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<p>Do you have any sense about what the median income is in this country and how most people live?? They aren’t buying Omega watches like you and me, they aren’t vacationing except maybe a driving trip to see grandma, they have very specific budgets for things. Being able to afford college is a HUGE deal for most people.</p>
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<p>“The divorced parents with one parent refusing to pay” is not at all uncommon. I certainly wouldn’t call it an outlier.</p>
<p>Also, “parents not prioritizing college expenses high enough” may be true and thus it may be their own fault that they are worrying about how to pay for college, but it doesn’t mean their main concern isn’t how to pay for college.</p>
<p>Finally…there are plenty of great colleges that don’t meet full need.</p>
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<p>How can one possibly “prioritize college expenses high enough” when life happens–job loss, divorce, catastrophic (and uncovered) health issues–and when the college expenses are a constantly moving (and rising) target?</p>
<p>Dad II - as a physician in his own practice, my H employs a lot of people who have some skills, but not at his level. Phlebotomist, receptionists, office managers, things of that nature. These women are typically married to blue-collar guys – and I don’t mean “guy who owns his own plumbing company,” but a guy who unloads a truck someplace and wants to pick up extra jobs on the side for cash. </p>
<p>These are people for whom the kids needing braces or glasses is a HUGE deal, for whom a car accident means they may make structural repairs but forego the paint job, for whom a big splurge is when the office takes them out for a steak dinner. These are people for whom a traffic ticket of $100 means $100 less for food that month. They are decent, and hard-working - but they simply can’t think about college the way I can.</p>
<p>Do you think it’s a reasonable expectation that they should be able to accumulate the kind of cash that H and I – two professional-income couple – were able to? No way. Their kids go to community colleges, to job-training programs, maybe to a directional university if they can finagle a scholarship somehow. It is a BIG deal to them, and if they knew how much we paid to send our kids to elite schools, they’d fall over. Yes, IF their kids got into Harvard and Stanford, they’d be free or virtually free – but their kids, like 95% of most kids, aren’t even remotely at that academic level. </p>
<p>I think you need a real reality check as to how most people live. Lot more of them than there are of us.</p>
<p>Are we still talking about the handful selective colleges here? </p>
<p>PG, so we agree that “their kids” will not have to pay one single penny if they “get in” those selective colleges. In other words, they should really worry about “get in”, shouldn’t they. </p>
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<p>Are you saying kids from those famlies are not smart like those of yours? </p>
<p>BTW, I know for a fact that Stanford has students whose SAT is around 1700. </p>
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The selective colleges I am talking about will automatic take care of the situation of a job loss. We were told very clearly by the FA office, you call them right after you call your family after a job loss. They will re-calculate the aid and take care of the student right away. They even said - on the other side, you can wait until next cycle to let us know if you win a lottory, but call us right away if your financial situation is negatively impacted.</p>
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Sorry, divorce is a very rare thing in my community.</p>
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<p>That may be but it certainly isn’t rare in this country.</p>
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The article refers to the population of American families in general, not just the small subset of American families targeting the handful of colleges you reference. Further, the research specifically defines ‘selective colleges’ according to the Barron’s system in which the selective tier includes 468 institutions.</p>
<p>In other words, “we” have never been talking about your small handful of institutions. How is that relevant to this discussion?</p>
<p>DadII: I simply meant that not everyone who is admitted to a selective college has the means to go. If the student hails from a low-income household, these schools can be generous. </p>
<p>But as discussed innumerable times on CC, middle class families are often not given great packages and students opt not to attend because of finances.</p>
<p>A99^, please define “middle class”. As PG and I agreed on, a family making 60K a year will likely pay not even one penny to those selective college.</p>
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could happen either they are on the real high end of the so call middle class or the school is not selective enough.</p>
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<p>I still think the families should really focus on “get in”, i.e. work with their kids to get good grades etc.</p>
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<p>We never were. We were talking about college-bound students in general. </p>
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<p>But their kids aren’t viable CANDIDATES for highly selective colleges. So it really doesn’t matter if Harvard gives free tuition and a pony with a ribbon on its tail to everyone it admits. They aren’t Harvard (etc) material. Like the majority of people in this country.</p>
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<p>These particular families? Yes, I’m saying that. Their kids are generally average students. Even if the president of Harvard personally invited them – they aren’t interested. They view college as a means of getting job skills to get gainful steady employment, not as four years of the life-of-the-mind.<br>
The fact that Stanford has (a handful of) students whose SAT is 1700 is irrelevant, since said students have something else Stanford wants desperately – such as athletic talent, parental money, or demonstrated excellence in some other activity. </p>
<p>Why are you having a hard time wrapping your head around the fact that most college-bound students are, well, average and not elite-school material?</p>
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<p>But their kids aren’t elite school material and they never will be. It doesn’t matter how much you “work with” or force or threaten or entice them. They aren’t at that level. Just like H’s receptionist is never going to be as smart as H is. That doesn’t mean she’s not a worthwhile person or a person who does a good job and takes pride in it. But she’s not at that level intellectually, and neither are her kids. </p>
<p>These kids aren’t being “underplaced” by going to directional state u instead of Harvard. They are right in with their peers. Not everyone is equally talented academically. Harvard wouldn’t be Harvard if everyone was Harvard-level smart. </p>
<p>Finding their intellectual tribe / set of peers isn’t the challenge. They can find that a lot of places. It is paying for it all that is their big worry.</p>
