<p>College is an investment. I don’t think NYU warrants significant debt, particularly as an undergraduate. </p>
<p>NYU’s lack of financial aid is not a choice. Their endowment is simply not large enough to support much aid per student. Their endowment is less than $60,000 per student, yielding no more than $3,000/year/student according to the normal 5% maximum rule. So effectively all they can do for financial aid is to use full pay tuition students to subsidize others.</p>
<p>It is a mixed bag of opinion as to whether it’s worse to be denied if not enough financial aid can be given to an applicant or to be accepted and insufficient aid given. From what I have seen, most people would prefer the acceptance letter. Some might be fishing for financial aid but have a grandmom or other resources that could be tapped if necessary and if parents/family think the school is worth using that money. This allows students to apply for aid with impunity and if they get the money, well and good, if not they can look for funds.</p>
<p>The downside is that some families do not practice prudence and may borrow or make other financial decisions that are financially very risky for them. </p>
<p>^^ Exactly.
A school can not offer what they do not have, least they go bankrupt and close down.
Most kids want to go to NYC so bad that they choose NYU as their means to get there, and when the award letter comes, they label it…“STINGY”.
Why are they not applying to other schools in NYC? There are more than 15 universities in the NYC area, but they all want to go to Columbia or NYU. Then compare the IVY award to NYU which is very unfair as the IVY’s have more money to draw from their endowment to meet student full need.
If you ask me, NYU is a scape goat here by default.
Can they do better, yes, but their hands are tight as well.
I usually advice other students who really want to be in NY city, to apply to other schools in the city. There are other good options beside NYU.</p>
<p>With the exception of Tisch and Stern, most NYers know that NYU’s strong rep is really in it’s grad programs (Law, Medicine, Dental, Stern, Steinhardt and Wagner) and don’t buy into the hype. I when I was in high school the only people who went to NYU were people with $$ who could not get into Hunter, Baruch, Queens and Brooklyn (which are still more selective than some of NYU’s undergrad programs).</p>
<p>NYU will meet full need for NYS students that are accepted through HEOP (but they will also max you out on loans to do so). If you live in NYC, it does not cover housing.</p>
<p>There are some families for whom the $25k scholarship is extremely generous and makes NYU affordable. There are also families for whom the 25k scholarship, still makes NYU unaffordable.</p>
<p>NYU is selling an experience - some people are naive enough to buy into that experience my taking out a mortgage on their future. </p>
<p>By the way, I’m asking this because Im a HS junior and I’d like to become a stock broker when I grow up… selling shares to others, managing their portfolios, etc.</p>
<p>And NYU is reputed to be almost the golden boy of undergrad business due to its location, alumni network, etc… but I’m not sure if the costs are worth the education.</p>
<p>@Jarjarbinks23 - No school is worth the rubbish financial aid peddled by NYU - if finance/Wall St is your goal (which, by the way, is a weird aspiration for a High School Junior - I question whether or not you truly like the stock market or if you simply like the lifestyle associated with it) then aim for UPenn Wharton; the aid would be much better. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Lies, you tell. And BTW, I can give you a discounted price on the Brooklyn Bridge if you are interested in buying it</p>
<p>@ccco2018
I just realized that NYU is a very large school. It would need an endowment the size of USC’s to fully meet its students’ needs.</p>
<p>If your goal is to be a stock broker, any school with a finance or personal finance major will work. Pick any school, be social, maybe join a fraternity. Getting hired will not be difficult, and success will be more driven by your personality and effort than your alma mater. Trust me, most successful stock brokers and financial advisors did not attend elite schools.</p>
<p>^^Exactly. I really research this school, and from my assessment, the school is trying.
So may applicants, and so little spot to fill. And 2/3rds are standby ready to pay the full COA. These are from kids all over the world. Quite a temptation if you ask me, but NYU is trying.
It just can’t do what Columbia is doing as far as financial aid is concern, so they do what they can, while taking what is offered in front of them - more full pay applicants…especially internationals.
