Of course there are choices. One of the choices is not to send kid to exorbitant price school.
But the point is salary is different for different area. For my neck of the wood, you are considered top 1% if your family is making nearly $500k, no wonder I don’t feel rich. For the SV area, top 1% is close to $600k per year. So when people come and complain about college cost, the cost of living needs to be taken into account. The government has COL adjustment for salary for a reason. Not everybody wants to live in the Midwest and not everybody wants to live in California either.
UC in-state tuition is much less than $35,000, which is the full cost of attendance estimate (including living expenses, books, and miscellaneous costs as well as tuition) at some campuses (there is some variation, including by on-campus versus off-campus housing).
UC frosh admission is roughly targeted at the top 12.5% of HS students (3.0 HS GPA is the baseline minimum, though not assurance of admission). CSU frosh admission is roughly targeted at the top 33.3% of HS students (think of 2.5 HS GPA / 900 SAT CR+M or 3.0 HS GPA with any test score as the baseline minimum which assures admission to non-impacted majors at non-impacted campuses).
There is, of course, the transfer path starting at the open admission community colleges. In California, these tend to have well developed transfer-prep offerings, so some students choose to attend them after high school for various reasons, including cost, wanting to try for a more selective UC or CSU than they can get admitted to as a frosh, or not even being eligible for UC or CSU out of high school (there are also many non-traditional students as well). For new high school graduates who are not ready to live somewhat on their own, the transfer path starting at a community college may also be of use. Probably about a third of UC and CSU graduates started at community colleges.
I looked up D1 and D2 tuition/r/b now compare to only up to 8 years ago- wow! doubled. our income has not moved at all in that time period. yikes.
There is an adjustment by state (probably based on state taxes).
Adjustment is not enough.
Post #82, our income actually decreased and tuition went up.
@ucbalumnus your post #71 doesn’t really bolster your argument. Many of those houses are in dicey areas with subpar schools. There is little likelihood that someone with a professional job, or someone making $150K+ would settle in those areas. You have pinpointed those very areas where those below the median reside. Some of them are downright dangerous. Very few intrepid souls of the ilk we are discussing would venture there just to be able to save for college. It’s just unrealistic.
Again, it comes down to choices of living here, but I believe this topic started regarding those who live in these areas already, not a comparable analysis how they could move to Iowa and live a wonderful life with a full 529.
That said, I do recognize that CC will always have those who don’t want to hear us 2-4%ers whine about how expensive it is in the places we chose to live, so I will stop now.
Yes, for just an IT job, you can find those in many places. But if you move up in a more specialized industry, you may find that it may not be worth your while to move. If say, there are 5 players in your industry, and because of culture/relationships/etc., you’d rather not jump to a competitor. And of course, there are folks who are tied to an area because of stuff like family (having to take care of an elder parent; having to run a family business, etc.).
I do know people in professional jobs making good pay living in all of those cities.
Also, it is not like most people earning $150,000+ moved into whatever houses they live in this year. Many of them have lived in their houses for several years, and hence bought them at lower prices, so their housing cost burdens are lower than those moving in today (which means that they should have more money available to save). How many families with high school seniors shopping for colleges just moved into their newly purchased houses?
What if you were born there? Or your entire family lives there?
I agree that a lot of families make choices that seem awfully extravagant (and frankly risky) given their income and future plans, but I find this type of comment kind of patronizing.
^Last paragraph factually correct, but my original statement was about the difficulty for those of us who choose to live in high-cost areas to maintain savings for college over time living in a high cost of living area. The people in your example faced the same issues a new grad faces now in terms of affordability 20 years ago - it was still more expensive to live here and they paid less for their house, but they were also making relatively less. Bay Area was still always more relatively expensive then most of the country, even before the tech boom, and it was not uncommon then or now for people to be committing 50% or more of their take home pay to housing. And real wages have far trailed the cost of housing for the past 20 years.
As for the city examples, yes, most of those cities have nice neighborhoods and not-so-nice neighborhoods, just like other large cities. My issue is that you chose housing stock in the not-so-nice neighborhoods to illustrate your point, where it is highly unlikely that the demographic of someone willing to save $100-250K for each kid’s college would ever settle - if someone is that committed to saving large amounts of money for college education, they would not want their children to attend the public schools in those areas, which are mostly low-SES areas with high schools that have poor records sending kids to 4-yr colleges.
I live in Downstate NY and have family living in Manhattan. The choices are not limited to either uber expensive areas or a ghetto.
