@blossom Ha! My husband preferred the colleges on our visits that didn’t have perfectly kept landscaping. There was crab grass at one and he said, “fabulous! our dollars are going towards something more important here!” And I don’t know how many times he’s told S19 that college is not a vacation and he doesn’t want to pay for lazy rivers and over the top dorms. Somehow we feel better being full pay sending S19 to a school that doesn’t seem to make these things a priority.
Except that that’s really not true. There are hundreds if not thousands of more affordable schools.
https://www.bestcolleges.com/features/lowest-out-of-state-tuition/
The problem is that no one lusts after Cal State Fresno, Utah Valley University, or Mississippi Valley State U. We all want Chanel at Walmart prices.
Like Blossom, I’ve seen a rise in demand for expensive services. Disability services, medical and mental health services, Title IX requirements, Cleary reporting, on-demand free tutoring, affinity group, first gen, international student and LGBTQ support to ensure at risk students graduate on time, special housing requirements, green eco-friendly policies, ombudsmen, NPC and quick-response financial aid staff, dietitians to create healthy vegan, kosher, halal, vegetarian, and gluten free menus, greater clarity in admissions in the form of CDS and federal reporting. Add a full or half-time staffer for each of these areas and is it any wonder college costs have risen exponentially?
Education is one of the only places in the economy that practices price discrimination based on income. Even within education it only happens at a small number of schools. It isn’t surprising that some of the people that are discriminated against don’t like it. If they didn’t, the whole concept of discrimination wouldn’t work.
Who is making these demands? How are they making them? I think colleges started this competition of services and extras to entice full pay students. I believe most of us are just caught in the crossfire.
Some of it’s a feedback loop. Students choose the schools with better services and facilities, forcing schools to build fancier dorms and hire more staff to keep competitive with their peers. That in turn changes the baseline and the cycle continues. There are also a lot more requirements for schools than there were a generation ago. Cleary Act, Title IX, ADA, etc. Those are all good, but they cost.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve read on CC that someone’s kid can’t live in a triple or that college’s aren’t being transparent enough with their admissions data (“They only have the data for last year. Why not this year’s? What are they try to hide?” “Why don’t they break out the admissions information for recruited athletes and legacies? It’s a rigged system!” “The NPC wasn’t accurate in our case. They pulled a bait and switch!”)
I’ll speak to decent facilities, and nice maintenance. We visited a college and the place looked like it hadn’t had decent maintenance. Oddly, the tour guide took us to see a classroom where the carpet was stained, and the curtains on the windows were actually falling off the rod. Their landscaping was ill maintained…lots of weeds, just a mess. Let’s just say, it didn’t make a good impression and the school was dropped from consideration.
We felt that decent facilities that were well maintained showed a sign that the college actually cared about…the college.
Having said that…no one is required to attend a $70,000 college…no one. If this is affordable for the family, fine. But there are college options out there that are not $70,000 a year.
No college would cost this much if a fortune wasn’t being spend on financial aid, athletics, administration and marketing.
Harvard’s NPC at https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculator says for the following:
- USA citizen, Colorado resident.
- Family of 4 with 1 in college.
- $150k parental wage/salary.
- $300k parental cash/investments.
- Harvard does not consider home equity or retirement account assets.
that the net price will be $24,600.
Of course, not every college will have a net price like that of Harvard. But someone running NPCs at Ivy League schools will probably encounter Harvard’s NPC or some of the few others with similar results.
Did you include contributions to your tax deferred retirement accounts in your $150,000 income?
Is that $150,000 income your net or gross pay? If it’s your net…what is your gross?
Something isn’t right about the OP’s NPC’s as far as Ivy schools go. There are differences among Ivys, too, but the results of NPCs on HYP would yield the kind of EFC that ucbalumnus provided in #47. You can run NPC all day long on any of the Ivys, but I don’t know how the statement – “if you’re full pay at an ivy your income is above $300,000” – is a wrong or misleading assumption. I have yet to see an exception to this.
The state university system where I live had to build a dorm in a VERY expensive city, where construction costs are off the charts, because the local branch college (built as a commuter college, in use as a commuter college) was perpetually below optimal enrollment since “you don’t have a dorm”.
So now there’s a dorm. I’m sure the masterplan will involve an athletic facility very soon.
The kids who live within commuting distance- they’ll be fine- they can still pay the relatively affordable tuition and take the bus or train.
The kids outside of commuting distance- who a few years ago, would have lived at home and commuted to their OWN local branch, now feel the need to dorm. In my city. A place where well compensated professionals find rents very high, parking is high, everything is high. And now we’ve added a bunch of 18 year old’s to the mix.
Who wanted it? Students and parents, that’s who. Certainly not the local residents (traffic is a mess, pressure on local services is very high- students like to pull the fire alarm at midnight, in addition to campus patrols, pressure on local police is intense to keep the area safe). Certainly not the tax payers in other parts of the state.
But if a public college is perpetually under-enrolled, and is losing 18 year old’s to three adjacent states, all with multiple options for dorming-- how do you keep up?
And the costs- oh my. So I think the claim “we didn’t want four star hotels- we’re don’t want Saks, we want Walmart” is disingenuous. You may want to pay Walmart prices, but you also don’t want your kid taking a city bus (with a reduced fare bus pass, courtesy of the state) to classes and then sleeping at home at night.
