I was like you. I lacked the knowledge when I first started looking. My D wanted to visit schools she had heard of—famous schools, the kind that many kids on CC aspire to. We wasted a lot of time, though we managed to have fun, so it was worth it.
I learned my lesson with my second kid. Visited only a few schools and he only applied to two reaches, six in total. He chose his safety, which I think I mentioned earlier. Having said that, while he is an excellent kid, he isn’t an “average excellent” kid, as per my own coinage, haha. He was never really in the running for 20 apps to top schools.
@cquin85 I agree that there are late bloomers whose fates aren’t set in high school. I think @eyemgh was generalizing about kids who are privileged to start with. Not kids like @mynameiswhatever ’s cleaning lady. (I’ll mention Scholar Match again. Hopefully we can get more kids like hers into college.)
Seems like a perception of elite-or-bust, but is the “bust” outcome of dentist, physician, or engineer really that bad? Perhaps not in an absolute sense, but it may be socially-unacceptable downward mobility for the scion of an international family with the wealth to full-pay their kid in a US university.
But then some of that is present in the US, though perhaps to a lesser extent. The upper edge of upper middle class parents may not like the idea of their kid having downward mobility in status or income, but there is little upward mobility space from the upper edge of upper middle class, so the chase for elite college, major, profession, and income level is often reality for such parents (and students who realize that non-elite college graduate jobs will not pay for the lifestyle they grew up with).
Yes, another industry plagued by asymmetry of information is healthcare in the US. Some people claim the answer is “more responsibility” by patients who should have “skin in the game” and “do their research” when it comes to prices. I think this is ludicrous. If I, as a doctor, can barely do this, how could anyone else? The end result in our country is healthcare 2x the cost of almost anywhere else with worse outcomes population-wise. I see our College system headed toward the level of severe dysfunction I already see in medicine. Our college system used to be the best, but I fear that is fading already.
Many of the students who are “rushing in droves” to attend certain institutions aren’t necessarily doing so because of rank or because they mistakenly think they need to attend a prestigious school to maximize monetary ROI (“future success.”) They may well value other aspects of the opportunity beyond maximizing monetary ROI.
I am still curious as to what you think Stanford and Harvard “should” cost?
If the price was determined on what the market would bear, wouldn’t the price be significantly higher than it is now?
If the price was determined by the schools’ costs of educating and caring for the students, wouldn’t the price be significantly higher than what most students pay?
I didn’t say anything about ROI. Be it ROI, knowledge for knowledge’s sake, or whatever a person seeks in the experience, ranking is a poor metric to look for any of those things. Yet, it’s the metric we have been conditioned to use.
As for price, I’ll stand on the shoulders of @fiftyfifty1 and say less than it does based on the outcomes we get. How much is McGill? Cambridge? Oxford? ETH Zurich? Why should our schools cost 300%+ more than they do?
You used the phrase a student’s success potential is baked in, which, I think, goes a little beyond the basic conclusion that Dale and Krueger proffered, though it’s been some time since I read the paper and don’t recall exactly how they got there. From what I remember, the point of what they had to say was, controlling for SAT score and HS GPA, which is key, the degree of selectivity or “eliteness” of a college had close to zero effect on lifetime earnings other than for an exception group.
That seems more narrow than “success potential is baked in,” which makes it seem as though you’re screwed if you’re not ready by the end of high school. But maybe that’s what they said. And of course that’s going to include a (presumably sizeable) cohort of people who never get straight because their problems (whatever they are) linger after HS.
When I say “late bloomer,” I mean people who grew up a little late and (1) either went to a school they could get into or attended CC and then transferred, and (2) worked hard when they got there and wound up in the same place as the kids who were ready right out of HS.
I’ve lost count of the number of kids, both during my time and that of my kids, who got cleared up after HS and went on to do well.
I certainly oversimplified the D/K findings. My point wasn’t that you are screwed if you aren’t/weren’t a high achiever in HS. There’s plenty of evidence to show that isn’t true. It was to say that the future success of high achievers in HS was their own and not attributable to the institution they chose.
Given your many posts about why students should and shouldn’t choose schools, it seems pretty clear that when you write of attaining “future success,” your focus isn’t on “knowledge for knowledge’s sake,” but maybe I’m mistaken. Were you referring to “knowledge for knowledge’s sake” when you wrote that “for almost everyone, FGLIs being the exception, a student’s success potential is baked in at the time they graduate from high school, regardless of where they go to college”?