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<p>Which is irrelevant if their kids – like most kids – AREN"T ELITE SCHOOL MATERIAL.</p>
<p>This is the problem, isn’t it? What is defined as middle class in the rural Oregon area where I currently live is low income where I was raised. And each university most likely uses their own income scales. </p>
<p>Here’s how I define a middle class American – family owns a home, owns two or more cars, one (or both) parent works a full-time job with medical benefits and a pension. Family has a modest to comfortable savings account and has means for children to participate in at least one extra curricular activity. Takes a vacation every year or so.</p>
<p>Clearly my definition includes blue collar workers, teachers, tech workers and everything in between. And it’s a moving target these days with the economy in the toilet, rising interest rates, unemployment and folks with huge and mounting medical bills. </p>
<p>YMMV</p>
<p>And have to agree with Pizzagirl. HYPS and their ilk are looking for what – the top 5% academically? Unless of course one is an athlete, actor, or child of a celebrity or billionaire.</p>
<p>i think folks are getting hung up over the word “selective.” Sure, you may not consider a school to be selective unless it turns away the vast majority of its applicants, but in this case the author is quite clear that he is contrasting “selective” with “open access.” In other words, these are “selective” schools in that they select their students - they actually turn some away. That’s a pretty low bar, so it is interesting that it still predicts a difference in graduation rate (I will not make the mistake of assuming causation, though I’m willing to believe that their may be some).</p>
<p>One commenter on the NYT site proposed that the factor driving this difference in graduation rate is that students who bother to apply to selective schools are more committed/engaged and that it is this factor, rather than the type of school, that is driving the difference in graduation rates. There may be some truth to this, but I think that there are other factors at work as well. </p>
<p>One I have not seen anyone mention is peer group. A selective school may not provide better professors/classes, but it does have, in most cases, a more competitive student body. Having worked extensively with students at both ends of the college bound spectrum, I have long speculated that one of the reasons that first generation students do better at more selective schools is that they are surrounded students who expect to graduate in four years. Were these same students to attend community college first, that sense of urgency communicated by their peers would be lost.</p>
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<p>More like the top 1%, but they’ll dip a little lower for certain kinds of “hooked” applicants.</p>
<p>Just to put a little perspective on some topics being batted around this thread:</p>
<p>At last count, there were 64 U.S. colleges and universities that promise to meet full need. Of those, 37 are small liberal arts colleges, typically enrolling between 300 and 600 freshmen apiece. Eight are Ivies, with a total freshman enrollment of about 14,000. Most of the rest are top-25-ish private research universities (Stanford, Chicago, Northwestern, WUSTL, Duke, Emory, Vanderbilt, Rice, MIT, Caltech, Notre Dame, Georgetown, Boston College, Tufts), enrolling another 20,000 or so freshmen. Only two are public flagships (UVA, UNC Chapel Hill), enrolling another 7,500 freshmen between them. One is the tiny Olin College of Engineering, with an entering class of 81 freshmen. Only 2 are not highly selective: Carroll University in Wisconsin, with an entering class of about 800, and Concordia College in Alabama which doesn’t provide entering class stats but has a total enrollment of 791, so you do the math. </p>
<p>Assuming the LACs enroll an average of 500 freshmen each (and that’s probably generous), you’ll have something in the vicinity of 60,000 freshmen who will enroll at colleges that meet full financial need, out of approximately 2.1 million students enrolling as first-time college freshmen annually. That means 97+% of first-time college freshmen will attend colleges that do NOT meet full financial need. And since upwards of 50% of the students at the most selective colleges (including those that meet full need) are full-pays, that means only 30,000 or so freshmen with financial need will end up enrolling at colleges that meet full need.</p>
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<p>I don’t think this is right. Read the study. The study combines Barron’s “very competitive,” “highly competitive,” and “most competitive” categories, for a total of 468 schools; these the study labels “selective.” It compares that group of schools to two categories which Barron’s labels “less competitive” (acceptance rates above 85%) and “noncompetitive” (essentially no admissions requirements, all comers welcome), and which the study combines into a category it calls “open enrollment” (even though the “less competitive” schools are technically not “open enrollment”).</p>
<p>The study mostly ignores the largest, middle group of schools in Barron’s classification, which Barron’s calls “competitive” (median SAT CR+M of 1000-1140 and/or median ACT of 21-23, admit rates generally 50+%).</p>
<p>So the comparison isn’t of schools with some admissions standards v. schools with none. Instead, it’s probably more fairly characterized as schools with higher-than-average to high admission standards (“selective”) v. schools with lower-than-average to no admission standards, omitting the largest group in the middle, schools with average admission standards.</p>
<p>The main premise of the artcle is 100 percent correct and something I also noticed but never posted here for fear that the response would be that I was trying to insult some schools.</p>
<p>But take a look at some of the large state universities. Their graduation rates are shockingly low … like fifty percent.</p>
<p>Why? I don’t know exactly. But I suspect that these schools (with 80, 90 percent admit rates) are letting in students that probably should have never attended college in the first place.</p>
<p>Problem is figuring out which 50% those are, as for each that flames out another finds they can do this and does well. The basic idea of publics-especially the larger ones in the midwest, west and south was to offer the opportunity to attend a major college to most residents and see what happens. Many used the famous “weedout” classes to do that in the first year. As demand outgrew the number of seats and schools could no longer grow (often in the 60s) some became very competitive and other state campuses–the “directionals”-absorbed the lower tier students.</p>
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<p>I think you’ll also find that many of these schools also give extremely poor financial aid. It’s hard to say how much of the low graduation rate is due to their admitting unqualified students, and how much is that many students just can’t afford to attend full-time and end up taking reduced course loads or semesters or years off to work. I suspect it’s a combination of both. But I think in general you’ll find that the stronger the financial aid, the higher the graduation rate. some state universities have graduation rates that rival the top private schools.</p>