<p>It might have already been mentioned, but I’m wondering about the non-profit (tax benefits) status of private schools such as NYU. How does it deliver on that social contract? (Just a tangent.) </p>
<p>Sally, I do feel sorry for your friends and their NYU issues. But, they seem not to have a very clear handle on life in the big city. 15k on lawyers after a party and 8K on a broker for a crummy apartment. That is nuts. Yikes.</p>
<p>@katliamom </p>
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<p>and, you probably worked very hard…yet there are some who think “working hard” means you should get what you want at any cost.</p>
<p>Thanks, Flossy. I feel the same way. But they are actually from the east coast and have lived in Boston, Philly, DC…so they really ought to know. My impression is that they have left a ton of decision-making to their kid, who is ill-equipped to make such high-stakes choices.</p>
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<p>It does make me wonder as one common theme I keep reading and hearing about related to tenant housing issues in NYC/Boston is how difficult it is for landlords to actually kick problematic tenants who know their rights/have a supporter who does out even when they do have bona-fide grounds to do so. </p>
<p>Also, one noise complaint wouldn’t remotely be sufficient justifiable grounds to bring eviction proceedings against a tenant unless there was some serious additional egregious violations such as criminal activity found by police. </p>
<p>And even then, the actual eviction process takes between several weeks/months and landlords must follow specified eviction procedures in the exact prescribed manner as one misstep which is called out by the tenant who knows his/her rights and upheld by the housing court means the landlord must start the whole process from scratch. </p>
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<p>I wonder how many parents shield their kids from any kind of money matters from birth to 12th grade, giving them everything that they want… until it is time to look for colleges (or worse, decide among several too-expensive choices in April). Having been told throughout life that “if you do well in high school, you can go to any college you want”, do such kids have difficulty facing the fact that cost constraints limit their choices, and their parents promised more than they can deliver?</p>
<p>It’s not just a parents. It’s guidance counselors who tell the kids they should apply everywhere and you never know what they will offer and blah-blah-blah. It’s a pretty routine speech at most college nights around here. Really. I don’t think parents are making promises and failing to deliver. I think everyone is pretty much clueless. Like Sally’s friend, sadly.</p>
<p>Or maybe parents and kids have bought into the line that you have to go to a “good” (i.e. well known, private, prestigious) school to succeed in life? Or maybe all of us are status mongers, preferring our kids go to fancy-pants schools with lots of rich kids rather than the state u with hoi-polloi like us? So much about college is aspirational. Still, there’s no excuse for OP’s mom not to have discussed the fiscal realities of her daughter’ choice… OTOH, maybe the mom DID discuss it and the girl went ahead anyway, hoping she’d come up with “something.” Both should have seen that they would eventually hit the fiscal brick wall since clearly the money just wasn’t there. </p>
<p>Lesson learned: If you want a degree from a college with a high net price, and have limited funds, spend the money on the last 2 years at the expensive college, and not the first 2 years. You may even get a more personalized education in the first two years at some cheaper colleges, with smaller classes. </p>
<p>(Of course, there are some prestigious colleges that accept few transfers, and there are some colleges that offer much less merit aid to transfers than new incoming freshman.)</p>
<p>Also, if a student is straining the family finances to make a high net price college possible, they should realize there is a much greater threat of something going wrong (such as a disability, business failure or layoff) than money suddenly falling from the sky in a future year.</p>
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<p>I see this on HGTV a whole lot, often with first time buyers. “We work really hard, so we DESERVE a house with all the bells and whistles. You say we can’t afford this house in our preferred neighborhood, but we’re really counting on you (the realtor) to make it happen.” Not much different from the attitude expressed in the letter to John Sexton.</p>
<p>Lucy has not given info such as what her family EFC is, and what her other choices in terms of financial aid from other schools were. Without that info, it’s not even apparent whether she would qualify for need based aid anywhere. I’m not sure why she depleted her college fund, knowing what she would need to get through all four years–did she think once that money was gone, the school would give her what she needed? </p>
<p>Good point, @Charliesch, though NYU takes a lot of transfers.</p>
<p>This girl obviously felt entitled to attend NYU, but I’m not clear why. The dad died and money was collected for her, so maybe she thought the public and/or NYU would cover what she couldn’t. She had a college fund, but didn’t spend it wisely. A fund of $60k would go a long way to financing a SUNY school; that, plus the $5500 loan and maybe a part-time job would have left her with debt comparable to what she now carries, but at least she’d have a degree.</p>
<p>Just read some of the comments, and wow, she’s getting a lot of sympathy. Completely opposite of the tone here.</p>
<p>The financial illiteracy of both our youth and parents is astounding. I know of several people who have gone down the NYU rabbit hole.</p>
<p>My daughter has not “discovered” NYU, but she has fallen for Boston University, and while I could foot the bill I seriously doubt it is worth the premium attending school in Boston at full cost.</p>
<p>I went to NYU in the early 80’s and as others have pointed out, it was a different school,. NYU’s mission back then was very different,it traditionally had been a place where often kids were the first kids in the family going to college, they offered night programs and such and even when I was there, that very much described a lot of the school. Its graduate programs in medicine and dentistry and law were first rate (still are), but the UG was very different.Though the school was not financially in the greatest shape (NYU nearly went under in the 1970’s, when they sold off their uptown campus, dropped their engineering school, and consolidated in the village). It had a large population (it was the largest private university in the world), but they also tended to be pretty good with financial aid. The school had relatively little property, Columbia dwarfed it.</p>
