<p>Most of the things you list are available for use by all students. Maybe its different at huge schools but my son is an athlete in a Division 3 school (Case Western). The athletic facilities are for use by all students. There are times that the gym is being used by varsity teams but otherwise it is open for use by all students. The same goes for the weight room. They will be getting a new facility that is for use by varsity athletes only but it will not be built with University fund. A locally prominent family will be paying for the majority of the facility.</p>
<p>Most schools make music classes and practice rooms available to all students. I am sure there are some that do not, but it would be unusual.</p>
<p>I am not a huge fan of Universities having huge International Affairs offices. If foreigners want to attend school here they should figure out what they need to do.</p>
<p>If by local you mean upstate NY, I am not. I am, however, a NYC resident so unless you’re talking about a Cuomo that’s different from the one I’m thinking of…we both have the same governor. </p>
<p>IMO, such an SAT program should be targeted towards lower SES students which focuses the program on where it is most needed…and minimize/eliminate the possibility higher SES families would try to get on this program to avoid paying tutoring fees they can presumably afford. </p>
<p>I also mentioned the possible PR concerns because there’s been a long history of NYers…especially those from lower SES take umbrage at public programs perceived as being targeted towards those perceived as more privileged groups…whether they’re high academic achievers or SES groups.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>From what I’ve seen and heard, they have such offices because in the vast majority of cases, Internationals are full-pay which means more money to the colleges concerned.</p>
<p>We are south of the Mason Dixon line, cobrat. Now we dont have the same governor.
And trust me, most every school here can use all the help it can get to boost the pathetic SAT scores. This has nothing to do with NY.</p>
<p>Jym626 wrote: “And as for whoever didn’t get it (I forget and dont feel like looking upthread), the comment about living in a noisy place and trying to sudy being like a dorm was A JOKE. Lighten up!”</p>
<p>Now you are wordsmithing. It was humor. Or intended to be. If you didnt take it that way,sorry. Its how it was intended. I said I was being flippant. For a reason. Lighten up. Geez.</p>
<p>“This is college life, quantified.”
Don’t leave a trail of breadcrumbs.
I can’t believe how many do.</p>
<p>Sorry if this offends anyone, but the only way to get through these threads IS to lighten up- even with links and arguments and occasional mud-slinging, it’s a forum. Not a policy institute. [insert the smiley of your choice.]</p>
<p>In the spirit of the holiday season, here’s a solution to that problem as demonstrated by a HS classmate who had that very problem with a noisy next-door dormmate late at night. </p>
<p>Since such noisy folks tend to have classes in the late morning/afternoon, the following is very effective…though some may consider it a bit cruel. </p>
<p>Pop in a CD/digital album of “artists” like Vanilla Ice, NKOTB, Spice Girls, NSync, BeeGees, etc into a stereo. Turn up the volume to the max and set to loop endlessly. Orient speakers and have them touch the wall shared by noisy dormmate. Press play once you go off to breakfast before 10 am. :D</p>
<p>Incidentally, I provided the Vanilla Ice CD to that HS classmate. Hey, got to put a gag gift to good use. It is especially effective against cheesy hair metal fans. :)</p>
<p>Somewhere else I heard that people wondered if $10 million they saved were enough for retirement. I had no idea/statistics how much people save for their golden years.</p>
<p>I am shocked that some have so much while so many have so little. Yet people resent the poor get some assistance. They try to take away that little assistance to the poor while pocket millions $ in assistance in forms of mortgage interest tax benefit on their big houses and health benefit from their well-paid jobs. Somehow some become full-pay, $50-70K a year, while most can only save <$30K for retirement. Interesting thread indeed.</p>
<p>^BCE, your mom is great/admirable and good for you. But how many are like her to save so much with so little? Perhaps <.1%?</p>
<p>If one got paid $8 an hour, less or none if the minimum wage law were to go if some had their way, how much could she save for her kid’s college and for her own retirement?</p>
<p>Being poor pretty much determines you will not save “a lot.” How can anyone save when there is nothing left over, and there was never “a lot” to start with? And by the way, this is not just a problem among the very poor. Middle-class families are taking a hit too, and many are simply unable to set aside much if anything for their future because the cost of everything they need now has gone up while their incomes haven’t.</p>
<p>Actually the data back BCEagle up. The savings rate correlates very poorly with income. I would guess at a low enough level there really isn’t any money to save however we still have tons of immigrant success stories of families that come here with the clothes on their back and end up middle class owning their own pizza place or store. We also have tone so folks making $200k per year wondering how to pay for state schools.</p>
