This is fun. J-school grad here. I was set to go to Syracuse in 1989 for a whopping $15k/year and it was going to be very hard on my parents. I opted with my best instate option UF, also a great J-school, and went for the cost of room and board. Definitely the best decision. My D applied to Syracuse and our total cost before her merit would be over $70k. Unbelievable.
@itsgettingreal17 glad to read your post because I also don’t find things in the admissions game THAT different now. I went to a top midwestern private school where I was NMF, 3 sport all-state athlete. There was TONS of pressure on us all to got to TOP schools. I only applied to 6 (that is definitely a change because my kids applied to many more). Got into Yale, Brown, Williams, and two others that I never really considered. Denied by Harvard. Mulled over Yale vs Williams, and went to Yale for 15k tuition, room and board (ok THAT is different!)
HS in the Silicon Valley in 1984 - most of my classmates either went vocational or CC, a few went to San Jose State and I can only remember two who left the state for college. SJSU at the time was affordable enough to work and put onself thru school, my SIL is proof. Most kids lived at home, worked and went to school even if they went to the local Universities. Going away for some experience was not something I encountered until this past year with DD.
I don’t remember anything beyond the PSAT and we did not have AP - there were two levels of classes: College Prep and all others.
In 2008, my DS went to Nevada - between the state Millennium Scholarship $10K total, a local business scholarship $3k total and his federal loans, he got thru undergrad with minimal debt. I know his R&B was about 8K the first year in a dorm and then dropped to about $5k because that is what Mom/Dad were willing to pay towards housing his Sophomore-Senior year as we lived 8 miles from campus. His tuition/books/fee’s was right around $5K a year
My DD who is 10 years younger was the one that easily could have racked up a $150K education - we refused to let it happen but her friends are all piling up the debt or their parents are.
@Booajo – no, it was very different (and easier) back then. You probably couldn’t get into those schools today.
Check these out:
Penn 1970 – 70% admit rate
Yale 1980 – 26.4% admit rate
Chicago 1995 – 68% admit rate
1997
Yale 20%
Columbia 24%
Penn 33%
WashU 56%
USC 70%
Chicago 71%
A 1500 SAT would get you in EVERYWHERE. 1300-1400 SAT would get you for sure into everyplace except maybe HYP. And you’d have a shot at HYP.
not a parent but this is extremely interesting to read as a current senior/incoming college freshman who is going to struggle to pay for college. how things have changed!
Graduated from HS in 79. Worked my way through SEC flagship – COA was $2800 my soph year. Worked in the cafeteria and was an RA for two years, at a time when RAs had roommates and still had to pay for the room. Wound up with $7k in loans because I later transferred to another state school up north. Got into Duke, but the money was out of the question.
DH was at Penn (had gone to selective entry NYC HS), had a full tuition merit award, worked to pay everything else and had $7k in loans. He graduated in 3.5 years because he ran out of money. Penn was cheaper than Binghamton and Buffalo. We both put ourselves through UG, got married shortly thereafter, and I paid our living expenses when he went to law school five years later. Paid off the last of the loans in 1998.
My kids wouldn’t have been able to put themselves through our flagship ten years ago, much less now. Not possible while making at/near minimum wage. Both worked and took out Staffords for UG, but that wouldn’t have been nearly enough.
I have an undergraduate and law degrees from top 20 universities. . In today’s world I probably couldn’t have gotten into these or maybe any school. I could not make it past one semester of HS Algebra ( where I got a pity based C- ) due to a numbers based learning disability. My SAT 740 verbal. 490 math ( my Hs counselor apparently had some correspondence with SAT officials that this score was accurate). Not being able to have 3 or 4 years of math was no big deal back then and my terrible SAT Math score played no part in my life. I never thought about it other than “ math is nor for me” But for my friends son who has the same academic strengths and weaknesses, it’s had to be a huge part of his life. It’s limited his choices of colleges to only the bottom of the barrel. It makes me very sad.
