Is $70,000 per year for an undergraduate degree worth it?

ROI is major specific so I don’t put much faith in it when its applied to a university as a whole. If you want ROI go into STEM or business, end of story.

@CU123, very true.

Actually, quantitative STEM or business/econ.

Which means that, when considering spending on college purely in ROI terms, going in to a lucrative major at a good/pretty good school at a discount (in-state or scholarship or fin aid) will generally give you the best returns.

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PurpleTitan – not sure what country club you belong to, but equating the look and feel of Wash U to a country club is a bit of a stretch. Notre Dame, Chicago, William and Mary, UVA, Washington and Lee, etc. all have similar looks. UCBalumnus – as a Wash U parent, I can guarantee you that my family is definitely not rich. And yes, we have loans. Are there less expensive schools? Sure. But it has worked out well for our student and family. Each situation is different and each has to make their own decisions accordingly.

@PurpleTitan I agree with that!

@1NJParent, I see.

Many people on CC seem to have the mistaken idea that the Ivies offer better fin aid than anyone (other than MIT/Stanford), though, so many CC posters were shocked on a thread when some kid got a better fin aid deal from Northwestern than Cornell when astute observers would expect that NU would be more generous (NU is richer, with a bigger endowment and endowment/student, than Cornell).

@Parche, I’ve been to both the WashU student union and U of C student union.

They are not comparable.

The Ivies are definitely not equal when it comes to FA, although Princeton generally seems to outperform all others.

Of course, the ultimate country college campus that we visited on all of our travels was Wake Forest.

FA generosity correlate very well with the size of school endowment per student. Colleges typically only spend the earnings on their endowment assets.

There are many kids in our town who will go to community college for two years and then to a major university for the last two - just to save money. Their kids get good jobs and do very well.

@glido yes. we all get that, just because you don’t go to a prestigious college doesn’t mean your going to spend the rest of your life in a double wide, however nor is Wall Street going to come knocking.

As I have said previously the wealthiest people I know personally (wealth north of $20M) NEVER went to college or if they did, only for a year. You’ll never get to that kind of wealth working for someone else.

“Presumably, the low cost universities in some other countries deliver education in an even more economy-class manner than US universities.”

Equivalent first year Oxbridge lectures are definitely delivered to the whole class (~300 or so math students), but students also get weekly supervisions/tutorials on a 1:2 basis for each lecture course. One difference may be the pay scales for academics but the major economy is more likely in support staffing and facilities (no 24 hour food courts or Olympic sized swimming pools there).

@Twoin18: Oxbridge is also almost the only UK unis left that are rich enough to give 2:1 tutorials, however, and many would be taught by grad students, which may shock the sensitivities of certain people on CC (being taught by grad students rather than professors? THE HORROR!)

A typical engineering professor might teach 1 undergrad class a semester. The rest of their time would be spent on research, consulting, mentoring grad students, teaching grad courses, and university service. If you just total up the faculty salaries and divide by the number of undergrads, you can get a very misleading number as to the cost of an undergrad education at a research university.

Yes but the cost of those tutorials is not extraordinarily high. When I was doing them 25 years ago as a grad student (fellows got the same money), pay was a bit under £10 per student per hour, now probably around $30. So 4 courses, 8 weeks x 2.5 terms pa (only half term in summer due to exams) = $2.4K total cost.

I should add that as undergrads we did get taught by a grad student who went on to win a Fields Medal, so not much horror on my part.

Even though few have such extreme examples, there are huge differences in what % of income families save at different income levels. For example, the paper at https://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014.pdf found the following average savings rate by wealth group: If you are living paycheck to paycheck with ~0 savings, college expenses may be especially troublesome, even if the expenses are a significantly lower percentage of total income than for those making $270k.

Bottom 90% – Averages 0% of income savings rate
Top 10% to top 1% – Averages 15% of income savings rate
Top 1% – Averages 40% of income savings rate

I personally know several dozen people who have 8 (and occasionally 9) digit net worth, and who were just employees in startup tech companies or financial companies. Yes, the real money they made was due to stock ownership in one form or another, but that just came along with being a talented employee, in the right field at the right time, not from being a founder of the business or even having to manage a major division. The founders of those successful businesses typically had an extra digit or two on their net worth relative to their employees.

And all of those employees I know did go to college, although not necessarily elite ones.

“Elite Ego Syndrome” is like a drug. JUST SAY NO! It’s just a bachelors. The career world makes no distinction between schools with their bachelors requirements. It’s about the grades and the major he chooses. Everything else is emotion.

I doubt that paying $70K per year for undergrad would ever be a proper financial decision. It is doubtful that that same person would make twice as much as he/she would if they attended a state flagship school for half the cost. They are definitely not going to make twice as much for entry level with no experience. After they begin to gain experience then salary is most dependent on effort and experience gained more than it is based on where your undergrad degree came from.

If you got the cash, then fine but for most of us $70K per year would be too costly to justify.