It is unfortunate, but its location has offered NYU what other schools can only dream of and they are taking…“FULL ADVANTAGE” of the situation.</p>
<p>@Glambam
Wharton’s much better for undergraduate FA, but admissions are also extremely competitive (much more than NYU Stern’s). </p>
<p>@sybbie719
It’s strange to quote US News, but wouldn’t NYU, a school whose Finance and International Business programs are 2nd best in the nation, whose other business programs rank mostly within the top 10 in the nation, and whose business school is overall ranked 5th, be a business powerhouse?
Saying that NYU Stern is not a business powerhouse is like saying UIUC, UMich, Texas, and so on aren’t engineering powerhouses.</p>
<p>@Fredjan:</p>
<p>NYU’s endowment only trails USC’s by $1B or so. However, it has almost 3 times as many undergrads as USC (which meets full need).</p>
<p>NYU Stern certainty is a Wall Street target. However, all the Ivies (especially Wharton & Harvard), Stanford, MIT, UChicago, Northwestern, Duke, Georgetown, UMich, Indiana, & UVa also are. For West Coast banking/trading opportunities, Cal, USC & UCLA (along with Stanford) also get some love as well.</p>
<p>Alright, lets stop right there with that silliness about their endowment being low, therefore they have no choice to be downright predatory towards their students. I’m all for perspective, but anyone who takes an apologists line of thinking about NYU has literally no clue what their talking about.</p>
<p>And beyond even the predatory behavior, over the last decade NYU has made a huge amount of obviously terrible decisions that have compromised the longterm health of their institution, and saddled their students with unnecessary costs in the process.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Their endowment is so low comparatively because (as I mentioned earlier) over the past decade they’ve been engaged in hugely superfluous infrastructure investment in unnecessarily expensive neighborhoods that will gain them little to no comparative advantages. (You can’t waste your endowment on overpriced dorms, then complain you have too many students and too small and endowment…)</p></li>
<li><p>Whats also hurting their endowment is arguably very bad choices concerning their endowment investment portfolio, that have led to gains insufficient to support their massive spending. Many even went so far as to declare nepotism was what guided their investment firms choices.</p></li>
<li><p>In the name of ‘wage competitiveness,’ (but in reality, PR) NYU has fought to attract large names at the expense of their students. Heaping expensive and needless perks on big name faculty (loans for vacation homes pulled directly from the endowment???), while allowing too many of their courses to be taught by adjuncts (especially when compared with their direct competitors, Columbia and Fordham). This certainly helped their reputation in the short-run, but resulted in many surprisingly uncompetitive undergrad programs that are hurting them in the long run (when Pace University, up a few blocks, has a better Drama program than you–that places more actors on Broadway, and for half the cost–you’ve got serious problems). In essence, they’re investing heavily in the marketing of their product, while ignoring the competitiveness of their product’s price and quality. A recipe for long-term disaster.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Whoops. My #4 got cut off.</p>
<ol>
<li>Furthermore, NYU is unique in that they receive such a large percentage of their revenue from tuition (which is often only what lesser established schools fall to, with little options for investments etc.). That leads to NYU ranking highest in the nation for total student debt (and fascinatingly NYU is the only school on the list that can actually be called a “real” school), as their students are encouraged to borrow exorbitant amounts.</li>
</ol>
<p>@Sonybd, you nailed it. My son’s friend is in one of the “surprisingly uncompetitive undergrad programs” taught primarily by adjuncts. He is a smart kid who got shut out of his top choices and fell for the hype of NYU as a consolation prize. He has been VERY disappointed by the quality of education, and his parents cringe about the expense–they are full pay, but barely and not without a lot of personal sacrifice.</p>
<p>Kids who have starry eyes about NYU even in the face of facts really need to do their homework and know what they are getting into. Also, read up (not just on this site) about the Liberal Studies Program, which kids are often accepted into instead of the program they wanted. This is a big bait and switch. It functions essentially as a community college “feeder” and forces kids to re-apply as juniors to a program of choice.</p>
<p>I want to make it clear that I am no fan of NYU. However, it is a fine school with high marks in the 3 Rs of rating, recognition, reputation. I now many, many, many who have gone there, go there, want to go there, and feel it is worth every dime it costs. I won’t bash the school. It offers need blind admissions, makes no guarantees about meeting need and the costs are right there to peruse and study. i mean really, what do you expect from a private school in Manhattan? It’s not like Pace University, at $38K, Fordham at $45K, St John’s at $37K Sarah Lawrence at $48K, Columbia/Barnard at $48K are priced better. They just offer more in the way of merit money, which NYU does not have to do to get the students they want, for the most part, or in financial aid in the case of Columbia for their traditional ug college (general studies a whole other story). I’ve seen kids accepted at Barnard, SLU, Fordham with big awards, and they want NYU at full price over those schools. Their pricing is very much in line with the demand. </p>