I graduated from Northeastern University in 1990, I was an average high school student, mostly B’s. I owed 14k in loans when I graduated. Back then if you could spell your name on the application they would accept you. My daughter who is a dream high school student, top 3% of her class, 1500 on SAT’s, tons of EC’s, AP’s, GPA over 4, was offered some ridiculous “ContiNUe” program at Northeastern where you take your first year classes on line (for 35K) and can go to regular classes sophomore year. The acceptance letter said “to keep your family legacy going at Northeastern” lol totally ridiculous. I was so glad she is not going there. It isn’t that great of a school. She will be attending our states top ranked public university honors program with a wonderful scholarship that will keep her and us out of debt. Times have definitely changed at NU!!
Graduated HS 1987; I attended 3 schools in 4 years (big suburban HS for 9/10, English grammar school for girls for 11–took O levels, and a Dept of Defense boarding school for 12). My parents helped me a lot with organizing my applications as I was only home some weekends but I certainly remember handwriting all the essays! I took the SAT once and 2 or 3 subject tests—610 V, 690 M, the subject tests were in the 600s.
Applied to Yale (mostly because it was near family), Brown, Georgetown, Northwestern, Duke, and U Maryland (instate). Did alumni interviews for Brown and Georgetown; the only campus I had ever set foot on was Yale’s because my grandmother lived nearby and used to take us there for the tour. The rest of the schools I knew only from brochures. Denied Yale and Georgetown, waitlisted Duke, accepted Brown, Northwestern and UMD Honors College.
I don’t know if my results had to do with my unusual schooling experience, or living abroad…I had one AP in English Lit and my ECs were mostly Dance and Theater but nothing outstanding. Money was a factor in the decision but not the only one–my parents explained I would be debt free and they would even throw in a used car if I went to MD, and that I would need loans for the other 2 and should pick whichever one offered the better FA package. For me that was Brown so that’s where I went. I feel very fortunate and am very aware I could never be admitted under today’s standards!
I graduated from a very well regarded prep school in the early 1970s. I took four APs as a senior - English, Calc BC, Euro and Art. I was about an A- student in a school that did not rank, but I considered myself as part of the smart group. I think I had the 3rd highest SATs in the class at around 1450. That was good enough for commended, but not NMF in a special “boarding school” division of NM. We were all forced to take it twice, but we didn’t study at all. It was the first year that the PSAT and NMQT were combined. I remember thinking I might have done better if I’d gotten to practice on the PSAT like previous year. That said, our English classes did vocabulary stuff every week starting junior year - including analogy stuff like exercises. Remember those? Our high school made us take the SAT twice. I took the subject tests fall of senior year. I visited three schools - Harvard, Tufts and Barnard. I applied to three schools - Harvard, Brown and Penn. I only interviewed at Harvard. Got accepted everywhere with a merit award (do they still have them?) at Penn. I considered applying to Yale, but they had some nasty essay that would actually have required some creativity - it was something about money - maybe designing a new currency? Anyway I couldn’t recycle the essays I used for the other schools so out it went.
English teachers in public schools also caught on to this, issuing vocabulary words every week or two, presumably motivated by trying to increase their students’ PSAT/SAT scores.
English teachers in public schools also caught on to this, issuing vocabulary words every week or two, presumably motivated by trying to increase their students’ PSAT/SAT scores (since the PSAT/SAT verbal section was mostly a vocabulary test back then).
Mathmom, Penn’s Ben Franklin Scholar award came with full tuition when DH was there (79-83). That is no longer the case. He got it with a 90 average at a NYC specialized school, 4 APs, and 1500 SAT. Those were the days!
I graduated from high school in 1981. I was a decent student graduating in the top 25 of my class. I only applied to UfofH and attended without laying eyes on the school. Dad dropped me off on campus on his way to a fishing trip. Tuition was $4 a hour and room and board was $320 a month. I wanted an apartment my sophomore year and parents said you have $320 a month to work with.
I was the best student in my class (and a few classes on either side) at a well-regarded provincial private day school. Historically, that meant I could go to college wherever I wanted, and that’s the way it worked out for me. In 1974, I applied to two colleges, Harvard and Yale. Harvard was my safety. I wouldn’t be considered a legacy today, but I had 16 reasonably close relatives (including my grandmother) who had gone to college there, and both my parents had gone to Harvard Law School, and that seemed like a legacy then. Yale was where I wanted to go, and where I went.
