I have found most Americans conflate socialism with communism.
I admit this is an ignorant question, but does the “full pay” student’s price equal the actual cost of a year of education at selective private universities and colleges? I know that at many private high schools, everyone (even the full pay kids) are in effect subsidized by the endowment/donors. So it’s NOT true that the full pay students are subsidizing the scholarship students. The donors (past and present) are subsidizing both full pay and those on partial or full scholarship. I’m curious if that’s the case at selective colleges as well. Certainly, at public schools, tuition does not cover the cost to educate a student. Taxpayers make up the difference. So I don’t buy the logic that the full pays are somehow subsidizing the scholarship student.
Even many of the wealthy realize that if those born into middle and lower income families cannot develop their talents through education, the wealthy will not do as well – people unable to become educated in a way that makes better use of their talents are less likely to become the skilled employees that the businesses owned by the wealthy need to hire to grow, and will have less income available to spend on whatever products and services those businesses sell.
Indeed, some states (e.g. PA and IL) somewhat follow the model you advocate, with state university list prices substantially lower than the list prices of private universities, but poor in-state financial aid, so that they are still financially inaccessible to many state residents. So many state residents’ potential is lost because their parents cannot afford to send them to college where they can upgrade their skills and contribute more to the economy (and the tax collection) over the rest of their lives.
@gallentjill Nice try. But your analogy fails. The public is subsidizing education in the form of Pell Grants, state offered scholarships, and Federal subsidized loans. Those educational subsidies are funded from the same as real estate taxes and other taxes the public pays for public services, such as fire and police. What I am pointing out, and something which is widely recognized in the secondary education industry, is that for most private universities, full payment students/families subsidize the financial aid system for those that cannot afford to attend private universities.
You have no factual basis to even suggest that civil unrest would result if the educational socialism that exists today at most private universities would result in civil unrest. We do have something called community colleges and well over a thousand public universities, many of which have started online classes. As Matt Damon stated in Good Will Hunting: “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”
@Overtheline , Harvard for one has stated that the sticker price paid by full-pay families does not in fact cover the full cost of the student’s education. In effect all undergraduates are subsidized by endowment earnings, not just those receiving financial aid.
So at least in this example, it is not a case of full-pay families directly paying for the education of students other than their own.
How about the fact that at many public colleges, out-of-state students are indeed paying more than the full cost of their own education, ultimately to subsidize the lower costs for in-state students?
@Overtheline You are not forced to attend any Private University. If you feel that the $150k price tag is not worth more than $1.50, by all means go to the library instead. If you feel that a particular college’s pricing policy is unfair, go somewhere else. They are only taking advantage of you if you participate. I believe that these private institutions can do what they want. If they think it benefits them or society to subsidize the attendance of certain students, they may do so. If you don’t want to subsidize anyone, don’t go there.
Go get a BS from an online university. Nobody is stopping you.
I’d be curious about the pass rates on the nursing boards, MCAT and LSAT scores, CPA passage for kids who have gone the online route.
But nobody is stopping you from pulling your kid out of the “I don’t want to subsidize someone else’s kid” pile and doing U of Phoenix all the way. You do realize that many of the online programs are owned by private equity firms or other corporate interests, right? So you aren’t subsidizing another kid- you are subsidizing a billionaire shareholder or hedge fund operator… Is that preferable?
Harvard is using Hollywood style accounting. From their statement, I’d bet they are taking total expenses and dividing them by the total number of undergrad students. They hire some ALL-Stars for big dollars who teach one class or build some big facility that is primarily used for grad research, which makes the cost of education per student balloon.
If you are a government contractor and do that for a “cost plus” contract, you go to jail.
Back to the original question. College Navigator shows what percentage of students receive financial aid by school on the Financial Aid tab. At some expensive private schools less than half of the students even bother to file the financial aid forms. That will give an approximate answer to 'how many are paying sticker price".
IMHO, The car dealer analogy is highly flawed as every customer does, in fact, pay a different price.
Also, isn’t the fact that private universities can charge individual consumers whatever they choose a nearly perfect execution of free-market capitalism?
When does the obligation to educated end? We educate our children. When they are 18 we considered them adults and they should work to support the next generation through k-12. When kids graduate from high school, they don’t want to take the classes we, society, wants them to take. They want to take music and theater and art, so should we, society, pay for that? Do we make the college student who receives a free education take 18 credits per semester, and make sure it includes some math and science, even though all the student wants is computer classes.
@twoinanddone Unfortunately, the world has changed now so that a high school degree is not really sufficient for a stable career. Your question about what they should study makes a lot of sense. Is it societies obligation to subsidize a student wanting to major in French Literature? I think it would be very hard to draw those lines and that students should be free to study what they wish. However, for this very reason, I don’t think college should be free. Student’s and their families need to have skin in the game so they will treat this opportunity seriously and not as a free four year vacation.
If a student wants to take a chance on art, music or literature, I have no problem with it as long as its an informed chance and they are willing to bet on themselves as well.
