Note that Gator88NE’s post above yours about income between 2007 and 2013 was talking about inflation adjusted income. Household income did have notable increases for the groups that are likely to be full pay, even if it did not keep up with inflation.</p>
<p>You didn’t mention which college your son attends, but many top 30 colleges improved their financial aid in the period between 2007 and 2013, in response to the recession (and in response to how other selective colleges changed their FA). For example, I mentioned that Stanford had a huge increase in their financial aid grants between the 2008 CDS and 2009 CDS and started a new policy with no tuition charge for parents that make under $100k (with typical assets). Stanford’s sticker price increases for wealthy families during this 2007 and 2013 period were quite similar to the tuition numbers you listed for your son’s school . The sticker price increase was far above inflation, nevertheless, the inflation adjusted average cost I listed earlier shows a 4% decrease for this period. Sticker price increased, yet Stanford received less tuition per student (in inflation adjusted dollars) because of their reduced cost for lower and middle income students. I’d expect many other top 30 colleges had similar reasons for sticker price to outpace inflation.</p>
<p>
Many colleges with generous FA also have a big bulge at the lower end for students who are charged low/no cost. Median doesn’t represent two bulges at opposite ends of the distribution well. It’s more appropriate when there is a bulge towards the middle of the distribution. Median also doesn’t represent what the cost is for typical families in the United States since wealthy families are overrepresented at selective private colleges. For example, earlier I mentioned that Harvard claims to be less expensive than state schools for 90% of families in the United States. If you only look at upper income students that are most likely to attend Harvard, then you ignore the cost that the vast majority of HS students in the United States would be charged if they attend.* In any case, it’s a moot point since no median cost figures are available. </p>
<p>*I realize that most students at Harvard received need-based grants. I am calling the majority upper income since need base grants can occur with $200k+ incomes. The freshman survey suggests a median income of $150k to $175k, with about 30% below $80k and about 30% above $250k.</p>
<p>Data10, could you summarize, without adding lengthy statistics, what point(s) you are trying to make? I’m asking that only because I’m not sure.</p>
<p>You seem to be arguing that college costs haven’t risen all that much in real dollars for most people in recent decades, due to financial aid increases.</p>
<p>But that is not the truth for many families who do not qualify for aid, but still feel the real pinch of rising costs. Average and mean and mode are fine but do not reflect the individual experience. You seem to be telling us that our personal experiences of rising costs with stagnant income are not reflecting reality.</p>
<p>You have posted quite a bit on this thread, and I’d enjoy reading a summary of your perspective. Without a ton of statistics. </p>
<p>Athletic- If you assume that athletes are equally distributed between needy and non-needy students, as I don’t know another way to guess, then about 60 non-needy freshmen received athletic scholarship of $32K.</p>
<p>Waivers- Stanford grants 50% tuition waiver to employees’ children. If you assume that most of their waivers are of this type, then 24 freshmen received $21K benefit from this, presumably most of them non-needy professor’s kids(?)</p>
<p>I suppose there might be a few kids who get the waiver and athletic scholarship, so fewer than 84 non-needy athletic/merit recipients. Say 80 total.</p>
<p>Merit- the external scholarship $$ work out to about $675 per Stanford undergrad. My guess is the bulk of this money is in one time freshman awards of $1-2K from student’s HS locale or $2500 NMSC, etc. In other words, not really money that makes a difference on the scale of Stanford costs. There are surely several kids with larger Coke, etc. scholarships in the mix, not sure how to guess the number.</p>
<p>According to the CDS, Stanford is free, except for student work earnings, for those with incomes below $60K and ‘typical’ assets, and free tuition for income below $100K.</p>
<p>923 freshmen receiving no Stanford grant aid - 80 athletic/waiver recipients = 843 (48%) essentially full pay. </p>
<p>This method of using averages to describe families’ college financial experiences may be useful at public colleges, but not so very helpful at the elite privates with half of kids full pay and most of the rest not paying much at all. The average doesn’t really describe anyone’s real life experience when the population is bi-modal. The appropriate thing to do is to describe the 2 sets of experiences completely separately. Just my opinion.</p>
<p>Data, many people are in the “high income” group because both parents work at moderate income salaries (at least for the east coast) and thus the individual salaries do not fall into the high income group for growth over the past few years. If each parent makes about $100K, that puts the combined income at $200K but in a different type of job than if one parent earns $200K. Further, in many cases, that income has not been consistent for the years with young children when one or both parents may have cut back on hours or a larege share of income went for childcare. </p>
<p>You seem to want to say that tuition has not gone up faster than inflation and the only ones that are full pay are the very wealthy. As many here point out, not true. </p>
<p>Based on Celeste’s analysis, that means about half of Stanford freshman are full pay. However, I would not assume that professor’s kids are non-needy as many professors are not making that much money. </p>