<p>That changed, NYU went on a massive fundraising effort starting in the late 80’s, and they raised a lot of money, and in the intervening 25 years they have transformed the school, they went on a buy and build campaign and much of the Central village is NYU facilities, and they still have a huge endowment.</p>
<p>They also made a conscious effort to go upscale, their tuition and costs skyrocketed to where it is in many cases more than the Ivy league, and they also stiffened their entrance requirements to near Ivy levels and managed to create a cachet around it of having that kind of impact (I agree with another poster, it is spotty, their business school is one of the top ones, though I question whether the UG programs have quite that level, Courant Institute is a very highly regarded math/comp science, and TSOA (Tisch School of the Arts), especially the film school, have very high reputations. Basically, they sought out to be an elite school, however you want to define it. They dropped their night programs in the main university, they do offer a program where you can get a degree at night, but it is a different program and the degree is differentiated from the main school), and all in all, they went after people with the money (or willing to go into debt), to go there. I don’t have a problem with them being more selective, what I have a problem with is that they have pretty large endowments these days, but they seem to be using it on everything but financial aid, they spend it on spiffing up buildings, building new ones, buying new ones, opening a school in China, in Abu Dabi, and so forth. It is their right to do it, but it is also why I refuse to give them money, I do give money to the school I got my master’s from because they seem to have kept the idea that education shouldn’t just be for the elite, which is my choice. The irony is that many of the rich donors who gave so much money to NYU got to where they are because the school always marches to the beat of its own drum, when the Ivies, including Columbia, admitted only a small quota of Jewish students, NYU and its grad programs had large populations.Later on, NYU had a large Asian population before the Ivies started admitting them in any kind of numbers, and many of those people were less than prosperous, many were first generation and were able to go there because of good aid and relatively decent tuition and costs. </p>
<p>And yes, I think that the girl in the letter, while she has a right to protest or speak her mind, also was more than a bit naive. NYU routinely gets flagged on college ratings as not being a good value, and I have to agree with that. Basically, they are selling the hype that often drives the admission to Ivy league and similar schools, that going there has this mystique about it, that it will open the golden door, and quite frankly, it is just that, hype. NYU is a good school, they have some great programs, some decent ones, some okay, and they have tightened the competition to get in, but coming out I’ll tell you that NYU doesn’t hold that much of a mystique. Even coming out of Stern grad school, it doesn’t have the cachet that Wharton, U of Chicago , Harvard, etc have. The girl in question bought into that, then found that it wasn’t so golden when you look at the costs. I feel for her, dreams die hard, and when you think something is golden that turns out to have dry rot, it can hurt. </p>
<p>A friend of mine’s son goes to NYU, and they are paying full freight, his son had the kind of stats that he could have gotten into an IVY, if not HYP, Columbia or Penn, but he wanted to go to NYU Stern, and I talked to his son but he was adamant it was a better place. The irony is that the ivies as a whole are much better with aid, that even with relatively affluent family incomes according to the tables, they tend to give decent aid, and if someone is good enough to get into NYU they would be better trying to get into an Ivy. They might promote the idea of elitism and I have mixed feelings about those schools, but I think they do a much better job of trying to make sure kids with the ability to get in there can afford it, which I cannot say of NYU. As an alumnus I have told them what I think, that I think they are more caught up in the PR of being a ‘great school’, of their own self importance and image, of getting the ‘superstar teachers’ (often famous people who settle in at a school to write their memoir and/or enjoy the fruits of their fame, in my time McGeorge Bundy settled in there after leaving I believe the Ford Foundation), and so forth. </p>
<p>It is located in a wonderful area, though with as gentrified ie rich as the Village and even Chelsea have become, I can make a case they aren’t quite as gay friendly as they once were or even bohemian, it still is a great place to go to school, it was in my day location wise, and there are some strong programs there, but unless someone can truly afford to pay full freight, I don’t think it is worth the cost, I told my friend and his son that. I think the school could do a lot better effort at making the school affordable, rather then trying to recreate Harvard in the middle of NYC, but that is their right, but I think people also have to be smart and realize that NYU isn’t going to buy you that yellow brick road, and paying 280k to go there therefore doesn’t make sense IMO. </p>
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<p>According to listings at <a href=“http://www.collegedata.com”>http://www.collegedata.com</a> , Boston University has a higher average student loan debt level than New York University. However, New York University’s average student loan debt level may have been lowered by the acquisition of Polytechnic Institute, which used to give much better financial aid.</p>
<p>@Smokinact:</p>
<p>Indeed. I feel that schools like NYU/BU/NEU (outside of a few renown departments) aren’t really better than state schools. OK, certain state schools in the upper half of flagships, maybe, but still. NEU is comparable to UCincy, with both having a big co-op program and are located in a city. NYU is comparable to IU: both have b-schools that are Street targets and while NYU has Tisch, IU has a top-ranked ballet program. BU is like a UCLA, maybe, or UCSD. Well-respected and in a city, but no one will mistake it for an Ivy-equivalent. Maybe Pitt. The funny thing it, it seems that Pitt gets more respect in its home city than BU does in its home city.</p>
<p>FWIW my wife daughter and I visited Pitt and their engineering dept and came away quite impressed.</p>
<p>This is a very old and very common ethical dilemma for schools that have limited funds for financial aid: Do you admit students regardless of need, knowing full well that by accepting their aid package many of them may incur crippling, life-long debt, or do you switch to a need-aware system of admission? I think the first scenario really assumes a level of financial sophistication that isn’t uniformly present among different parents. I’m thinking particularly of first-gen families. The fact that it is advantageous for NYU to be grouped with other prestigious need-blind colleges makes this especially troublesome.</p>