@jym626 Your points are well taken. I agree with you. There are many whose income fluctuates considerable esp. those who make large sums and receive bonuses. Variability is also a huge factor when you own a small business. Making a million in one year and losing several hundred thousand (on paper) as investments change and/or losing a large client. I don’t believe that many on this board have ever made those sums so much of their data is supposition only. Yes, there are some doctors and lawyers mainly whose salary fluctuates only modestly and yes there are regions of the country where these salaries are not the rarified incomes the rest of America dreams about. But they are a handful of towns in CT ( for Wall St) and CA ( for tech) and the like.
There are MANY people who fall into the over 630K category due to a change in business ownership (inheritance), sale of a small business or any number of other ways. Yes, they may hit that category again (or it might be a single lifetime event). So saying that someone who receives $750K for their small business which they may have owned for many years, should pay full freight is short sighted and doesn’t see the big picture.
Yes, there are many people who can pay 100K for college per kid without blinking an eye. Add in the fact that the kid has to meet certain criteria and the number drops like a stone. Middle class families who do the right thing and save for college since birth get totally burned. The family who saves whether they are poor or wealthy will not receive as much aid. IMO people should worry less about others paying their fair share and how many wealthy people there are in the US and more about the lack of spots relative to the population. That’s where the real problem lies, students want to go only to the best universities and there are too few spots. Hence, colleges can charge what they like.
I don’t think it has changed that much. In the 1950’s, if you wanted to be a doctor, nurse, lawyer, teacher you had to go to college. If you wanted to be a car mechanic or own a business, not necessary/ Same today. There was a thread started today about kids going directly from high school to trades and everyone who high fiving about it.
States can decide how much help they want to give their residents and how to do that, through community colleges, through low tuition, through scholarships to the best and brightest.
Someone is always going to think it is unfair, that he should have gotten a full scholarship or she should have been able to go to Harvard for free. The state has to make decisions based on their budgets.
However, there has been formal and informal credential creep, requiring job seekers to have more education than job seekers a generation or few ago. For example:
- It used to be that one could earn a law degree without earning a bachelor's degree in something else first.
- CPA licensing gradually moved to requiring *five* years of college course work including a bachelor's degree, starting int he 1980s.
- Nursing employment is increasingly favoring those with bachelor's degrees in nursing versus those with associates degrees in nursing.
- Occupational therapy recently changed from a bachelor's degree to a graduate degree.
- It is more common now for employers to prefer applicants with bachelor's degrees even when the job requires neither general thinking skills nor major-specific skills and knowledge that a bachelor's degree indicates.
- As the state of the art in various skilled trades and services increases, the educational requirements for those jobs increases.
In addition to needing more education, students (and parents) also find the needed education to be more expensive, while high school graduate jobs that they can take to work their way through college are less well paid relative to living costs and tuition/books costs than they were a generation or few ago.
and pharmacy is now a doctorate level thing (I don’t think it’s the 7 years for a STEM PhD, but still…)
Honestly I love how folks are quite willing to tell private enterprises (colleges) how they SHOULD run their admissions (no financial aid; same price for everyone). Would they feel the same if they were a parent of a first gen student, very accomplished, where the parents worked as a cleaning lady and a mason, to be told “just pay the (slightly lower) list price”?
Colleges are free to admit as they wish. End of story.
@donnaleighg The thing is, at some point there are too many “hooks” Not based on merit. As an Ivy league educated person who did come from a background like the one you mentioned ( very accomplished and parents were hard working) I thought scholarship money it was a gift. It was. No one else in my town ever went there. And I would doubt many do today. But I was willing to work three jobs during college to stay there. No many are today. At some point as the demographics of the nation changes, and college becomes more and more expensive you will have free for some and paid for the rich. The rest middle and upper middle will be pushed out. Different prices for different people never works over time. Why do you think it is fair for a middle class family kid to have 100K of debt at graduation and someone from a poor background to have zero? It isn’t. People are pushing back on the costs of education and the distortion not the colleges themselves. And if no one questions costs then it will continue to spiral up.
Reality is that it is far more likely for the “middle class” (as used on these forums) kid to find affordable college options than it is for those from poor families.
I might be mistaken this board for saying it here and here alone. But I have seen it on CC. If you were FA kid to a very selective college when you went to college, and your kid now is also qualify for FA at similar selective colleges. I consider your going to the very selective college not a defining moment to elevate you to another social economics level. I think we all need to give your kids some practical advices, instead of just “following your heart”. If we are spending the money to full pay, we’d better get some returns!!
In our case, both DH and D chose to turn down MIT for better financial options. D didn’t believe MIT education worth the extra $200k.
Here’s a study on income variability, indicating that less than half of top 1% earners (40-43%) are still in that group 10 years later https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/Documents/Report-Income-Mobility-2008.pdf
One might surmise that (as @Happytimes2001 notes) quite a few people get into that group through one off windfalls in a particular year (large stock option/business sale gains for example) and that others get into the lower end of that group for a few years at the peak of their careers.