<p>"I think more often the scenario is “my kid is dying to go to University of Chicago to study classics, but it is going to cost us dearly and potentially jeopardize our resources for the younger siblings and our retirement. Our state flagship has a classics department and is less then half the cost. Plus, he might change his mind about what he wants to study once he gets there. So we aren’t going to indulge him with his dream school.” "</p>
<p>Sure. And I bet that kind of scenario does occur. And people content themselves with it because - hey, that’s how the cookie crumbles, money doesn’t grow on trees, and every other cliché I can throw at it. And that may be absolutely, hands-down the right decision so you’re not jeopardizing the younger siblings and parent retirement. That doesn’t mean that it would be their first preference if the money fairy were to make a visit, and that doesn’t mean that there is no difference between U of Chicago and UNH for classics (in this example).<br>
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<p>“And many of the rest of us are tired of the implications that we are failures as parents because our children either didn’t gain admittance to these highly selective schools”</p>
<p>WHOA. Where did that come from? Did anyone make any insinuation even remotely close to this?</p>
<p>I dream of some day owning a house at the beach. However, we’ve never had enough discretionary income to fund retirement, save for education, AND own a beach house. We can’t even always afford a week at the beach. This definitely is an illustration of the different perspectives posters here are coming from…</p>
<p>One of the mantras I often say to my ds is: “Just because you <em>can</em> do something, doesn’t mean you <em>should</em> do something.” This cuts both ways in this discussion. Just because one <em>can</em> get a free ride doesn’t mean that taking it is what one <em>should</em> do. Just because one <em>can</em> get into a reach and pay full-freight doesn’t mean that is what one <em>should</em> do. The diverse number of viewpoints presented in this thread amply demonstrates that there is no one size fits all decision.</p>
<p>Ds had the option of free at a couple of state flagships or full pay at a reach, along with other choices in the middle (cost-wise) that gave partial merit scholarships. We don’t qualify for financial aid. He chose the reach. We will be full pay there as there is no merit money to be had by anyone. He is our only and we can afford it. We probably won’t cover grad school for him should he choose to go.</p>
<p>The problem with college admissions and college decisions is that they involve the two things people are the MOST sensitive about: their children and their money. Just look at how riled up a bunch of STRANGERS have become debating this issue! We all know how much MORE sensitive it can be among friends and classmates. I have had people say to my face, “We think it’s stupid to pay $50,000 per year (it’s more than that!) for an undergraduate degree,” knowing full well that that is exactly what we will be doing. Implications (or overt opinions) go both ways. There is absolutely nothing pretty about this process, but I find people to be defensive on BOTH sides of the money issue. People make choices all the time regrading how they spend their money that I don’t agree with. Why should this area be any different? I really don’t care what others choose to do.</p>
<p>As far as the OP’s question goes…we justified paying for the reach for many reasons: intellectual “thickness” (I really like that!) as mentioned above, networking opportunities, location, the type of overall collegiate experience we believe he will receive there, ability to afford it without ill effects, and the fact that we truly believe it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for him. We believe sending him there is “worth” it. Will that pan out? Who knows? Could he have done just as well at a full-ride school? Who knows? We won’t ever know. It’s not a controlled experiment which is why a definitive answer can’t be determined. </p>
<p>I beg to differ. There are many top caliber people who only have a Bachelors degree and they are the smart ones who manage to forge a successful career path and reach the top without any advanced degree. Most kids I know go to grad school (and I am not talking about professional schools like law or medicine whose graduates need the degrees to work) because they can’t find a job or advance in their field with their first degree.