When I first moved to this area there were a lot of 6-figure income families living very good lifestyles: new cars, huge houses, expensive trips, plans for elite schools. Then the economy took a dive and a certain large computer company decided that many, many people were expendable. People blew through college savings trying to stay afloat and some ended up losing their homes anyway because they could no longer afford the mortgages and not many people were in the market to buy them.
I was in college and worked at the computer company (as support staff thru a temp agency) so I heard these stories first hand. People make the mistake of living up to their income all the time. If their mindset is that the only choices are the extremes (high cost of living/little savings or the ghetto life) with no middle ground, then I can see how they wouldn’t have enough savings for expensive colleges. I just don’t believe that’s the colleges’ fault.
UCB, but your post didn’t include SS payment, state disability, and if this income comes from two incomes than you have to double social security, if this is self employed income then you have to pay 13% plus in SS tax. What about deduction for health insurance. There are too many scenarios you have not take I to account.
@austinmshauri, please name these places with low crime, good public schools, and cheap good housing that are within a short commute (30 minutes or less) of Manhattan.
I’m sure that more than a few people on this thread would be interested in hearing of these places.
OP here; discussion in this thread has been interesting to follow.
I think the common sentiment from all this is perhaps that much of life in the United States (if we are fortunate as regards mental and physical health well-being ) has to do with CHOICES: how/ where we chose to work & live, what kinds of activities do we chose to fill our days with, how do we choose to educate/support our children (public, private, home-school, state/private college, grad school, etc). And for many being asked to pony up full-pay COA, the price tag of elite privates like Amherst (ranging near to 280-300K for 4 years) is a CHOICE not willingly made.
Anecdotally, we know of a family who chose to live in our large midwest town, relocating a decade ago (with grandparents!) from SF/Bay area, both spouses leaving high-paying Tech jobs to take new jobs, moving into an incredibly beautiful home and sending their child to an outstanding private school. One of their primary motivations had to do with educational opportunities (as I recall, some sort of frustration over a lottery system for public elementary school placements in SF) that they were going to be able to afford by moving. Obviously, it worked for them (from an employment standpoint) to be able to even consider this significant choice/change in personal living. A decade later, they have not looked back. To each, their own.
We also stopped at two partly for financial reasons. I come from a large family with parents who worked hard, saved, and paid for what they did buy (except our home) with cash. My dad had a well paying job but lost it when he became disabled. By the time my college educated mother was able to find work to support us all they’d gone through their savings. It took years for them to financially recover.
When we had kids I wanted to stop at a number I thought we could support if something went wrong. My husband and I had good jobs and a nice income. We bought an inexpensive starter home, used cars, took inexpensive vacations, and made a habit of paying with cash. Our goal was to pay for our home in 15 years then bank my income for college. We’d only been married a decade or so when our youngest was diagnosed with dyslexia, dyscalculia, and dysgraphia, so we made the decision to homeschool. That meant giving up a second income. If I hadn’t given up my job and never got another raise we’d have earned an additional ~$600k, less taxes, which is a pretty nice chunk of change. It would have let us send both kiddos (full pay) to $50k/year schools.
That strategy worked for us. Living inexpensively has let us save enough for the kids to commute to our state schools. When our youngest finishes high school I’ll return to work and whatever I earn will be rolled over to pay for grad school. So they’ll have college educations but no debt. If we’d had a handful of kids, it would be much more challenging to accomplish that.
I didn’t say 30 minutes from Manhattan. Metro-North goes at least 2 hours out of NY and I know many people who use it to commute. It takes more time, but they made that choice because it allows them to have college funds.
I don’t live near my family, nor do I live in the area I grew up in. Just saying that you are making choices with financial consequences. And complaining about it when the consequences come home to roost is disingenuous. I would love to live in SF, great city and beautiful part of the country. I have the job skills to get a job there, too. But the finances, even with higher pay, don’t make sense.
On the other hand, if it is more expensive to live where the high schools have better records of sending kids to four year colleges, then people who live in those places on higher than median (for those areas) income should be able to save for the kids’ college like other people there can (otherwise, the kids would not be able to go because they cannot afford it). There are not many places where the median income is over $150,000, so one would expect that people making that level of income, even in expensive areas, can find the money to send their kids to four year college, based on your assumption that those expensive areas are where most high school graduates attend four year colleges.
@austinmshauri, obviously, there are drawbacks to a long commute as well.
So yes, some people evidently have to make sacrifices. The question, though, is why people have to sacrifice either their kids attending the best colleges or time with their family (taken away by a long commute) in this country. And not everyone lives in a state with top public colleges.
How many people would prefer a system like Germany’s, where higher taxes means a stronger retirement system, free healthcare for all, and unis the caliber of UMich/GTech/UIUC tuition-free?