College tuition/fees instate- my mother, $54 (per semester?) late 1940’s, me $254 (there was a newspaper article then with comparisons) early 1970’s, son tenfold that in the 2000’s. All for Wisconsin flagship. Res Halls food service work $1.60 (1.65 after midnight in the snack bar) for me, I think minimum wage was $1.50 back then. I had penciled in the price of my 3 semesters’ use calculus book- $13. Son’s honors (theory based) one was copyrighted in the 1960’s (math does not change) and over $100.
No AP’s in my day. My mother was discouraged from taking STEM classes- dropped out, would have been a good engineer. In my day UW was a “shakedown cruise”, many started and fewer finished while today it is harder to get in and they expect students to finish. I would have gotten in, and had higher test scores.
When I went to high school decades ago, there was a small number of AP courses:
AP calculus BC (under 10% of the class was a grade ahead in math which led to this course in 12th grade; maybe one student every few years took it in 11th grade)
AP English literature was the honors 12th grade English course
level 4 of the foreign languages was designated as AP
a couple others
Enjoy when this discussion comes around on cc.
Am of the same era as wis 75. We did have APs, but IIRC I only took 2, and didnt really plan to take the AP exam (shocker when I found I had to- oops!) I applied to 3- Got into 2 -Vassar and Penn. WL at my safety (Union). I think I applied to a 4th but I can’t recall at the moment! What I do recall is sitting in a. foreign language class and the teacher asking everyone where they were going. We went around the room calling out where we were going: Was like a recitation of the USnews listing: Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, Tufts, Brown, Pembroke (that was the women’s college at Brown), Vassar, Haverford, Cal Tech, Columbia, Princeton. The one outlier was U Rochester. Times have changed.
Took SATs twice in 1983, superscore of 1430. Almost all As at a pretty dire HS (only figured that out in retrospect many years later). Graduated #4 out of 100. NMSF but no idea what that was so happy with that. The first I heard of AP classes was at frosh orientation in college.
Wanted only LACs and got the one I really desired so no complaints there. Accepted at Bates, Colby, Carleton. Rejected by Amherst. That was a lot of applications back in the day!
I agree that parental influence is a big factor. My parents were pretty disengaged in the process and were simply happy that I was going to a college I wanted to attend.
ETA: I turned out reasonably well (no jail time and employed for 30 years), which I keep reminding myself as D18 and D21 go through the process. Overall, they are much better prepared for the college experience than I was. Academically at worst the same and socially much better.
I guess I’m the outlier. My daughter has far better grades and scores that I did, and has elected to attend MY dream school from 1975. I loved my college experience at another school, but I will enjoy watching her go into a school that I suggested and she thinks is the absolute bomb!
Graduated HS in Southern California in the early 80s…3.8…1300 SAT (unprepared and had the flu…as noted by a really lousy verbal score). Friend’s mom said “you should to to Wharton”. Couldn’t find it in Barron’s. “No it’s at Penn.” Couldn’t find Wharton listed under Penn State in Barron’s. "Ugh…U Penn. Interview in admissions went like this: “Why I’ve never seen such a big spread between a verbal and a math score.” My heart sank. “Oh, you’re a Region 5!” Yup…I got in because I was geographically desirable. Oh…and my last year at Penn my COA was less than $15K or $35K in today’s dollars.
I graduated high school in 1980. I was valedictorian and NMSF, and a female who wanted to study engineering. So I knew I could get in just about anywhere, but applied only to UT-Austin. Tuition was $4 / credit hour - that’s not a typo! My entire bill was about $250/semester, including fees. My main costs were room and board. My parents paid to have me stay in a wonderful dorm, just off-campus, that had a swimming pool and sit-down meals with cute waiters. Gosh, was I spoiled. I had a boyfriend who went off to MIT - I was SHOCKED that the school cost more than $10,000 a year!
Yes, I had this conversation with my children several times. I graduated from HS in DC in 1982: honor student, several AP courses. I was accepted into the Univ. of MD, first generation, in-state, off-campus ( lived about 1/2 hour away on public transportation). Tuition/year = about $2K, covered by FA package (Pell Grant; no loans) and merit scholarship. Transferred to another college OOS and had to take out loans - $2500 total. A full time student and a part-time job at NIH, and was offered a permanent position upon graduation.
We found my mom’s tuition bill from a North Carolina university (fairly well known) from the 60’s. Think her total cost was $300 (including housing?). I need to ask her to dig that up again because it was astonishing to see.