Within our family, we have MD, JD, MBA and one with a BSc. Guess who has the highest income and youngest in age?</p>
<p>My posts on this thread have always been under the assumption that the reach school was financially affordable, but parents would rather not pay when there is a cheaper alternative. I assumed people wouldn’t apply to schools they couldn’t really afford. That’s why I implied I "“I wouldn’t SELL my child for a merit scholarship.” (why wouldn’t I use the money I’ve saved for my kid’s education for college?) If I couldn’t afford to contribute toward my kid’s college tuition and I couldn’t get much FA for whatever reason (people in the donut hole), my plan would be to tell my kid in 9th grade to get best stats possible in order to get highest merit aids. </p>
<p>I believe in playing the cards I am dealt with and make best of life. There is no shame about not able to afford something. But if you can afford it, why wouldn’t you give it your kid.</p>
<p>I like the ‘intellectual thickness’ comments. I feel the same way, especially on the other end of the spectrum, minimizing exposure to kids who just aren’t serious about school. I think this especially applies to certain fields of study, the types of which have already come up on this thread.</p>
<p>But I also acknowledge that a lack of intellectual thickness, and exposure to a significantly supply of kids who just don’t take school very seriously, pretty much describes every public high school in the country.</p>
<p>How did our kids fare in this environment during high school? Well, if they have the opportunity to go to a highly selective college, they fared spectacularly!</p>
<p>So the kids going to these colleges with all this intellectual thickness are precisely the kids who have already proven that they do not need such an environment to be fantastically successful. Oh sure, college is not high school; but a 20 year old is not a 15 year old either. I’m not sure we have to worry too much about these kids attending colleges a couple of rungs lower than the so-called elite.</p>
<p>So, just speaking for myself, I’d have to say that ego is probably more involved in forming my opinion on the matter that I might initially like to admit, and I think there is at least some rationalization involved in citing the concept of intellectual thickness as a source for my desire to have my kids attend a highly selective college.</p>
<p>Oldfort, and there’s also no shame in deciding, “you can go to U Mass, I’m not paying for BU even though we can afford it.” But that’s not the same thing as telling the parent who IS willing to pay for BU that they are prestige %^&*s who don’t know the value of a buck like you do.</p>
<p>I do find it interesting that the “Value” crowd has no problem telling the full freight payers how deluded we are, but the full freights are never allowed to even whisper that they might have made a different decision for their own child faced with the set of facts presented. And the “a smart kid can go anywhere, it makes no difference in where he/she goes for undergrad” mantra becomes a little tiresome when most of those same people concede that it actually DOES matter where the kid goes to grad school.</p>
<p>So the kid who majored in Classics at UNH and went off to a PR firm or to do marketing for a health insurance company or another role populated by kids with degrees in the humanities-- who never goes to grad school- it doesn’t matter where he goes to college, but his sister, who goes to UNH and THEN does grad school-- it matters for her which grad institution she goes to why exactly?</p>
<p>Just trying to figure out the logic here. I’m presuming that the name on the degree matters for grad school because it communicates the eminence of the faculty, the deep pockets of the academic resources, and somehow signals the quality of the kid who has said piece of paper, correct? It has nothing to do with what the kid actually experiences at said institution??? There is no correlation (or only modest correlation) between ACTUAL academic quality and the name, right? It’s just the perception? Because of course, a smart grad student can make his or her own opportunities WHEREVER they end up, right? Get invited to symposia, get fellowships, asked to spend a semester overseas doing field work- doesn’t matter which institution you’re at, the smart grad student should be able to make this happen. At least that’s your logic, right?</p>
<p>Ah, that is exactly the point!. Those kids from Georgetown, UofC, etc, get to work and live side-by-side with that type of person were accepted to and attend really strong IR programs, all year, not just during a summer program.</p>
<p>No, I am not assuming, since I knew many of those people and understood the difference between what they covered in quant mechanics and what was covered in courses I took for example. Please don’t think that that the level of material covered in MIT or CalTech is at the same level as what is covered in Podunk U’s physics or calc courses. Or do you think the psets for all colleges are the same?</p>
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<p>Yes, I know that many people get into grad schools. My point is that some people have a much stronger foundation when they go. </p>
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<p>Duh. No one said it is “just” because it is a better school. I never stated you can take the average Podunk U person and plunk them down at MIT and get some magical result.</p>
<p>If you are the type of person you mentioned, high caliber, you are better off at MIT than Podunk U, even though there are plenty of people who go to grad school from Podunk U.</p>
<p>YZamyatin: excellent post, excellent points. And related to that, just because someone didn’t reveal his brilliance in high school doesn’t mean he won’t come into his own and contribute to the intellectual environment at his college. The schools with the much-desired “thickness” of intellectual ability don’t have all the smart kids–but what they do have is many of the smart kids who had their #*$& together in high school and had begun to focus on academic excellence by their early to mid teens. They have a lot to offer, but they are surely not the only interesting students to be around in college.</p>
<p>blossom, the reason terminal degrees matter in academia is because the job market is SO competitive for faculty positions. It’s COMPLETELY different than undergrad.</p>
<p>And for what it’s worth, my son (studying IR and Arabic at Tufts) discovered that the Tufts Arabic program teaches much more Arabic than any of the other colleges whose students he came in contact with. He was placed in more advanced classes with the same number of years of study going in. Not all schools (or departments) are created equal.</p>
