@NPKR01, that’s your criteria? Price discrimination by income rather than other types of price discrimination? @DiotimaDM listed some examples. And I know of some doctors/health clinics that do the same.
In any case, as you see with post #39, some people think that is a good thing (and that merit scholarships are a bad thing).
I would also argue that student and senior discounts, ostensibly based on age, are actually using age as a proxy for income. That is, I suspect that the reason for the discount is the idea that many students, and many seniors, have less or limited income.
@garland well, that is your interpretation. It doesn’t mean that I think the poor have it easier. And maybe I should have clarified- not all private schools but selective ones that meet full need.
“At expensive, elite institutions whose financial aid is need-based, not merit based, “you basically don’t have the middle class anymore” said Elizabeth Armstrong, co-author of “Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. Three quarters of the students are in the top quartile of income, “And then there are poor students, and almost none in between.”
So, yeah, I think that’s a problem. It’s my opinion, just like you have your opinion.
And, by the way, there is no reason to be snarky (“I don’t think I’m the one who’s out of touch with reality”), is there?
@DiotimaDM, yep.
Actually, many of these price discrimination schemes are. Happy Hour specials bring in people during a slow part of the day when most people are working. For that matter, you’re more likely to clip coupons if saving a few dollars matters to you.
@DiotimaDM “It’s not unusual for legal services and mental health services to offer sliding scales based on income. There are also restaurants who offer meals on a pay-what-you-can basis. Certain Panera locations do this, and they’re not the only ones.”
I think you are confusing a changing sticker price for goods and services based on income and assets, which is what was being discussed, with legal aid and medicaid, which are government-subsidized services for the poor, something entirely different and unrelated.
Panera and other restaurants asking someone to pay what they can? What? That’s your counter? You are struggling. Could you provide a list of restaurants that allow you to “pay what you can” and also tell me how Panera and all these other many restaurants determine, on the spot at the time of the meal, what you can actually pay? I’m not sure if you are pulling my leg here.
@NPKR01, er, no, there are doctors and medical clinics who charge uninsured patients (who don’t qualify for Medicaid) differently depending on income.
Lemme go out on a limb and guess that you have never been working poor and uninsured.
@PurpleTitan “In any case, as you see with post #39, some people think that is a good thing (and that merit scholarships are a bad thing).”
Of course some people see it as a good thing. Many of us look at the world differently and that’s ok. Also, who doesn’t like a free lunch? If someone is getting FA of course they think FA is a good thing. It’s the other people not getting the free lunch who have to pay full price for the lunch, that aren’t going to like it very much. Why should they?
And I’m not against FA per se. But why shouldn’t a needy student be given loans rather than grants to finance their college tuition? Why does the middle class and UMC have to take out big loans that the students and their parents will have to struggle to pay back long after graduation from college? All while that other student that received grants to lower the price of their tuition walks away after graduation with little or no debt and little or no loans to pay off.
If I want a Mercedes and I can afford it with cash I buy it with cash. If you can not afford the Mercedes you either buy a cheaper car, of which there are many, or you buy the Mercedes and take out a loan. Only in the area of college financing is this concept not applied. Or maybe Panera Bread being the only other exception.
And people with less money always have state colleges to attend which have a much lower cost. If you can’t afford private college, go in-state. Private H.S. is expensive. Don’t want to pay for it? That’s fine, go to your public high school. It’s one of the reasons why tax payers across the country donate a large part of their paycheck each week- to make sure everyone gets an education.
I pointed out the disrespect and sarcasm that some posters direct towards those of us who are not happy that we have to pay full price while others get it for much less. I think it’s reasonable and understandable. I bet you would be upset if you went to a restaurant, ordered the same lunch as someone else, but were charged three times as much. Yup, I’m certain of it- you would be upset as would anyone. If things suddenly changed and those getting the free lunch were then charged full price while others were given a big discount on said lunch you can bet even the former “free-lunchers” would suddenly be against the free lunch concept.
