May you, your children, and your children’s children, unto the thousandth generation, remain financially blessed so that you never experience the gaps that still exist.
God speed and good night.
Just for the record, Harvard’s endowment stood at $35.884 billion as of June 30,2014, the latest date for which endowment figures are available through NACUBO. That rounds to $36 billion.
http://www.nacubo.org/Documents/EndowmentFiles/2014_Endowment_Market_Values_Revised2.27.15.pdf
“OK, $32 billion, $36 billion, whatever. What’s $4 billion between friends?” you might say.
Well, as the late Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-IL) used to say, “A billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon it starts to add up to real money.”
as taxpayers we are subsidizing the richest schools the most:
http://nexusresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Rich_Schools_Poor_Students.pdf
@GMTplus7 wrote: If the school meets full need, then it meets full need. Period.
As you’ve been on these boards for quite a few posts I’m sure you know that schools meet full need based on their determination of the need. Enough low income students have posted about not being able to afford some schools which “meet full need” to make this known here at least. And it’s not just the low income but the middle income students who don’t receive enough aid to make the school affordable. It’s also true that the need may be “met” with unattainable loans beyond the Stafford loans.
Harvard and other elites are often the best choice for low income students who are able to get in. This is an extremely small percentage of all Pell Grant recipients. Fortunately current law permits Pell recipients to attend the school of their choosing. With the cost of some state’s public universities, low income students have huge gaps. Elites or other privates with generous aid/merit scholarships are their only viable option other than community college. If the student has gotten credit for AP and/or dual enrollment credits, CC may be a very temporary solution. The gap will become even greater when they then apply as a transfer student instead of as a freshman.
In 2014 there were 11654 Questbridge applicants. 4180 were finalists and eligible to apply through the match process or QB application during regular admissions to the 35? (now 36) partner colleges. Of those finalists 501 were offered admission during the match process and approximately 1500 were accepted during regular admissions. That’s about a 17% admissions rate for QB applicants. QB is great, but not the panacea some imagine.
At al2simon thanks for your posts. Yes how lucky those are who have no personal experience facing the financial obstacles of many.
I’ve been on cc a long time, and I’ve never seen such a post. But perhaps I’m looking in all the wrong places. 
On this we agree. So, wouldn’t it be better to take from the 1% to better support those at the state Unis and work to reduce that “gap”?
incidentally, unlike private colleges, most publics are extremeyl generous with AP/IB/DE credit. Such a student could save even more money by graduating in <4 years.
How do you know that many of us don’t speak from the “personal experience of facing financial obstacles”?
@bluebayou 's post:
Today at 1:23 pm edited 1:28PM
Enough low income students have posted about not being able to afford some schools which "meet full need" to make this known here at least.
I’ve been on cc a long time, and I’ve never seen such a post. But perhaps I’m looking in all the wrong places.
With the cost of some state's public universities, low income students have huge gaps.
On this we agree. So, wouldn’t it be better to take from the 1% to better support those at the state Unis?
If the student has gotten credit for AP and/or dual enrollment credits, CC may be a very temporary solution.
incidentally, unlike private colleges, most publics are extremeyl generous with AP/IB/DE credit. Such a student could save even more money by graduating in <4 years.
Post edited by bluebayou at 1:28PM
We all pick up on different things in our browsing of a message board. My interest in such would be more keen than yours. And your glasses tend to be more rose tinted than mine. 
Glad we agree on something. 
No. It would be better to offer support to both sets of students.
If a school is affordable for four years, the student saves nothing by rejecting that admission offer to try to graduate in three years from a school which will cost them more than they can possibly pay for the first year alone.
For a four year degree, I don’t think there are many colleges or universities that would not accept AP credit. Now, if you want to be an engineer and don’t have AP Chem/Phys/CalcABC then maybe it doesn’t save you a year, but then again graduating in 4 years as an engineer is a victory.