<p>Government rewards schools based on enrollment and does not care about retention and graduation rates. Tennessee has seen marked improvements in their state schools when they switch to a model based on retention and graduation rates. </p>
<p>My concern is not with rising college rates, it is that college educations are becoming pedestrian and virtually useless. Not every kid should go to college. If your child is not in honors and AP classes, and you think they should go to top state U., save your money and send them to junior college for two years.</p>
<p>When did college become an entitlement for all students? My cousins who would have gotten in to many state schools nowadays were not pushed onto the college path, and did extremely well for themselves. It’s not a choice to have a career any more, a child must go to college right after high school, period.</p>
<p>Easy way to get rid of the crushing debt: don’t go to college at 18.</p>
<p>You do realize that $100,000 per year is more than “moderate” income, right? It is in the top 7% of personal income in the US. A household with two such people with a total of $200,000 per year is in the top 6% of household income. Even a household with one such person earning $100,000 per year is in the top 21% of household income.</p>
<p>Median personal income is about $28,000, and median household income is about $50,000.</p>
<p>mom2and, yes I agree, my kids are professor’s kids and and we would not be full pay at Stanford and the handful of similar schools. I didn’t mean to imply that professors are rich, just trying to bend over backward in estimating to err on the side of not overstating number of full pay families. </p>
<p>Also, though we are in the Midwest, I sympathize with families who live in areas like NE and CA. I remember years ago when we moved from small town IA to a bigger Midwest city, all our living costs practically doubled, but salary did not jump by that much. Can’t imagine trying to manage in a high cost area.</p>
<p>And I was thinking of Stanford salaries, as they are MUCH higher than professor salaries generally, and assuming by the time kids are in college that most will be full professors. In 2012-13, avg full professor salary at Stanford was $207K. Not enough to be rich in CA, but puts you up there on the EFC scale.</p>
<p>There has to be a line drawn, a formula established for aid which gives us the FAFSA, PROFILE and some other schools’ take on the process. The results can vary widely from school to school, even those that are similar, and when you throw merit money in the mix, there is even more of a range. My guess is that the most selective school have come up with the costs and formulas, and it trickles down from there in the private school category. You get schools like HPYSM that can fill their classes happily with full pays, and parents who would sell body parts if they could so that their kids can go there. The number of such parents, and the fervor is lowered as one goes down the list of “name” schools. Those colleges that do not have that hardcore group of parents willing and able to pay full fare HAVE to discount with merit and financial aid. That such colleges that have to do so, often do not have the funds to be need blind, cannot meet full need as the mainstream formulas define it, cause them to go after parents who are full pay by discounting their kids’ costs. Much more efficient to give 100 kids with no need $10K apiece than to offer the same number of need packages that will average out to more per kid. And if you gap the kids, it increases their likelihood of their not being able to go there. So you go after the market as effectively and efficiently as you can. Merit generally benefits the full pay or close to full pay families. </p>
<p>UCB, the data you are quoting includes 15-24 year olds, and 65+, both of which have substantially lower incomes and are less likely to have children in college. I don’t have my hands on the info at the moment, but you know that if you use data restricted to families whose earners are of age likely to have kids in college, the medians are much higher than that.</p>
<p>Other charts in that page may indicate another reason why parents with high school and college age kids are feeling pinched. The two age groups whose income fell the most since their peak incomes were the 45-54 age group (probably including many parents of high school and college students), and the 15-24 age group (including the college students themselves). Note that this applies to the 45-54 age group even in comparison to the peak income of the 35-44 age group, where current 45-54 age group people were likely in the peak income years.</p>
<p>So even though $200,000 is a lot in absolute terms, if the household has had to cut back from an income of $230,000 in the past, it may feel “poor” compared to the level of income that they were accustomed to.</p>
<p>UCB, I’m looking at the table you linked and see it uses census data also. Now I’m figuring where the discrepancies are, I think. I was looking at data for families (2 or more people in household), where your source is using data for all households(includes also single adults) so yields different #s.</p>
<p>I think one could make a persuasive argument that the reverse is also true: that it’s really the sticker price that is driving financial aid. You can play a lot of games with “average” price and average “discount rates”, but the fact of the matter is, nominal prices at high-end colleges (which, I believe also drive what lower-end colleges can charge) have been exceeding the CPI for decades. And, with each increase one can sense that there has been a gradual “bracket creep” in terms of which families FA covers. Twenty years ago it would have been very surprising that a family of four making $150k a year would qualify for any kind of grant aid. Nowadays, not only do they qualify for aid but at some ivies, they would not even be expected to take out loans.</p>