I remember my parents complaining about the huge yearly jump in tuition when I was at Miami University in Ohio. I just Googled it, and in 1980 in-state tuition and fees for the year were $1,310, rising to $1,780 the next year. The 1980 figure would be just $3,915 in today’s dollars.
$3,400 tuition ($13,970 in 2018 dollars). $2,000 room/board ($8,218 in 2018 dollars). Average SAT 1063. Who knows what the admit rate was – probably 80%?
Parents would not let me apply – way too expensive. Which was true at the time.
Parents walking around at my college back in the day had shirts that said, “my kid and my $80,000 go to University X.” And that meant 80 grand (full pay) for the whole four years. Today, that university charges almost 80 grand for one year. One. I also remember that a whopping 9,000 kids applied during my year! Now it’s more like 30,000. No way I’d ever be accepted now!!
I went to a small rural high school in So. Calif. and graduated in '73. There were no AP classes- I don’t know if they were a thing then. I had a 4.0 and I know I did very well on the SAT’s, but did no prep of any kind and took it only once. I remember I overheard a friend talking about this college entrance test he was going to take and figured I had better take it too, but really didn’t know what it was for. I applied to only one college- Cal Poly SLO as a Social Science major. I got in and hated SS, so transferred to Engineering after one year- just filled out the paperwork and that was it. Just try getting into any Engineering Program at CP SLO these days. My tuition at one point during my time at school was $79/quarter.
Getting accepted was much easier, but the freshman class was told, “Look left, then, look right. Only 2 out of 3 students will be here in May.” The bell curve took care of failing out the bottom third.
College ranking methodology and drastic tuition increases definitely contributed to better high school preparation and high freshman retention rates.
I dropped out of beauty school to attend the University of Michigan in '77 for just one semester to help out my BF whose roommate left during first term freshman year. I stayed to graduate but only because I’d met my future husband. I paid for that first term from my earnings at a bookstore. I earned a full scholarship for the remaining years. Pretty sure it was easier back then.
81 grad, valedictorian of a pretty competitive HS in NY. Had no real idea what my GPA was. No AP exams (just took all the Regents exams I could). Good SAT, I took it once. Had an 800 on the Math subject exam. It was a big deal to have finished Cal 2 before college. MIT showed up at my house and I was totally NOT interested. Didn’t think a bit about status of colleges. Just thought where I could afford and what campus I liked and that it was far away from NY. I applied to 3 colleges that I remember, may have been more. Was accepted everywhere I applied. Wanted Vanderbilt but it didn’t give me enough money. Ended up at SMU on their three year degree plan with Merit scholarship and then full tuition scholarship my senior year. I had almost no ECs except mathletes and helping in an after school science program for the elementary school. Jobs were tutoring(a lot), and babysitting. Totally different now.
Went to Cal Poly Pomona in the early 80’s. An Unweighted 3.0 GPA or higher (no AP/Honors classes offered then so only College Prep and no extra weighting) did not require you submit an SAT score. ACT was unheard of at my school. $60/quarter tuition, $15/quarter parking pass and less than $100 dollars for books. Applied only to CSU Long Beach. Since I lived within a 50 mile radius of CSULB campus, no on-campus housing available so reapplied to CPP and commuted 15 minutes.
My husband attended CPP 4 years later with $600/quarter tuition.
I went to one of the top high schools in NYC (one of the test in schools) in the 90s. Nothing is all that different now in comparison. Well except most students didn’t really study for the PSAT or SAT. And most didn’t do many ECs. That’s more a result of being from the inner city. Top students still took lots of AP and honors courses (I took 8 AP courses, and that was on the low side for top students) and had high GPAs and SAT scores. The school didn’t rank or weight GPA. I personally got into every school I applied to including several top 10 LACs and won lots of merit scholarships. I ended up choosing a school that gave me excellent need based aid and allowed me to bring in my outside scholarships, which wiped out the student loans and left me with extra.
I was told in 1980 more than 2/3 of the incoming MIT freshman class had not taken any calculus in high school. I am hard pressed to think nowadays there will be more than 10 (or even 5)% of the MIT Class of 2022 that do not have some calculus in high school.
Currently, frosh applicants with a 3.0 HS GPA (CSU weighted with up to 8 semesters of +1 honors points) are CSU eligible with any SAT or ACT score, but that only assures admission to non-impacted majors at non-impacted campuses ( http://www.calstate.edu/sas/documents/ImpactedProgramsMatrix.pdf says that CSUDH is the only non-impacted CSU campus currently). In the recent past, it was stated that SAT or ACT was not required in this situation, but that does not seem to be the case any more (probably because more and more CSU campuses and majors have become impacted).