Also, graduating with a STEM degree in 3 years is only possible if you are really well prepared, pretty darn smart, and willing to work really hard. Likely the same for any degree, but I know what it takes to be an engineer.
You really have to separate the various groups and come up with a plan that provides them the education they want, are willing to work for, can afford, and need for their future. Pell Grant recipients at Harvard is a very small bunch indeed. I feel for anyone who truly cannot afford a state option, but I think to be fair, a CC->4 year option or commuting or lower tier university is certainly about 95% of what you truly need (not the party-on experience you want, but what you need to become a productive adult). I think we have to provide some remedial cheap education for those who decide late on an academic interest after being lazy in high school and especially for those whose HS was just no good. In college, even the lowest ranked CC in US, I think someone who seriously wants to move up to a BS or higher could do it, it could take 5 years or 10, it might involve work and study, but it is possible and you are at least away from those who aren’t interested at all.
There may be some states that do not provide properly for their students by providing a good multi-tier CC-4year-university system that can take them where they need and want to be. I think these schools probably are a better investment than a bunch of for-profit schools that are trying to make a lot of money from taxpayer subsidies, but this is likely also too broad a brush. There are roads to accreditation that can make any school a good education facility, or there are roads to quick wealth.
@al2simon I also really enjoyed reading your intelligent and thoughtful posts.
As for questbridge, I never heard of it before I came to cc, and in any case it serves a very small number of students as pointed out above.
I see kids posing that they can’t afford college with the financial aid package they were given all the time. Such posts are usually in the fa forum.
There are a very limited number of colleges that promise to match full need, many are in the Ivy League or similarly selective schools with large endowments. Very few public colleges meet OOS need, probably not all IS need.
And, many parents just won’t or can’t pay what the colleges calculate as EFCs. To be honest, very few families have 10s of thousands lying around, and even those that do, don’t always want to use it for their kid’s private college experience. These people will say they “can’t afford” schools, and well, that is true to a point.
The use of parent’s financial status to determine students EFC creates a lot of room for confusion, high debt, and disappointment (I got into CMU, Berkeley, etc and my parents won’t pay 60K a year to send me there).
The number of people with a spare quarter million sitting around is pretty limited out of Wall Street or family money. Many people with larger amounts of money are older and facing retirement without pensions but with 401ks that won’t last forever, etc, etc. Jobs for successful talented people in their 50s with college age students are not really guaranteed, so college tuition is emptying out retirement savings accounts with no clear ability to fill them back up.
Only having 2000 people getting accepted to Questbridge means it is really just a better way to funnel some top talent into top schools, at least there are some advisors, summer programs, etc to help insure these top kids do well in some really terrific schools. That program likely should be expanded beyond just top 40 schools, that have too many applicants anyway and a lot of disgruntled folks who don’t get in) and maybe on to flagship public Us and other fine schools.
States should make more public universities affordable. That ended in the Reagan years with the erosion of many federal student aid programs. I guess we all need to make sure our politicians make these programs available and provide good quality education to most at an affordable price (to students and to taxpayers).
Harvard is only “a hedge fund with an educational institution attached,” it is only fair that Harvard and its wealthy peers step up and pay back a part of what the nation’s taxpayers have granted them through tax exemptions. The nation’s need for adequately educated students cannot be met without significant additional financial support, and a fair source for that support is a reallocation to underfunded public institutions of a percentage of the tax-exempt subsidy that the nation’s taxpayers provide America’s wealthiest colleges and universities.
Huh? Why, from a public policy perspective, do we need to fund “wants”? Shouldn’t the public goal to be able to educate the maximum number of students in the most efficient manner?
Of course, but that is much different than saying many “low income” students post on cc that they cannot afford a meets-full-need college.
As Pickone pointed out, most cannot afford an OOS public, but that “most” includes the middle class, whereas we were discussing Pell Grant recipients, which are anything but middle class (however defined).
I did not dig into the details but I heard it was exactly because some pressure from the Congress that these top schools started to give the middle class (later even the upper middle class) some break in tuitions.
