their own values and can choose as they please. I do think when people default on loans they would not have qualified for or end up in financial crises due to poor choices, we ALL pay for it in the long run. Those are the situations I find troubling. If you are just rearranging your savings and assets to pay for it or using smallish short term loans to make payments easier, that’s great. I think the federal limits are good guidelines for student loans and I do find it concerning when parents will sign for more than that for an undergrad degree. Parents choosing to take out a loan and cover it is a completely different decision.
I’ve got 2 high-achievers applying to schools right now. They certainly have dreams of attending an elite private. Much of this desire is due to competition created by their HS peers on social media. No one wants to get into the lesser school while a “non-deserving” fellow student gets into an Ivy. It’s gotten to the point where UCB and UCLA do not impress.
These elite privates are about 75k per year COA. Their claims of FA as outlined in their brochures aren’t exactly true. After all, if their FA award is based on income as the literature clearly states, then why do they need to have the parents strip to their financial underwear via the CSS Profile?
As a CA resident, our UCs will cost about 33k per year COA. This is a 168k difference vs. Ivies/privates over 4 years. IMO, we can talk about smaller class sizes, professor accessibility, and other advantages to a private elite, but when you’re talking about 168k, most need to see an economic advantage that makes itself known, even if it occurs over a long period of time. In the research I’ve done, which also includes talking to parents of kids who attend Ivies and also drawing on my own 34 years of experience in the tech sector, the numbers just don’t pan out. In my own work, which includes a stint at a National Laboratory, the people from Stanford, Cornell, MIT, Princeton and the like work alongside the people from UC and Cal State. They don’t seem to get promoted at a faster rate, and their cubicles are all the same size as mine. They also don’t seem to possess higher capabilities. In my group, our cutting-edge server is being designed by 2 guys from UCI and one guy from UMD. The leader of the firmware group went to Cal State. This has been typical of my experience. My brother-in-law, a graduate of Cal State, supervises engineers from Ivy League schools.
I understand that different people attribute different value to different things, but in the end our kids go to college for job training which we hope will give them an economic advantage they can carry forward. If what we put into that training doesn’t pan out in an economic benefit, it just seems like a really tough sell.
And in response, on CC, you get, but there’s consulting and investment banking. And it is true that it’s easier to go into those fields from an elite school. I don’t think anyone would debate that. But those fields represent such a tiny fraction of graduates, many of whom go into them because they don’t know what they really want to do in life, and yet CCers obsess about them and offer them up as the justification for all. Furthermore, they ignore the fact that many who aspire to consulting and IB at the elite schools don’t get offers; the competition is fierce. I’m beating a dead horse on this point though.
You are correct to be suspicious of the survey. It wasn’t just a random survey of high school students. Instead they surveyed a specific subgroup – students who spend a lot of time on the princetonreview.com website – a site that focuses on increasing SAT/ACT scores through prep programs costing as much as $800 for a short course or $167/hour for tutoring. Obviously students who are obsessed with HYPSM… are more likely to hang out on this type of expensive SAT/ACT prep site and participate in the survey than students who are not. The princetonreview.com site regulars do not offer a good representation of the average HS student, just as collegeconfidential.com forum regulars do not offer a good representation of the average HS student. That said, UCLA was still in the top 5. Had they only surveyed CA students instead of nationally, I think it’s likely UCLA would be #1 since UCLA preference has a strong regional bias among CA students.
If my kid chose the cheaper school and there was money left over, I would not give that to them when they graduated to buy a condo. If they decided to go to grad school the money would be used for that or it would be used for any other kids going to college…in our case whatever money wasn’t used for my daughter to go to college will be used for her brother…
If we need to support or help out any of our kids after college, which we did for a little while with our daughter, then the money could go to that. If my kids need a bit of help after college, I am happy to help in any way I can and in any way I can afford to. I don’t think giving leftover money to help the kids buy a condo is helping…giving money for groceries, letting them live at home for a while, etc…
And here is what I think about in regards to skin in the game: that’s when the student works to pay for all or some of their tuition and/or spending money, books, etc. And also studies hard to get the best grades they can and applies for scholarships. Giving a kid money for a condo or to start a business since they chose the cheaper school is NOT skin in the game…that’s just giving money to a kid to do something with it…
@LMK5 Agree with your statements. We did discuss this earlier in the thread. The more technical the area of study the less important the impact of an Ivy degree. As long as the university can prepare you well for the technical area of study, then what matters more is your knowledge, experience and impact.
I had an interesting conversation with the alumni rep from WUStL today who came by my job. Of course the ask was to donate. I shared w/ him that I loved my 4 years when I was a student, but I chafe at the idea of paying full freight for D19 when the merit based state scholarship programs in GA get the price tag down to $15K/year. He understood and pointed out the new buildings, scholarship fundraising options, admissions yields, etc., etc.
It’s also interesting to me that new hires where I work are looked at more at what they study and GPA instead of where they study. If they have the right major and GPA, we’ll interview them, and the salaries will be the same. I do have a colleague who attended Harvard, as did his wife, and they just saved and saved and sent both kids there - no aid, two professionals. They felt really strongly about their choices, and we have spirited discussions from time to time. Won’t change my outlook, but respect the different choices. Until there is some disruption where the expensive private colleges don’t get such high yields, I don’t foresee any change.