<p>I’ve also seen kids, just a handful, but some, who got their best aid packages from NYU. Once upon a time, they were a PROFILE only school, and I knew some kids who really made out price wise as NCP info was not used. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. But, for some, NYU is a good deal. Also there are a lot of parents willing to cough up the money somehow for NYU and are grateful that they can apply for financial aid and see what they get without the student getting assessed on a need aware basis, and they can go to plan B, and yes, there are families with financial plans B, C, D, and the whole alphabet, depending on how much they want the school. </p>
<p>Sally305, my sons have all had friends in the same predicament as your son’s friend in that the family are paying full freight, and can/could barely afford it. But those kids all had other choices, many of which were close to the same price, and had they gotten into some of their top choices, say HPY, they would still be paying amount the same amount. Actually, as I may have written earlier, some of them have defrayed some of the costs by having the kids commute after freshman year, when it became clear what the impact of those costs were, an option they would not have had if they had gone to schools further away. Not that commuting from the suburbs is that cost/time efficient, but they want it badly enough. THe market is bearing the demand. </p>
<p>@cptofthehouse, I don’t think we’re necessarily disagreeing. I would just argue you fail to factor a few important caveats into your thinking. Caveats so important, I’d argue, as to declare support of NYU largely an issue of morality.</p>
<p>“Their pricing is very much in line with the demand.”</p>
<p>I think we both largely agree that, for now, thats true. However, where I think we differ is the context surrounding that demand. </p>
<p>I understand the NYU stereotype is an affluent out-of-stater (or international) who grew up watching Felicity or whatever, and is willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money so they can dye their hair blue and call themselves a New Yorker–and in a lot of ways that’s many shades of true for a huge portion of the NYU student body. BUT, growing up in the NY public school system, I would argue that NYU’s business model mostly isn’t dependent on the ‘rich people spending their money how they want’ model, it’s instead heavily dependent on low-to-upper middle class students with a superficial understanding of the college admissions process (especially those who are first generation, or have immigrant parents).</p>
<p>For instance:</p>
<p>"When students were accepted to NYU, the school would direct them to Citibank as its “preferred lender” for all private loans. In return, Citi would kick back a percentage of its loans to the school. NYU’s take amounted to $1.4 million over five years…</p>
<p>Lyndsey’s mother had never gone to college. Her father is English, and had no familiarity with the American university system.</p>
<p>‘We relied on the University to help explain it to us,’ Lyndsey says. ‘We didn’t take it lying down. We called financial aid to ask what was up. They told us that NYU has a fairly high dropout rate, so to protect themselves, they don’t offer a lot of financial aid the first semester, but we could expect the financial aid to increase in future semesters.’</p>
<p>With that reassurance, Lyndsey and her mother inked promissory notes to Citibank. But when the second semester started, Lyndsey’s financial aid didn’t change. The next year, tuition went up, and her aid actually went down."</p>
<p>There are literally thousands of NYU stories like this, most of them infinitely worse, especially when you move beyond upper-middle class students like “Lyndsey” and start looking at how aggressive they are towards impoverished students.</p>
<p>While we can debate responsibility all day, I see no difference between NYU’s predatory marketing strategy and that of many for-profit schools. How can we differentiate between one business that offers a dubiously marketed product for an exorbitant expense, and another that does the same thing? In fact, I’d go so far as to say its no accident that in story after story about NYU, debt-ridden students use the same language as fraud victims.</p>
<p>What makes this even worse is globally NYU has been infinitely more successful than any Phoenix University because of their bought legitimacy (Currently #1 ON THE PLANET in student debt). So yes, these 18 year olds should have been more careful and less trusting, but perpetrators of fraud don’t need EVERYONE (or even most people) to fall for their misdirection and outright falsehoods; they just need a small percentage. And at least if you spend all your money on snake-oil you can file for bankruptcy afterwords…</p>