Regardless, many students aren’t using rankings in the shallow manner you suggest. Rankings are often used as starting point for inquiry into fit, and into the strengths and weaknesses of certain schools. For example, a student/family who is interested in attending an ethnically diverse LAC might find the various rankings a good starting point to identify such schools . . .
Likewise, if a student is primarily concerned with maximizing monetary ROI, there are rankings for that too.
It sure sounds like you are (again) suggesting that the kids at Stanford and Harvard are not getting an adequate return on investment. But if not then please set straight . . . what do you mean when you suggest that Harvard and Stanford cost too much “based on the outcomes we get.” What are you referring to if not ROI? Knowledge for knowledge’s sake?
All of the international colleges you list are heavily subsidized by their respective governments. Should Harvard and Stanford be more heavily subsidized than they already are, so that even families who can can afford it don’t have to pay so much? Because kids who can’t afford it are not paying sticker price for these colleges. Not even close.
One conclusion I found interesting in that or another paper Krueger authored (with somebody) was the one involving a cohort they identified as having just applied to a top tier / hyper-selective school, but not attend. That group had, I think, higher earnings than those who didn’t apply. Krueger or somebody used the Penn / Penn State example. The kid who ultimately attended Penn State but applied to Penn did just as well as the Penn kid. At that point they are diving into psychology and other factors, but I thought it interesting nonetheless.
One thing in common between our too-expensive American healthcare and our too-expensive American higher education: both are products of a nation allergic to anything with a whiff of “socialism”, yet both are heavily subsidized by tax dollars nonetheless. In other developed countries, both universities and medical care are directly subsidized by government dollars - social programs available at less out-of-pocket cost to users, though many Americans feel those people are paying “too much in taxes”. Yet our tax dollars end up supporting colleges and hospitals indirectly, and I think that indirection (to make up a word) is way more expensive than straight-up government support. It’s leaky. Billions go to middlemen (health insurance companies), fraud, and the false veneer of capitalism (who really has a choice when it comes to health care?) It’s all paralleled in higher ed: the indirection of grant dollars supporting private colleges, the government-backed student loans (because the private colleges are so expensive), a whole industry built around college financial aid. Somehow, the idea of a “free market” has the government paying Medicare dollars to private businesses to buy health care at non-profit clinics, and has the government subsidizing colleges that have tax-free endowments big enough to cover free tuition for decades. Yet somehow it’s the “suckers” in Canada/Scandinavia/Japan who are getting their tax dollars “wasted” on social services. OK, rant over. I know this will get flagged.
Because many of the costs are the same? The land costs, the electricity, the food, the technology, the administrative staff costs the same at Harvard as at other Boston area colleges. Harvard may pay their top professors more, but are they paying their groundskeepers or cooks more? Do projectors cost more at Harvard than at UMass Boston?
Actually the funding in the UK is not much different to that for state universities in the US and the offerings for students (eg large lectures) at most UK universities are quite similar too. Oxbridge is better off but mostly because the colleges use their endowments to cover some of the extra costs of their facilities and teaching practices.
The vast majority of money comes from student fees, including those charged to overseas students. There has been a 78% decline in direct government funding over the last decade and students pay much the same as they do at most US state universities ($13K per year in fees and about the same again in living expenses), although structurally this cost is incurred through loans which are written off if you don’t earn enough to pay them back. See: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7973/
The real question is why US private colleges have no incentive to offer lower prices in exchange for a less luxurious experience. It’s been the obvious target for innovators in higher education (including for profit firms) but they’ve not had much success to date. A plausible answer is that market is already well enough served by state universities in most parts of the country.
To date price discrimination and the willingness of the wealthy to pay up has allowed private colleges to keep increasing list prices (though many public colleges have kept fees relatively static in recent years). Barring an economic collapse, that can likely continue for quite a while for the most prestigious colleges, but probably not for second and third tier colleges, especially if the public alternative doesn’t increase prices very much.
The elite schools are also cementing their advantages in other ways. They support efforts to discredit merit aid in favor of more need-based aid in order to reduce competition from slightly less prestigious schools “buying” top performing students to help raise their profile. And the decline in the birth rate is going to make life even more difficult for second tier schools.