<p>As for the comment about how our kids survived high school, yes they did, but at a cost. My older son attended a school of over 3000 kids yet there wasn’t a single other kid in his class who was even close to the level of computer programming he had. He was involved in Academic Team and Science Olympiad and had three friends he hung out with. Three. At Carnegie Mellon he had hundreds of peers in computer science and many, many more friends who shared his interests. He’s a kid with fairly narrow interests and it was a breath of fresh air to go to a school with lots of kids like him.</p>
<p>My younger son, much less focused in high school and with more varied interests had lots of friends in high school including some that were not in all the AP classes. High school worked fine for him, but I’m still glad he’s in a selective college where he really has to work to do well. He needs a little push to keep him from his slackerish tendencies.</p>
<p>@oldfort - thank you for your clarification. There have been many posts that have implied that the only reasons parents might not be able to afford a quarter million dollar education is because they were frivolous and/or don’t care about their kids. While that is true in some cases, there are many cases where it is not.</p>
<p>As for why someone would apply to a school they can’t afford, I can think of two reasons:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>They didn’t know what they were getting in to. Just look around for posts from kids who were given the advice “you’re smart, just apply and if you get in, the money will work out”. Some of them have never heard of a net price calculator, and didn’t realize that some of the more selective schools don’t award merit based aid, or didn’t realize how merit-based aid worked. They’re then devastated when they have a handful of acceptances and not a single school they can afford, or when they’re forced to go to a safety school they hate and only applied to because their parents made them.</p></li>
<li><p>They were seeking merit-based aid. Very few schools tell you up front what their merit awards are, and NPCs are meaningless for those seeking merit aid. You don’t know your merit award until after your acceptance - in some cases well after, as some schools require you to visit campus and compete for merit awards. That’s why we were totally up-front with D about what we could afford. She knew how much the merit awards would need to be for her to attend the schools she applied to. But we also had a safety we KNEW she would get in to and we KNEW we could afford even without merit money. And since she did her part working hard to make herself an attractive student, we had no problem paying the max we had budgeted, even though that $60,000 savings over 4 years if she chose the cheapest school would have given me a nice down-payment on that beach house I’ve always dreamed of… However, she also knew we would not sacrifice our retirement to pay for a more expensive option.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>My oldest was a definite “top candidate”–got into all 10 of his schools including MIT (where he is finishing his soph. year), Princeton, Penn, Caltech, Mudd and others. </p>
<p>He has no plans for grad school. I think, as a math major, he will do just fine in the job market without graduate school. He is either going the entrepreneurial route (my prediction) or will be very employable doing data analysis or finance. He’s working this summer as a data analysis intern.</p>
<p>We are one of the most fortunate ones not to have to wrestle with the original question, Our moderate income and my oldest son’s stats allowed him to attend college with very little cost to us. In fact, he’ll pay for the last two years with his own summer income.</p>
<p>@blossom - it’s not stupid or vain for someone who has the money to pay for a more prestigious school to do so. I’m not sure if you lump me in the “Value” crowd, but I don’t think people who pay $250,000 for an education are deluded if they can afford it. I do think people who take out $100,000 in debt or raid their retirement funds to obtain that same education are deluded. But I also don’t think it should be assumed that anyone who chooses a more “Value” option is doing so just because they’ve frittered their money away on conspicuous consumption.</p>
<p>IF someone obtains a graduate degree, then yes, where they went undergrad really doesn’t matter. The terminal degree is what is important. If someone stops at a bachelor’s, then yes, the undergrad institution is more important. Many kids who think they’ll go on to grad school don’t, many who never thought of it do. And a good student can succeed anywhere, but the path may be smoother for those who attended a more prestigious school. That doesn’t mean that the kid who went to Yale is guaranteed success, and the kid who went to a directional U is guaranteed failure. The arguments in this thread have become very extreme.</p>
<p>That’s not what I hear the full freight crowd whispering. It’s more along the lines of “we’ve managed to be full pay by giving up luxuries” then citing things like designer handbags, pricey cars, and vacation homes, and we “scrimped and saved” – our raises, 2nd incomes, retirement funds, income from our rentals – without realizing most of America has none of those things. If they do recognize it, they seem to have difficulty grasping that families can have less than we do through no fault of their own. Invariably, when someone protests about those comments, the response is that we’d all send our kids to “intellectually thick” elite colleges if we could afford it. We wouldn’t, actually, because some of us believe we can learn from all different kinds of people, but people making those comments can’t seem to grasp that either. </p>
<p>My point is, I think some of the people who pay full freight for elite colleges can’t conceive that others wouldn’t pay full freight for those schools if their circumstances were better, and they seem to assume the circumstances aren’t better through some fault or oversite on the part of the other families. What’s troubling about the attitudes I’m seeing is that so many of us are advising impressionable kids (and their families) who we really know very little about. When you can cut a $60k check to a college and talk about giving up luxuries to do so (meaning selling the “beach house” that you neglected to mention you had), it’s easy to forget that, to others, luxuries may be one of their daily meals and delaying retirement for a dozen years (if not much longer). The not so subtle message in these threads is that the more elite, the better, and if kids want to be in a position to not have to worry about college costs for their children, elite colleges are the way to get there. No wonder so many families inquire about borrowing $60k, $90k, even $240k for undergrad work. I hear you (all) saying don’t borrow that kind of money, but when you write threads like this detailing all the reasons why they should sacrifice, which message do you think they’re hearing? </p>