My primary point was at Stanford, and likely many other colleges, the average inflation adjusted tuition paid by students and average tuition per student received by the university is essentially unchanged in the past 15 years (the range of available CDS reports). The two primary reasons for the sticker price increases at Stanford and likely many other colleges appear to be inflation and improved FA for lower and middle income students. Saying tuition is increasing too rapidly can be misleading, if you are only looking at sticker price, since at many colleges when sticker price increases faster than inflation it reflects a redistribution of tuition with lower costs for certain groups (lower and middle income) that balance the higher cost for certain groups (higher income and often international). Answering the title of this thread, “Escalating College Costs … Any End in Sight?,” tuition is not expected to stop increasing as long as inflation exists. </p>
Median doesn’t work any better with this distribution. As I mentioned earlier, it would be nice to analyze different income groups separately – price for typical US family income, price per typical middle class family, price for…, etc. However, this information isn’t available for previous years. The available information is sticker and average price. We all know sticker price, but average isn’t as obvious. Average also is the most relevant measure for seeing how much the tuition received by the college changes over time.</p>
<p>Also note that at the two schools I analyzed earlier in the thread (Stanford and Harvard), families with $200k incomes are eligible for financial aid, if they do not have large savings + certain types of assets. It’s not a large portion of the net cost. I expect some in this group wouldn’t even bother since a student job is required to receive the aid, but it’s something.</p>
<p>First of all I am not crying for these folds, and I’m one of them feeling squeezed with an EFC over the COAs f college. It’ll take a way lot more money in the system before any aid will eve be given at this level, and it should not be available. Those who make this amount can more safely take advantage of loans to pay, a there is that income, assets available and room for downsizing as the kids leave the home.</p>
<p>But a squeeze, is without a doubt, there. Most of us are trying to get the best neighborhood, nicest house, best location, amenities , school district, etc for the family. That is the every day life after all. When we moved here to this horribly expensive area, from the mid west, we looked at houses half the cost of what we bought, that just weren’t anywhere as nice as the one we were leaving supposedly for an improvement in our standard of living. A lot of upheaval to squeeze into a small fix me upper from a nice big comfy house that did not cost that much in the Midwest. I couldn’t touch that price here, not even close, when looking at neighborhoods. So we took the house hit but the location was good, school district was good, and the house a bit better than the old house to take the sting out of this move… and I don’t think we really made out bottom line financially. But, it gave us more security as there were many jobs out here for H, if things didn’t pan out at one, whereas in the midwest, he was locked in. Any cuts and he’d take drastic pay cut, and he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. </p>
<p>I think we could have done it if the market hadn’t tumbled, if college costs did not go up so high, if there weren’t some other issues that croped up. But things happened and it meant having to make choices, and though I personally would have moved into a tiny apartment and lived like a miser, there were other members of the family as well. So we enjoyed and enjoy a great standard of living, but the top priced colleges are not in the picture since we choose to do that. Neither are luxury vacations, designer wares, eating out more than rarely, not watching the budget, expensive new cars, jewelry…we have to make our choices, and can only pay so much. </p>
<p>Whatever happened to the simple idea of just controlling college costs? If some of these places merely kept increases within the CPI, there’d be less need for folding in the first place.</p>
<p>My point was not that a salary of $200K is moderate, but only that it can be made up of two parents working at salaries considerable lower than that. In the NE the median family income is over $100K, which is $44K higher than the national median. $200K could be earned by two school teachers (teachers in my district start in the high $50K), or a nurse and a firefighter. Not just Wall St brokers, doctors and lawyers. These are not the salaries that went up substantially over the last several years.</p>
<p>And, as I pointed out above, using inflation alone the average private University tuition in 1984 was $9,500 which in 2013 dollars translates to $21,300. With typical tuition at around $44,000, how is that not rising higher than inflation? If tuition had kept to inflation, there would be much less need for increasing financial aid. </p>
<p>I just finished a new book about college life and the impact of student debt, written by a very relatable recent grad. The book provides a candid, account of today’s college experience (more realistic than what the admissions officers tell us!). My daughter is reading it now and really enjoying the story/perspective: </p>
<p>Anyone else read this yet? Chasing Zeroes: The Rise of Student Debt, the Fall of the College Ideal, and One Overachiever’s Misguided Pursuit of Success </p>