<p>The data for programs like 401ks is interesting but not too surprising. Participation rates go up as income goes up and the % saved also goes up as income goes up … however the rate of use at the low income end is far from zero and far from 100 percent at the high income end.</p>
<p>PS -
The same way almost all savers save … they save first and then live off the remainder. When my parents first married my Mom would cash my dad’s check and sneak out something like $5/week to save … on his own my Dad would have spent all the money. That discipline carried over to when they were actually making OK money.</p>
<p>Savings rates (savings as a percentage of income) are higher in countries such as China and India that are much poorer than the U.S., and savings rates in the U.S. declined from about 10% in the early 1970s to about zero in 2007 as per-capita real income grew (see [The</a> Decline in the U.S. Personal Saving Rate: Is It Real and Is It a Puzzle?](<a href=“http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/07/11/Guidolin.pdf]The”>http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/07/11/Guidolin.pdf)) . The savings rate has risen in this recession (see [Savings</a> Rates Rising Toward Mediocrity - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/savings-rates-rising-toward-mediocrity/]Savings”>Savings Rates Rising Toward Mediocrity - The New York Times)) as incomes have fallen. The savings rate is largely a matter of choice. Need-based financial aid acts as another tax on earning and savings and therefore reduces how much people earn and save. High college costs for full-pay students, partly caused by subsidies for low-income students, raise the cost of having children for affluent families and cause them to have fewer. This is a loss both for those families and for society in general, since the traits of intelligence and self-discipline that are correlated with income are partly inherited.</p>
<p>I am not saying that need-based financial aid should be eliminated, but the negative incentives it creates should be considered alongside the benefits of enabling more people to attend college.</p>
<p>The usual statistics on real estate is that 1/3rd rent, 1/3rd own their homes free and clear and 1/3rd have mortgages. So my guess is that the percentage with decent savings is a lot higher than 0.1%.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>I started to look into my wife’s financials after we got married and I was somewhat stunned to find that she had five times the amount that I did in savings even though I made five times as much as she did. She had something like $35K in savings making a little more than minimum wage. She has no more than a high-school education. But she has had some interesting jobs, one that afforded her extensive world travel.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>My wife grew up in a third-world country though it eventually became part of the first world. Her sister, also with no more than a high-school education is worth about $750K. She worked a government clerical job but made a lot of money in real estate, buying, renting out and selling. BTW, my sister-in-law doesn’t have a computer, car, cable tv or internet access. It’s a real pain in the neck getting in touch with her.</p>
<p>One of my tennis buddies, a millionaire, drove an old buick from the 1980s until a few years ago until I finally got him to get a newer car. Several years ago, he found that he had a gas tank leak. He fixed it with a welding torch. He’s also fixed exhaust pipe leaks with soup cans. He makes a professional salary - nothing fantastic but he works pretty hard on saving money. Edit: one other story: his washing machine tub sprung a leak a few years ago - it was something like 25 years old. He fixed it with his welding torch. I think that most of us would have just replaced the washing machine.</p>
<p>There are savers out there. Maybe savers don’t talk about it a lot and it certainly isn’t portrayed well in popular culture. But there are cultures of saving in the US and it may be a lot bigger than we think, given the media telling us that noone has any savings.</p>
<p>PS - If interested read the book “The Millionaire Next Door” … it is very interesting read and essentially outlines the behaviors of savers.</p>
<p>I was thinking about starting a thread on plans for paying for college and then punted the idea. For Mom3ToGo and I … with two solid professional jobs since college … this was not that hard to do since we paid ourselves first … maxed out 401k, 403b, and IRA contribution (after we were a couple … we both were making partial payments to these programs on our own before we were a couple) … monthly payments to 529 plans … invest incremental cash flow (bonus, stock options, gifts from parents) … invest at least 50% of raises.</p>
<p>Households earning under $13,000 per year spend about 9 percent of their income on lottery tickets, on average, according to a 2008 study from “The Journal of Risk and Uncertainty.”</p>