@Jpgranier that was Suzy!
I find the statistics on New York University interesting. I thought the median income would be a lot higher than $149,300.
Forty years ago, I was a freshman at one of the CUNY schools listed as being best for upward mobility. I was raised in a housing project so I was definitely in the bottom 40% socioeconomically. Forty years later, according to a chart i found, I am in about the top 20% or so for my area, so my school worked. Too bad, I hated every second there.
@vineyardview: NYU is a big uni and some kids commute from home (tri-state metro is huge, after all).
NYU tuition of roughly $50K/year isnât cheap, but thatâs about the same as the NYS in-state COA at Cornellâs contract colleges.
Meanwhile, in-state tuition+room+board for Pitt Nursing or UIUC engineer/business is about the 30-35K range. Many UCâs and upperclassmen at Umich pay close to those rates as well.
@PurpleTitan thanks for the context. Being from the west coast, I am unfamiliar with NYU and the other unis you mentioned, with the exception of the UCâs.
This hasnât always been the case. For instance, from the early '70s till the late '90s, equating CUNY/CCNY with the exceptions of Sophie Davis, Brooklyn College, etc with excellent education or graduating with zero debt wasnât the case.
The effects of open admission and the effects of near-bankruptcy and heavy focus on remedial education even in the 4-year schools during that period meant even many CCNY/CUNY alums who were parents of classmates from elementary-HSâŠespecially my public magnet HS actively discouraged their kids to apply/attend CCNY/CUNY unless they had no other options for academic reasons.
And this was futher borne out by the experience of HS classmates I knew whose HS GPAs placed them at the very bottom of our graduating classes and as a consequence, CCNY/CUNY ended up being their only option at first.
All transferred out after a year or two to respectable/elite colleges like Reed, Columbia, Brown, CMU, etc because they were fed up with the experience of being able to pull A/A+ grades without having to open their textbooks while most CCNY/CUNY classmates were struggling to pass and being frustrated by a bureaucracy which wonât let them take more advanced courses despite amply proving their ability to tackle them. All those issues went away at the colleges where they graduated*.
Incidentally, some I have known who have graduated from CUNY within the last several years have student loan debt so the âgraduate with zero debtâ part is not always a given. This includes some who graduated within the last 5-8 years.
At one party held at one of their homes, the conversation turned to student debt and they asked everyone including yours truly the level of student debt incurred. It was a bit awkward to find I was the only person in that party who had no student debt whatsoeverâŠand most of the party attendees were CUNY alums(undergrad and/or grad).
- Those issues ended by the end of the '90s with CCNY/CUNY raising admission and academic standards across the board, incorporating the Macaulay Honors Program, etc.
However, Cornellâs contract colleges tend to be much more generous with need-based aid than NYU so that along with the greater cachet of Cornellâs name meant if a student had to choose between the two at my HS, unless he/she came from a higher-income family, Cornell would be the better choice from a financial and academic rep standpoint.
Incidentally, when I received my admission offer from NYU CAS which included a FA/scholarship package(miserly), I ran the numbers and found Iâd still need to come up with another $20+k/year in cash/loans to attend AS A COMMUTER in the mid-'90s.
Considering all that along with the fact I was accepted by an LAC which not only offered a near-full ride FA/scholarship package covering ~75% of tuition & expenses, but also was much stronger in my academic field of interest, it was a no-brainer to turn down NYUâs admission offer.
@OHMomof2, itâs similar to your kidâs school wherever I look: top 1% take about 20% of the seats and the next 9% take 30%. Itâs nice to be in the top 1% range, but we need strong K-12 public schools so to have enough poor kids competing for top seats.
I am confused by the graphic. NYU is given prominence as the first big spot and a big box, but is actually #101 on the list having just 11.4% students in the top 1% and and 24% students in the bottom 60%. The graph makes one think they would have the highest population of top 1%ers.
Same with Boston College (#32) and USC (#73) on the list - why are those schools front and center when they are actually deeper in the list? Popularity?
Am I missing something?
@scotlandcalling perhaps it has to do with the physical number of students in the top 1%. NYU is a pretty large sized school so is USC etc. The percentage may be smaller, but the actual number of students could be bigger.
@Jpgranier this is meant to make you think.
As you await your college decisions and ultimately decide where you go to college in the fall, what will be the difference in your college experience if you enroll at a school where the majority of the students are 1%ers versus a school with an economically diverse student body?
Side note: how was this data collected? Are âtax fillings and tuition recordsâ open for public use?
@ClarinetDad16 I always thought the nick name of SMU (Southern Millionaires University) was exaggerated, but after seeing 22.9% of families make >630k I think itâs well fitting.
Re: post # 23:
Current tuition + student activities fee for an in-state student at Cornellâs land-grant colleges is $34,209.
Adding housing, dining, books& supplies, health-related expenses and personal & misc. expenses puts the total estimated cost of attendance up to $50,869.
http://finaid.cornell.edu/cost-attend
tuition + registration & service fees at NYU are over $49,000 and total attendance costs are estimated at $77,409.
.http://www.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu/globalServices/documents/forms/students/estimatedExpense/Estimated%20Expenses_Undergraduate.pdf
My daughter transferred from school in NYC to Cornell. it was her experience that incidental living costs/ personal expenses living as a student at Cornell/Ithaca were very substantially lower than when she lived as a student in New York City.
Happy to see my school comes out comparatively well compared to its NESCAC peers.
Iâd sure like to know more about the data collection. We did not submit any financial aid documents. Unless we included parent social security numbers (I donât recall) how would they count income? Big Data?
@Mom22039 Iâm wondering the same thing. I suppose the could get info from you FAFSA or something, but high earners usually donât submit FAFSA or financial aid so Iâm unsure how they get this information
@Mom22039 â I was wondering the same thing. I definitely did not provide my SSN to my sonâs college. I thought I could get away w/o providing my sonâs SSN but he was summoned to the bursar a couple of months into his first semester, requesting proof of his SSN. The school issued a 1099, I assume for 529 purposes, but not even sure about that as it only reported tuition, leaving off room & board fees.
This article references " burst of economic research made possible by the availability of huge data sets and powerful computers."
Where does this optimistic conclusion come from? The most comprehensive study of college graduates yet conducted, based on millions of anonymous tax filings and financial-aid records. Published Wednesday, the study tracked students from nearly every college in the country (including those who failed to graduate), measuring their earnings years after they left campus. The paper is the latest in a burst of economic research made possible by the availability of huge data sets and powerful computers.
The Paper itself is available which answers some of the data questions. If you click the new study link in the Times article, it takes you to a page where you can access the paper and even the dats. Apparently colleges report tuition payment to the IRS. And tax data is somehow available to researchers?
@mom2and â Yes, am guessing that IRS data is available to researchers and then someone must match up the home address on the 1099 the university issues for tuition payment with the home address on the parentsâ tax filing.
Your friends graduating with debt is more of a function of them being full pay because their family income was more than 80k/year making them ineligible for TAP and Pell making them ful pay.
80k income (even in 1990 $) does not put them in the bottom 60% (as compared to living on public assistance in public housing).
Letâs call it what it is; your friends have loans from CUNY tbecause even though they were full pay and it cost ~3k to attend, their families could not/would not pay.
The top 1% income is $630K+, not $450K+ as CNN Money says and I believed. The IRS-based figure in this report must be more accurate. The top riches have other incomes.