Our kid happened to be in the transition period of these colleges’ semi-voluntary “middle class initiative” so we paid full fare for his first half of college and paid a significantly reduced amount for the second half. Our annual household income back then was not much more (say, at most 5-10% more) than the average salary income for the new graduates with a CS major from a top college CMU now (of course, there has been inflation since then.)
I would say that, without some “pressure” from “outside”, those in power, either institutes or individuals, would have no motives of doing anything different in general (or at least it would take much longer before they would voluntarily do it.)
Is it true that the white females in this country could vote later than the black males could? (Is it because the black “fight” for their right with their blood and sweat?)
The issue is that to what degree this should be done. Moderation is the key.
Of course, there are always two or more groups of people who have a different and even opposite belief. Each is entitled to his/her own opinion. The “system” here is to sort out the differences democratically in politics.
I’d say what bothers me more is that major oil companies are continually showing record profits, yet they get government subsidies.
If things hit the fan, the college endowments will be a cushion to keep higher education alive in the US.
But those record profits are going towards investors, so if things hit the fan, the oil companies will just want MORE subsidies.
^ Call me shallow, but sometimes I think to have some elite colleges in US could help project the greatness or even the “bragging right” of our country. At least, it could help bring in tourists to their hosting cities. (But their students may feel they are like animals in a cage when they become exhibit objects. LOL.)
So I think we may need to give these college some pressure, but it has to be done not excessively.
@mcat2 - you mean this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/education/edlife/next-stop-harvardland.html?_r=0
ClarinetDad16, Yes.
The average starting salary for CS majors from CMU was posted by mathmom recently on another thread:
http://www.cmu.edu/career/salaries-and-destinations/2014-survey/scs.html
We need high quality universities to be a high technology, first world country. We may even need Harvard grads, as horrible as that is, to be some of the movers and shakers and entrepreneurs in this country (and no, not every entrepreneur comes out of Stanford or MIT).
I think “wants” are OK, since we also want people to be motivated to work hard and improve ourselves, and therefore improve our society, our technology, our ability to survive both man-made and natural calamities. In the right academic environment, a student should want to take advantage of their opportunities. I don’t think you can take high performers and give them a CC education and really get them to operate at their full capacity. You can get some that will shine and go to HBS, but you also get a lot of folks bored and disenchanted and dropping out. In a better academic environment, they may really shine. That is human nature.
We can’t just cater to low income Pell Grant recipients, or the middle class or the 1%-ers and my gosh, we want the best and brightest of them to become our future leaders and scientists and writers and film makers and artists and who knows what else. And, yes, entertainment is a real thing, it brings in a lot of dollars to the US from the entire world.
I don’t want to pay wildly high taxes anymore than anyone else, but I would like the US to stay at the forefront of technology and to have something to compete with on the global marketplace when my grandchildren start working. I don’t want to demolish our national universities on some quest to help some subset of people. Or because someone has a beef with any enterprise that is remotely successful and makes … .oh my … money.
I think all 50 states really do have adequate public universities. Maybe there should be federal pressure on the ones that do not serve their state residents well, we could argue that.
Also, how exactly can you punish Harvard for fund-raising successfully ? It’s a non-profit. Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong at one point had a huge pile of unspent cash too, should they have lost non-profit status ? How can we take away funds for competitive research grants or student-owned Pell Grants ? Isn’t a heavily subsidized Harvard education with a Pell Grant a better value than some U of Phoenix non-graduate to us taxpayers ?
If Harvard is just a hedge fund, then why do people around the world dream of sending their kids there? Must be a bit more there. How about Johns Hopkins or MIT ? Just greedy hedge funds ?
Is this the same mantra u like to parrot over & over?
Your 401k and mine must be in different investment universes, because oil prices have crashed and are at 40 bucks/barrel; oil companies have record earnings losses; and their stock prices are in the toilet.