<p>Interesting list of the 25 most expensive colleges...</p>
<p>College:</a> 25 Most Expensive Colleges For 2008-2009</p>
<p>Some (like Bennington) appear to be missing.</p>
<p>This can be misleading. Don't some of these colleges offer good merit aid?</p>
<p>This article separated college costs by the dollar; it would have been much more informative if it listed schools total costs in categories rounded to the nearest thousand dollars. For example, the 25th most expensive school is Bard for $48,438, while the 15th most expensive school Claremont McKenna College is listed at $48,755. There are many colleges & universities within a few hundred dollars of Bard. A better list might show all colleges & universities above a certain figure--such as $46,000--so consumers realize that these are not isolated cases of high cost for tuition, room & board.
Re: Post #3 above: USNews includes a table that factors in grant aid & the quality of school to determine the best academic bargains in the country. The best bargains-in order as ranked by USNews- tend to be the most highly selective schools with the largest endowments like:
Harvard, Princeton, Yale, CalTech, MIT, Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, UNC, Duke, Vanderbilt, Chicago, Rice, Penn, Brown, Virginia, Emory, WashUStL, Cornell, Notre Dame, Northwestern.</p>
<p>LACs are, in order:
Williams, Amherst, Wellesley, Pomona, Swarthmore, Grinnell, Smith, Carleton & Macalester, Wabash, Colgate, Bowdoin, Colorado College, Colby & Centre.</p>
<p>The average cost of attendance after receiving grants (not loans) based on need is discounted on average by as much as 66% at Harvard, Williams & Amherst for the 2006 to 2007 school year.</p>
<p>I know Colgate offers a heck of a lot in merit aid.
Rankings</a> for 100 Best Values in Public Colleges</p>
<p>USNEWS has lowest loan amounts that grads carry.</p>
<p>actually the advertised COA for NYU is nearly 52K and that is still too low since you can barely get R&B for the stated rate (my son's dorm - not the most expensive by far is $10600 and that excludes food). And books for 1 semester were over 500. and Personal expenses of 1K for 30 weeks in NYC means you don't do much outside of class. And transportation isn't included in that number NYU</a> Office of Financial Aid</p>
<p>I was talking with a GWU mom over the weekend (ranked second in this list). She mentioned that while GWU may be extremely expensive on the lists, they also hold tuition at your freshman year rate for all four years. With tuition rising 5% or so a year, if you look at total cost for four years, they aren't going to rank quite as high on the expensive list. I haven't checked out her numbers ... but you get the idea.</p>
<p>Yes, many schools are at the $50K price point -- University of Miami and Tulane give 2008-2009 COA as $50,200.</p>
<p>I'm not sure why they are not on the list, but I believe this figure includes books and some personal expense money; subtracting that out would bring the number down to $48K-ish.</p>
<p>I keep hearing about some UCs taking 5 years because students can't get the courses they need. Is this true at many publics and does it actually add 25% to the cost, or do students just take fewer credits and pay less? </p>
<p>Anyone heard of this problem at privates?</p>
<p>Not at my D's private school. Never a problem getting a needed class. But then many privates are residential colleges, so they need to get the old students out of the dorms in order to bring the new students in. It's to their advantage to keep tabs on student graduation requirements and not to have too much slippage. </p>
<p>Plus, most parents would NOT be happy to have to cough up an extra $25 or 50K. Hard enough to get through 4 years...there would be a rebellion if a substantial number of the graduating class had to stay over!</p>
<p>At my son's school, there is substantial competition to get into a year long screen writing class. Essays & writing samples required. As many talented rising sophomores were not granted a place in the class, the school created a separate quarter long Intro. to Screenwriting class, completion of which gives priority status for the year long, more advanced class. A healthy endowment enabled such a quick & positive reaction. (This is a private school = Northwestern University.)</p>
<p>I used to be a college advisor at a community college and I have advised students who were actually attending the university of washington- when the course they needed at the UW was full- but was available at the com college.
For instance organic chem is a pre-req for several programs- and even though the UW offered 25 sections, they fill up.
also since classes are scheduled practically all day and night- obstensibly to better meet students needs, there still are schedule conflicts with work or with other classes.</p>
<p>But... my impression many kids who take longer do so because they change majors- /take too many classes in the first place and don't do well/don't plan ahead- while you don't typically register for a major till junior year or so- if you are in the sciences, you need to know what your major is freshman year, because there are so many pre-reqs.</p>
<p>( my nephew at WSU for instance changed his major three times- but essentially back to what he started as, it took him at least another year- of course he was working two or three jobs in order to pay for school- but he had course credits also from high school, so I think it was a wash)</p>
<p>My daughter didn't have a problem registering for classes at her private school- but still she couldn't take everything she wanted because of conflicts.</p>
<p>Also while she did take a year off in order to retake a class elsewhere- this was because financial aid was only good for 4 years at the school. </p>
<p>If she had stayed at Reed, retaken only that course sequence and we had covered it out of pocket- that would have counted for a year of attendance and she wouldn't have been eligible for aid the next year.</p>
<p>The top of that list, SLC, offers no merit based FA.</p>
<p>I know she meant well, but I'm still upset with my son's teacher who is an SLC alum and who talks it up with her students complete with beautiful posters in her room. I finally wrote her an email asking her to please stop trying to sell my son on SLC because we do not happen to have 212K lying around. It is just obnoxious.</p>
<p>Since Bennington is so often featured on most expensive lists, I checked their web site and find they list their annual tuition, room and board and required fees at $48,950.</p>
<p>This should just about tie them with Colgate at #14.</p>
<p>I didn't realize SLC only had need based- that is a surprise, generally the most competitive schools only offer need- IMO because " getting in" is acknowledging merit.</p>
<p>Being on the west coast- I am only vaguely aware of SLC, although one of D's friends is a freshman & our behind neighbor is an alumna.</p>
<p>I will admit though that for students in families where their EFC is roughly the cost of instate tuition, a school that meets 100% of need- can be a good deal- even if merit awards are not offered.
But if your EFC is more than that- it may be hard to justify the extra cost & it is worth it to look for merit aid.</p>
<p>Something that GWU offers to its families is a 50% tuition reduction for siblings, even if the older sibling has already graduated. That offers a dramatic reduction in tuition for families with more than one kid in college. Too bad my daughter is the youngest!</p>
<p>That was an interesting list, although I wonder at its accuracy. I did notice that none of the Ivies were on there.</p>
<p>Someone mentioned the 5% increase every year. I know that Yale and Brown last year raised their COA by less than 5%. Brown's president suggested to parents last weekend that Brown is taking a close look at its increase for next year because of the economic situation. I'm wondering if schools with healthy endowments are going to be costing less because they can have slightly more modest cost increases.</p>
<p>Georgetown's #4, but my D was accepted there last spring - with a family income around $100,000, after aid she'd have had to pay between $12-13,000.</p>