If @ucbalumnus hypothetical family made $90,000 instead of $160,000, they would have the following tax bill and remainder:
$90,000.00 Gross Income
$16,969.20 Total Owed Tax
$73,030.80 After-Tax Income
So going from $90K to $160K in income nets about $43,415 from the $70,000 gross difference.
No individual example can prove anything (though it only takes on example to disprove an assertion), but let me give a present term example from my own experience. In my D’s friend group (all bright students), there is one friend who is from a low-income family. Her family is low income primarily because her mom works part time and stays home mostly with the 4 kids, and her dad has followed his creative abilities and does film/music/production work. Great guy, talented, and pays the bills, but there just isn’t a lot of income there. Because of her income, they get heavy financial assistance to send her & siblings to a top private school. In the friend group, she is the lowest performing student (GPA, ACT/SAT, leadership positions, etc.), though still a bright and a wonderful girl. Several of the girls got into ivies/top 10, but she is the ONLY one attending an Ivy. Why? Because her financial need makes it possible for her, whereas of the other girls, only one is going to a top 10 (non-ivy) school – the one who is an only child of a wealthy family. All of the girls who applied to top 10s/ivies got in, but the others are not attending purely for financial reasons. The costs for a full pay student are staggering.
They are taking opportunities where significant merit aid is offered. Everybody is happy for the lower income student who gets to go to the ivy for no cost. They are happy for the wealthier girl who gets to go to her top choice. And they are happy for themselves that they have earned their ways to other good schools where their parents can afford to send them thanks only to merit awards. This is real life in the here-and-now for tens of thousands of students. Why do so many people want to take away the ONE affordable opportunity these students have to go to great (but not top 10) schools? Nobody is trying to take it away from the students from low-income or high-income families – what are you trying to gain from advocating the exclusion of all of those in the middle?
Yeah… I totally reject the “If only we were poor, we’d get financial aid” schtick. The reality is, the vast majority of low income students don’t get substantially more aid, or enough aid to actually attend schools, because most schools don’t have wild amounts of aid to give out in the first place. So, no, sorry, life is not easy for low income kids – they still get shafted just about everywhere BUT at the top schools, which routinely reject highly qualified kids because there are simply no spots.
I don’t think people were necessarily saying oh if we were poor we’d get financial aid. I don’t lament not being poor enough for the kid to get needs based packages. I think the idea was more that those who pursue merit opportunities shouldn’t be made to feel badly either. There should be room for both.
Also, whoa, I am so used to the old profile picture that the blonde threw me for a loop. You look awesome- but very different!
I agree, @delilahxc. I don’t think anyone has stated that they wanted to be poor in order to receive more FA. I am glad that need based opportunities exist.
That said, I refuse to feel guilty that my kids have been awarded merit scholarships. They bring a lot to their collegiate communities. And, they have limited opportunities (commute, live at home). The idea that all middle class kids can afford any in-state public without merit aid is definitely NOT true for our family. (And we are not going on vacations, driving new cars, living in a McMansion.)
We have been blessed by great occupations, and very talented and well-educated children, and can afford any college full-pay for all of our kids. Yet, I am not convinced that an Ivy education (or any other ‘top 10’ school) is necessarily ‘worth it’ if paying the full cost. We have had kids go to an Ivy, and a couple go to large flagships. The education is very similar, and in some regards, better at the flagships. We have so far had 2 children, with excellent stats, get competitive merit awards, nearly full-rides, at flagship state schools, and choose to attend there over Ivy acceptances. They have done extremely well, and hopefully have enhanced the school communities they attend. The schools can bolster their stats through offering these merit awards, but I wonder how much this really helps them. I would think that merit aid is here to stay. Students and families can use this as another tool in their search for the perfect fit, and maybe save their college funds for grad school or other uses in the future.
College Scorecard has the avg cost of attendance, broken down by income category, for basically every college in the US. Anyone who’s ever spent any significant time searching it would see that very very few colleges offer a better deal to low income students.
@SuzyQ7 -
You are correct, but there are two advantages to using Harvards NPC as a proxy:
1 - It is simple. All they ask for income, assets and number of kids in college and it spits out a number. That makes it very easy to test different combinations of income and assets. It also makes it easy to calculate their aid formula. At Harvard, it only took a few minutes to figure out that they want about 5 percent of your assets and that their marginal tax, err tuition rate, started at $70,000 and was 100 percent at $170,000.