And here’s reality- you can’t build a new dorm in 2018 using 1945 building codes. Once you have factored in current regulations for fire, access, wiring, IT, parking, air conditioning, setbacks, etc. you’ve already built a Ritz Carlton hotel even if the finishes are relatively modest. It just costs a fortune to build a dorm which will be safe and up to code in the middle of a dense city.
So all of you “we don’t want the bells and whistles”- if your kid is living in a dorm, you’ve already GOT the bells and whistles. And never mind all the indignant parents who insist on a single, can’t live in a double (let alone a triple) and… wait for it… claim a medical need for a private bathroom even when the medical need is “my kid doesn’t like to share a toilet (who does?) and can’t see other people on the way in or out of the shower”.
Who pays for all these singles and constructing all these private bathrooms? I can’t even count the number of people using the facilities in my freshman hall!!!
@ucbalumnus That’s really interesting! That Harvard NPC doesn’t ask for nearly as much info as I remember having to type in when we were running NPCs last spring. If we had seen a number like that we would have jumped all over it and had DS apply there (whether he got in would be another matter altogether though).
When we finished our 2017 taxes, we did Yale’s NPC as they had just sent DS19 a marketing letter that made them seem like the perfect school, and the parent contribution was above the COA-- close to $80,000. My son was like “that’s not so bad”–but when I pointed out that was the 1-year cost, not the 4-year cost, he just shook his head.
We have been saving aggressively for retirement, and the more detailed NPCs had us add that back into income. I see on the Harvard NPC that they are asking for pre-tax income, while a lot ask for AGI. It gets confusing pretty quick.
At the end of the day, my whole purpose here was to give the heads-up that there is more to the financial aid equation than just income. I think that is still a valid point. Although we are finished with the process for DS19, hopefully someone will see the Harvard numbers you ran and give it a shot! 
Your contributions to your tax deferred retirement accounts are added back in as income. For two people, aggressively contributing…that could easily add $40,000 in income back in.
If I mention income on this forum…it’s pretax income…your gross…not your net after all deductions…
From what you are posting here, your gross income (pretax, and including those retirement contributions) is a lot higher than $150,000.
And maybe another lesson is that if your EFC comes out significantly different than expected it might be worth checking with the FA office at the school? I don’t know if they’re willing to field those types of inquiries.
Well, we had just under $30,000 in pre-tax retirement savings, so gross income was about $180,000 rounding up.
A $180,000 gross income would (as an estimate) yield a FAFSA EFC in the $45,000 to $60,000 a year range…and that doesn’t include your non-retirement asset of about $200,000 which would add an additional $10,000 or so to the EFC from assets. And if a school uses home equity, that would add more. I can see how your family contribution would be close to or above the cost of attendance at many, many places.
For others…the FAFSA formula will be released soon…and folks can hand ca,curate the FAFSA EFC.
The Profile goes into much more depth about your finances. And each school has its own formula to compute their institutional need based aid.
And @Colorado19and22 the more robust the net price calculator…with more questions…the more likely it is to be a closer estimate to your net price.
Yale does count home equity, unlike Harvard, Princeton and Stanford (https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2018/12/17/stanford-drops-home-equity-calculations-family-wealth). That was a big consideration for us in picking schools to apply to and led to a lot of colleges being taken off the list. Don’t assume those top schools all treat assets the same.
The difference between 150 and 180 income alone is quite a significant tweak on the Harvard NPC. Again, this isn’t expected to be from income, but savings.
It is all fun and games to waste time on endowment NPCs when like as not your kid wouldn’t get a look in. Realistic schools with real math is much more important than abstract exercises.
Yo, blossom and Sue22! Exactly. The drives to upgrade, offer more fancies, cater to whims du jour, air condition dorms, have snow perfectly cleared in winter, underwrite study abroad, and on and on, is about students selecting colleges. We could offer our own kids some better perspective.
Over the years, with my own experiences working for a U, there are cost savings and cutbacks no outside family would see. It’s far more than hiring adjuncts.
150 is a tidy income. First, many families determine how to spend that money. Unfortunately, after many of those choices, they realize what a fancy college costs. Meanwhile, many are still caught up in the notion that more prestige = better education.
If Ihad it to do over, I’d still send mine to where they went, because of the fullness of the fit. But D1, a bright, highly educated kid earning a great salary, recently admitted she looks around at coworkers and realizes how most of them went the public route. Same jobs, same money.
Lookingforward, reassure your D that the publics participate in the amenities arms race too (per my earlier post) and I find that offensive, knowing that the waitress at the diner down the street who pays state income taxes and in no way could afford to send a kid to the flagship. State of the art athletic facilities (both for the athletes and regular students), every convenience known to man in the “upgraded” dorm facilities (all singles, apartment style suites, god forbid a kid should go to college and share a bedroom). And since many of the US state flagships were plunked down in rural areas (cheap land, but very small “customer base” of kids who live close enough to commute) those dorms aren’t optional. You want to go there? You need to live there.
We all wax nostalgic about being able to work your way through school. But you need to live somewhere, and you need to eat. And once that “living somewhere” is no longer the family apartment/home, you’ve got a pretty big nut to crack every month.