@NPKR01:
“And people with less money always have state colleges to attend which have a much lower cost. If you can’t afford private college, go in-state.”
Shocking as it may seem to you, there are many families (the majority in the US, I daresay) for whom even an in-state public would cost too much without fin aid/merit scholarships.
“I bet you would be upset if you went to a restaurant, ordered the same lunch as someone else, but were charged three times as much. Yup, I’m certain of it- you would be upset as would anyone.”
You like to make assumptions, I see. In this case, you are wrong. I wouldn’t be upset. I may or may not choose to be a customer, but you’re being too presumptuous of my thinking.
The problem is that almost everyone thinks they are poor (or middle class or lower middle class) without any comprehension of what real poverty is. I really don’t have a problem with financial aid for kids who live with very little family financial strength. as it is a primary driver of breaking a poverty cycle. We do not have “cheap” public higher education in Michigan but we do have the CC to 4-year route that is doable if you come from a family that has a “spends what comes in” lifestyle that puts them in the middle class with no savings. And if a kid is so smart that he/she could get admitted directly to the flagships then that kid is smart enough to knock off a year or two at a CC. But as long as colleges give discounts to the middle class and even the upper class at some schools, people are going to want it because everyone loves a discount and grow to expect the discounts and college costs will continue to rise until it doesn’t work anymore.Top it off with the concept that some people don’t want others to think they can’t afford to send their kids away to college and kids who have come to think that going away to an expensive college private or some other state’s public uni is a validation of their “hard work” and you’ve got the perfect trifecta for what’s happening these days.
“Price discrimination” is a technical term. It means, roughly speaking, higher prices for people who are willing to pay a higher prices, and lower prices for people who are only willing to pay lower prices. So, for example, a company practices price discrimination by releasing a new technical product for $$$. The people who must have the new product pay the $$$, and nobody else buys the product. Then, later, the price is reduced, and more people buy the product.
Another example of price discrimination is airline tickets. Last-minute fares are jacked up, because the airlines know that there are some people who are willing to pay those high prices at the last minute. Most people aren’t willing, so they don’t buy tickets for a flight that leaves the next day, but the people who do want the last-minute tickets want them a lot and are willing to pay a lot to have them.
The more price discrimination there is, the better for the seller. Some buyers are better off under price discrimination, and many are worse off.
Student and senior discounts could be proxying both income and a greater tendency to use things like restaurants and mass transit at non-peak times.
Top quartile of household income in the US starts at around $100,000, which some here seem to describe as “lower middle class”, but which Armstrong presumably means is above her definition of “middle class”.
For a family of 3 in MA with 1 in college and income of $100,000 and no assets, Harvard’s NPC at https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculator suggests a net price of $9,600. So it is likely that Harvard would be affordable for those students from families with income between whatever “poor” is and $100,000, assuming no issues like uncooperative divorced parents and the like.
Note: in the above situation, the minimum net price is $4,600 at $65,000 income and below; list price with no financial aid of $69,600 starts at $255,000 income and up.
The community college route is all well and good IF you have an acceptable academically appropriate Community College to attend. The Community College my family is “zoned” to in Texas is god awful. It has an 18% graduation rate with a cost of attendance of $16,000. There is no way attending it would prepare any student to be successful at either of our State flagships or most of the directionals. So if I wanted to ensure my student’s success at a four year school they could transfer to In State, we would have been looking at an Out Of District/In State $16-18k tuition rate and if we are paying that amount, we may as well have sent my student to the directional for the incremental $3k! I will not deny that there are some excellent junior college/cc’s in Texas and but there are just as many bad. I think the choice of attending CC is dependant on many factors and if you are blessed to have a good choice, it makes sense, but not all are blessed with a good choice.