The COA my freshman year was about $4,600, and I had a NMS of $1,000 that took a bite out of it. Including me, four kids in my high school class of 110 went to Yale, one of whom was my best friend. (Plus, there was also a former classmate who had been sent off to St. Paul’s for a few years.) Three others went to Harvard, one of whom was a legacy who hadn’t even ever been in the honors track. It didn’t feel super-competitive. Not everyone got in everywhere they wanted, but pretty much everyone got in someplace they could feel good about. At the time, though, there was no early admission to HYP, so I had to wait until April to hear for sure.
1974 me might have a chance of getting accepted at one of those colleges today, but I sure as heck would apply more broadly. I had 1560 SATs (one test, no prep other than taking the PSAT), including an 800 Verbal, which was very rare then. I had done a lot of challenging things in my curriculum (in 9th and 10th grades, all of my courses but two were 11th or 12th grade courses). Years later, the chair of the Languages Department at my school, a 50-something PhD who had taught the Spanish 4 class I took in 9th grade, showed me the recommendation he had written for me. It said that by the last trimester of his class I had assimilated everything he had to teach, and he was learning new things about the books in his syllabus from me. That’s the kind of recommendation that has an impact.
If you were to use a way-back machine, you might find that the cost of attendance at my small liberal arts college, including tuition, room, and board, was just under $2,000 per year. Translated into today’s dollars that would be $16,600. That could be manageable now. But in fact the college website now estimates that the cost of attendance – just for tuition, room, and board – for 2018-9 at $70,240.
This means that even after adjusting for general inflation, the cost of attendance for freshman year at my little LAC (Reed) would be 4.2 X what it was in my first year.
Of course a lot of things have changed in higher education in the America. Demand is up, both domestically and internationally. The demand is especially up at elite colleges, but also at state flagships.
My kids attended private colleges (UChicago and RISD), about 20 years ago. I estimated then that their attendance cost us about $125-130 thousand for each child. Again, however, the current cost of attendance is waaaay higher than can be accounted for by general inflation alone.
General inflation is an average. The costs of services like college and health care are obviously way up, but then there are things that have dropped in price over the last decade (data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics):
Clothing down 9%
Household fuel down 9%
Personal computers down 71%
TV sets down 90%
New cars down 9%
Gasoline down 21%
https://www.cbsnews.com/media/a-decade-of-changing-prices-for-11-basic-goods-and-services/
This is a college that you know well. When I attended college, no students had TV sets or personal computers or “printers”. Very few owned cars. I owned a brand new Smith Corona portable electric typewriter (cost $130) and a radio-alarm clock. Those were my electronics. Nowadays, everybody has a lot more electronics than they did even 10-20 years ago (even if prices or particular equipment may have dropped). I suspect they’re spending more on this now, including cellphones, tv’s, earbuds (or whatever).
It probably takes most college students less time now than it did in decades past to do their school work.
https://tuftsdaily.com/news/2010/11/08/kids-these-days-spend-less-time-studying-and-more-time-playing-study-shows/
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15954.pdf
The reasons are not necessarily bad ones, since technological improvements can be time savers. Previous generations in college doing research papers may have had to go to the library and dig around in the card catalogs, write down possible references, look for them in the stacks, look in each book to see if it had the desired information, and repeat if the first group of possible references did not yield the desired information. Of course, there was also sometimes having to wait for a checked out book to be returned, or a book moved via interlibrary loan. Today’s students doing research papers can find pointers to references on the web, check their availability in the library from their dorm room using the library’s web catalog, or even easily buy their own copy if not available in the library.
Computer science students decades ago had to go to the computer center to use an 80x24 character terminal to connect to a shared university computer to do their programming projects (earlier generations probably considered that a time-saving luxury compared to making punch cards). Today’s computer science students probably do their projects on their own inexpensive laptop or desktop computers in their dorm rooms that have orders of magnitude more computing power and storage than the shared university computers that their parents used.
Even the act of neatly writing up an assignment, report, or project without errors is much easier and quicker now with today’s word processing software compared to hand writing it or typing it on a typewriter. Anyone remember using Liquid Paper or similar products to correct errors in papers written in pen or typed on a typewriter?
However, PhD students doing original research may now have to learn more preparatory material and go deeper into the specialty area, since the frontiers of knowledge have been pushed further out by previous generations.
I got into Lehigh in 1990 and my highest math class in high school was Geometry!
I tell this to my seniors in Calc BC and it cracks them up.