This topic widely varies by families, and as should be the case. I sent my two to expensive schools - one out of
state to Michigan - albeit where she was a Shipman Scholar reducing the price somewhat - and the other to Princeton full pay.
My reasons were not as much economic - although I was fortunate in that I could afford to pay without any loans or aid - but rather personal.
I was poor, without a home to live in, and completely on my own at age 18. I was fortunate to go to school on athletic scholarship (one of the two top 10 USNWR schools that give athletic scholarships), and I frankly resented the way the rich kids (many of whom were effete, spoiled elitists) treated me. I got through undergrad and competed very well at the graduate level (paid for by trading in futures), all more or less to satisfy my insecurities over being poor. The elite really doesn’t like seeing poor people like me succeed, so it was gratifying in a shallow sense. In any event, when I had kids, I told them that they could got to college absolutely wherever they wanted to go. I was fortunate to have a spouse who understood (she came from an excellent family background). There was no way I wouldn’t keep my word, especially since I wanted to break a generational cycle of poor decisions and failures to look out for young people and their interests. Yes, there were a lot better economic choices, and I support parents who make value based education decisions, but it was really important to me to run down the demons of my past. Perhaps selfish in a way, but since my focus was on the interest of my kids, only somewhat so. Outcomes vary by families.
One thing I do notice today is the relative lack of value at many schools. Compounding this is the culture at many places today. My honors thesis advisor, already very skeptical at letting a full time athlete on scholarship in his program, had absolutely no compunction about repeatedly driving home that learning is not about comfort or my feelings but rather about how much ego damage I could sustain. He was right, and the results prove it, and he turned my life around. I can’t imagine the safe spaces crowd today - nothing is more damaging than constantly looking for safety and comfort. This to me is a huge valuable proposition today, and of course, not easy to talk about.
In examining “different schools of thought about paying for college” you first need to answer examine the “different schools of thought about the purpose of college.”
If, for example, one agrees with @LMK5 is correct insofar as his/her assumption that “… in the end our kids go to college for job training which we hope will give them an economic advantage they can carry forward” it may not matter as much where that “job training” is received, especially in fields like nursing or engineering, where access to a hospital for internships or ABET certification is at play and where the strength of the program might not be as institution-dependent as it might be in other fields (leaving aside the issue of making connections, resources for networking, etc. or the research vs. applied focus of programs one might find at individual schools).
If, on the other hand, you view the purpose of higher education to be the pursuit of knowledge (note, I say “pursuit” not the “acquisition,” where and with whom you go to school might matter more. If a student aspires to become a “scholar,” plans to conduct research in an academic setting or wants to teach at the college level in a tenure-track job someday, the institution and mentors that student might have access to as an undergraduate will matter a lot; going to an elite school with strong mentorship might be an advantage.
For our part, we fall into the latter category.
(I was going to delve into the whole car analogy – as fraught with caveats as it may be – but I’ll spare y’all). And we’re another So Cal data point of a student turning down Cal – and UCLA – for that school that everyone loves to hate.
Maybe I’m in the minority here but I feel that the journey is just as important as the destination and that college is much, much more than what your starting salary is after college. If it was just about getting through college on the cheap, one good way would be to live at home, go to a community college for two years and transfer to your state college with a 4 year degree in hand.
Some students, on the other hand, are looking for the full college experience, 4 years away at college, surrounded by your academic peers in ALL classes, taught by professors and/or programs that are “best in class”, put in a competitive environment of like-minded and frequently international students, a college with an incredible alumni network, and school spirit and pride that stays with the student for the rest of their lives.
IMO, ROI is not just monetary, far from it…
To the OP, a lot of the anecdotes don’t address the original question of: for full pay parents, who can EASILY afford a private elite college, how many would choose the full ride instead? I still stand by my comment that very few would choose the full ride and many of these same parents have probably been paying for private middle school and high school for years, so the private elite college COA is no hardship.
@socaldad2002 we certainly weren’t interested in our kids getting through on the cheap. We wanted them to have the 4-year experiences we had. However, we set parameters for them. We could have paid more than $35K per year per child, but it didn’t make sense to. In fact, for our last one, he turned down a considerably higher ranked school for the one he is attending because the program he is in is much better and he received a nice merit package. The other school, in our view, wasn’t worth the additional $20K per year.
Agreed, college is about far more than starting salary. The question is, in my case, is the journey at the elite private worth 168k more per child than a state school in the national top 50? I’m open to being sold but as of now I haven’t seen a convincing argument.
Would he have taken the better program if it cost the same as the higher ranked? That’s an interesting question, IMO - if the program is better perhaps then the college is better - ranking be darned.
@OHMomof2 I think so. The program was the driver for him and we were thrilled it happened to come with some money :). Both universities are flagships with their own strengths but the one he turned down has a stronger overall profile. Originally, he was a bit torn because he was hung up on the top 50 ranking, but then he realized he wouldn’t get what he wanted. So far so good. He seems happy and is doing really well academically. Can’t ask for more than that.