Other NPCs require registering, dividing up your assets into different types (liquid, home equity, business, etc.), dividing your income into different types. etc. The NPC at Harvard took 30 seconds for a result. At a school like Amherst, it took 30 minutes.
2 - Harvard, along with Princeton and Yale, provide the most need based aid. If a family does not qualify for need based aid at any of these three schools, they won’t qualify for any at schools like Chicago, Dartmouth, Amherst, etc… Knowing this will save time filling out endless time consuming NPC’s at different schools for high income families.
Yes, I do have a little hostility, and frankly, I am surprised more people aren’t angry. After all, we have a system whereby:
1 - The cost of attending has increased nearly four-fold in three generations.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_330.10.asp
2 - The percent of tenured faculty has decreased from nearly 80 percent to less than 35 percent. As the existing tenured staff retires, they are being replace by adjuncts.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/11/adjunct-faculty_n_4255139.html
3 - The replacement adjunct instructors are paid a pittance with little or no benefits.
4 - The number of administrators has outgrown the number of teaching faculty.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584.html
5 - While faculty pay and benefits stagnates and declines, the pay of the administrators rises faster than inflation.
6 - As a result of college administrators putting their interest ahead of teachers, students and parents, student loan debt has skyrocketed in the past 10 years.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SLOAS
Remember that a college education is fundamentally unchanged over the past 40 years. In fact, with technology, the cost of providing a college education should go down, not up. Instead, we have a greedy class of people who have co-opted not-for-profit colleges and universities for their own benefit.
If this happened at a charity, people would be in jail. At colleges in America, people just shrug their shoulders and take out more loans.
True, that is a major advantage of Harvard’s NPC over others where you have to click through numerous pages of questions instead of finding it all (including the answer) on one page.
A “claim to meet full need” school that is not Harvard-level in financial aid, but has a relatively easy to use NPC that you can use for comparison is University of Southern California: http://financialaid.usc.edu/undergraduates/prospective/net-price-calculator.html
I’m not hostile.
Much of the sharp rise in costs is due to the litigious society we live in. I had a two semester work-study job at my college back in the 1970’s and the entire administration fit into one Colonial era building. There was no such thing as “risk management” (now it’s an entire department- that’s how frequently colleges get sued. Kid gets drunk, falls off a balcony? college gets sued. Kid gets drunk- falls on a patch of ice- college gets sued.) There was one dietician who was responsible for the entire university- now it’s an entire staff- gluten free, various allergies, vegan, etc. There was a small staff at the health center who did triage- strep tests and the like. Now there’s a team of mental health professionals who do both routine counseling and crisis management, and a large student population which shows up already having been diagnosed with depression, eating disorders, drug addiction, etc.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing that students who could not go to college a generation ago (who sent a kid with a psychiatric disorder away from home? Nobody) now go to college. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that a kid with a severe peanut allergy can go away to school (I had cousins with severe food allergies- they lived at home and commuted, ate all their meals out of a tupperware container).
But don’t pretend that these changes happened mysteriously while the American populace wasn’t looking. Parents/kids/consumers have driven these changes, and the colleges have responded. And don’t pretend that these changes are free-- they cost money.
My college had two animal research centers back in the 1970’s- one in the psych department, and one affiliated with the med school. Each had an administrator. period full stop.
What college today can afford that when you’ve got PETA showing up, Eyewitness News, and every environmental activist on the planet scrutinizing your primate or rodent population? And a 200 page manual from the Federal government making sure you are in compliance with federal regulations regarding animal research?
No, you don’t hire tenured faculty to monitor your program. You hire the administrators and managers who have experience doing this- they don’t teach, they don’t supervise doctoral thesis- they make sure the university is in compliance to avoid fines or avoid being shut down.
That’s why I’m not hostile. You make your bed, you lie in it. You can’t stuff that genie back in the bottle.
I have friends who are irate when their kid shows up at the health center of their various colleges and get referred to a specialist in town (i.e. not a university employee, but a regular, practicing physician). I say, “do you really expect the college to employ a full time allergist, ENT, opthalmologist, pulmonologist, gastro?” and the answer is always “of course”. Who wants their kid at a college where the health center consists of two RN’s, a nurse practitioner, and a supervising medical director who works 8 hours a week? Nobody, that’s who. Everyone wants the full on clinical experience. And that costs lots of dough.