This is the Cost of Attendance for Blinn College (a feeder for TAMU, a "good"example)
In District Texas Resident $16,874
Out of District/ In State Texas Resident Price $18,242
This is the Cost of Attendance at Stephen F Austin (a State Directional)
In State Texas Resident $21,230
This is the Cost of Attendance at TAMU (a State Flagship)
In State Texas Resident $28,278
None of these have anything to do with colleges that discount tuition not based on financial need. Discounts happen all all the time in sales. And if attending a particular college has become bartering at the market then we’ll see how long it lasts before the seller colleges can’t sustain the discounting. Colleges and universities aren’t a service, they are a now a commodity and have been for around the last twenty years and they did it all by themselves with the total support of tuition paying parents.
There are really two issues here and they are not related.
The first is the very real middle-class doughnut hole, where families make too much for federal aid or useful help from “meets full need” schools that only award aid up to the EFC, but don’t make enough to be able to pay for the quality of education THEY BELIEVE THEIR CHILDREN DESERVE.
In almost every one of those cases, there is money for a four-year college. It’s just not a good enough college, in their view. And so they seek financial aid or merit money at the better schools.
(I count myself and my family in this group, so please don’t think I’m being derogatory.)
The second issue is truly poor students who are not NMF and getting straight As, in other words, the massive majority of the truly poor.
My family has done the Big Brothers Big Sisters program for 15 years. Our Little Brother graduated high school (which was an achievement that was by no means assured) and has not been able to afford ANY college. His mother works 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job. They have lived in the same house for 20 years. They are not freeloaders or scamming the system. But while he showed interest in higher education at graduation, there was no money for tuition at our CC (which is more than an hour away from us, here in a rural area, and costs $7k p/year).
After a while, there is simply no more energy, money or motivation to attend college. This is his reality. It is not an outlier; it is the norm. Those folks need more help than they’re getting.
@labegg those community college expenses have room/board factored in. If a kid lives at home and commutes to community college the tuition is much less expensive. The same thing applies to the “commuter” 4 year universities. Living at home, commuting to/from school every day and brown bagging it can keep the costs of college down.
In most cases, commuting from home is significantly less expensive than having the student live at the school. However, commuting from home is not $0 cost, since the student continues to consume food and utilities at home, and commuting has non-trivial costs if you live beyond walking (or maybe bicycling) distance to the school.
My HS son has been doing an hour long round trip commute to/from the community college this year. While his housing/food costs have not changed for us we do have to factor in commuting costs (car/gas/insurance). His tuition costs are covered because he is dual enrolled with classes at the CC and at the HS. He will be going to a 4 year university in the fall as a full time college student and his room/board will definitely be more expensive for us.
NJ state law requires that NJ public colleges accept CC credits. Rutgers Engineering program doesn’t accept the credits toward their major requirements…they only accept them as electives. This is obnoxious because it makes it much harder for people to shave off some cost to getting a valuable Rutgers Engineering degree.
I don’t think it is usually as straightforward as it appears i.e. I will spend two years at CC then two years at the four year university and graduate. Students have to research exactly how credits will transfer and find out what agreements are in place.
Another note…my D did a dual enrollment program and many private universities will not accept the CC credits if the CC credits were used toward fulfilling HS graduation requirements. This surprised us.
@flmom26 Yes, as you say, those figures do include housing. I was trying to keep the comparison “apples to apples”.
For my family, DD would not be attending our “assigned” CC, so we would need to incur housing expenses in our cost of attendance figure. (Not everyone lives within a commuting distance to a CC or 4 year institution.) Also consider it still costs to house & feed your student even if they live at home too.
@ucbalumnus you make a good point about the cost of commuting.
On average, we spend approximately $1000 per year on normal auto maintenance (oil changes, repairs, registration); gas at about $2.25 a gallon adds up fast (a tank a week on average for my HS senior DD just driving locally) another $100 per month I’d estimate; auto insurance for a teen is outrageous, put that at $1000 per year; add in the cost of a car loan or purchase (?). I estimate, conservatively, $3200 annually to commute (without the cost of the actual vehicle) = 1 semester room & board at TAMU in one of the older dorms with the minimum meal plan.
(DD could attend a somewhat local 4 year institution, however, the transportation time from home to the school would be approximately a 1 hour commute on a good traffic day).