<p>Princeton Review, for the third consecutive year (followed by Duke and Princeton).</p>
<p>I had seen the rankings in past years, and this year watched the video on Swarthmore’s website. Gotta say, makes me and my husband feel like suckers for paying full freight - for 2 kids no less. Oh well. Like they say: ‘You can’t take it with you!’</p>
<p>Meh. I don’t know how I feel about this.</p>
<p>Bah, hardly, at least from my now-soured point of view. In spite of my ED II acceptance, I’m no longer going to be able to attend, as in the eyes of the Financial Aid gurus at the school, they can only allot my family $10,000 of the $50-whatever thousand a year costs, in spite of my parent’s combined salaries only being in the neighborhood of $90,000 [a letter carrier and a service clerk]. We’ve called and tried to appeal, but the number won’t budge, and neither will my parents. It’s really sickening that they advertise the ‘average aid package’ as $37K when they don’t actually give half of the students on-campus any aid at all. The $37K figure is the average for those deemed ‘needy’. Absurd.</p>
<p>^I’m sorry that financial aid didn’t work out for your family, but the “average aid package” means nothing at any school. What matters is how they assess YOUR family’s need, which is never average.</p>
<p>Unshaken, That must be very discouraging to be priced out of your first choice college. Our family has a similar income as yours, and my son applied to several LACs. Like your family, our decision would be to look elsewhere if the FA was $10K at a $50K school. Taking out substantial debt to complete a BS is not wise, in our opinion. </p>
<p>Regarding the affordability of college, we seem to be in an unfortunate income level - not high enough to truly afford to pay the full or nearly full cost of LAC, but not low enough to qualify for substantial aid. All in all, I am not complaining because I feel very fortunate that we are financially secure and that counts for a lot.</p>
<p>Let’s just wait and see. I think it will all work out for the best.</p>
<p>“do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”</p>
<p>The whole notion of a $50,000+/year undergraduate education being a “good value” is ridiculous. There’s just no way the average student’s financial ROI is going to be higher going to Swarthmore and paying full price than going to the best public school in his or her home state. So, really, the media needs to quit trying to frame college in terms of value like this, because it’s misleading. It’s basically just a myth perpetuated by a biased media industry whose bread is buttered by higher education.</p>
<p>It is somewhat disheartening to see that Swarthmore’s financial aid policies are falling in line with the trend of squeezing out the middle class on all fronts in modern America, but it’s not really that surprising. And, it’s only going to get worse as income inequality continues to grow. Yet, I’m sure that in 10 years, when a Swarthmore education costs about $106,000/year, there will be someone in the media telling us it’s a good value.</p>
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<p>I’m with you about whatever crazy quaalude-inspired model that USN&WR adopted to define the concept of “value,” but you sort of stray from the ranch when you get into this wider attack on “a biased media industry” and touch on the idea that its “bread is buttered by higher education.” Huh? USN&WR has lots of questionable metrics so I’m not feeling this idea of extrapolating from this one particular absurd USN&WR metric (out of many) to its being the byproduct of an entire subservient industry suckling at the teat of higher education.</p>
<p>How many masters can one industry serve? I don’t know but for all the puppet masters I’ve heard about that supposedly control American media, this one is a new one. It’s as questionable an allegation as the one that has Swarthmore being some kind of “value” choice for an undergraduate education. But, if you’re right, maybe they can reduce tuition to “blue light special” prices if they take print and broadcast outlets off their payrolls.</p>
<p>In your opinion, is Swarthmore worth it?</p>
<p>If my family can afford it, or has saved up enough money for college with the idea that it’s a worthy investment and get me a good job, is full price for a top LIBERAL ARTS college worth it?</p>
<p>How else could one spend this money for self advancement? We have no knowledge of how to invest or how to start businesses…</p>
<p>i.e. is Liberal Arts Wisdom worth 50k a year?</p>
<p>Most top LACs (and Ivies) are around $50K, and Swarthmore has a very good academic reputation. As far as liberal arts goes, then, you’re probably getting a good deal for what you pay. Whether or not liberal arts is worth it to you is something for you to decide.</p>
<p>If you saved that money for the purpose of going to college, or your family could afford it, then I personally think Swarthmore would be a worthy investment.</p>
<p>Just a couple of data points to make this interesting discussion a little more “reality-based”.</p>
<p>The average student at Swarthmore in the 2009-2010 academic year paid **$32,403 **total (tution, fees, room, board), not $50,000.</p>
<p>The cost of providing the complete undergrad residential experience (i.e. Swarthmore’s “product”) to the average student was $78,743.</p>
<p>Now, we could certainly argue whether Swarthmore is spending it on the right stuff or whether they need to spend as much as they do, but strictly from a dollars and cents standpoint, paying $32k for a product that costs $79k to produce is a pretty good value. In fact, it’s the kind of value that would have customers lined up around the block to buy a car on sale at that price, which is exactly why Swarthmore and other top colleges have ridiculous numbers of applications.</p>
<p>This ‘value’ ranking will mean different things to everyone. For those families paying the ‘average’ student cost or less, it may be a good value; maybe not for those paying the full-price. I would encourage families making this very expensive decision to really think about what is most important to your student and family - and then arrive at your own set of rankings. Just because a school is ranked well by U.S. News or Princeton Review does not make it the best fit for every student and family.</p>
<p>We were full pay. It would have been about the same price for us at ivies, comparable universities, and other top LACs (and we had all those options at the time). We feel that spending that money on Swarthmore education was absolutely “worth it”.</p>
<p>We were also full pay. And based on our family’s definition of ‘value’, we do not think it was worth it. That’s why I’m encouraging prospective students and families to do the research based on their own sets of values.</p>
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<p>That’s interesting and all, but I’m quite certain the OP indicated The Princeton Review was behind the rankings being discussed ITT, so I don’t know why you’re talking about USN&WR. How many masters do you think The Princeton Review has? Do you think that The Princeton Review is an unbiased source for information about higher education, or do you think they might have an incentive to rank schools the way they do?</p>
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<p>As usual, you provide us misleading statistics. What was the median, not the average, for a student at Swarthmore? That’s far more relevant to someone from a family with an income around $90,000/year. Perhaps you could tell the people who have already spoken up ITT about getting insufficient financial aid that, the “reality” of it is that Swarthmore doesn’t cost as much as they think it does. Business Week cites $188,200 as the “cost to graduate” from Swarthmore (as of 2010), which comes to $47,050 per year. It gives Swarthmore a 30 year annualized net ROI of 10.8, but this obviously neglects any interest paid out for loans or refinancing that a family might take in order to make the payments. Top public schools have ROI figures of 13%+, and a Swarthmore-caliber student at one of those institutions would be a favorite to do even better. How on Earth Swarthmore is seen as such a great value is beyond me.</p>
<p>I stand by my sentiment that it is disingenuous, misleading, and outright dumb to characterize schools like Swarthmore as being a good value in a financial sense. Swarthmore is good and bad for many reasons, but if I were an investor and college students were a financial instrument, I wouldn’t invest in people about to matriculate at Swarthmore. I would invest my money elsewhere. Why would I take a 10.8% ROI instead of the 14.2% ROI I could get investing in a Georgia Tech student?</p>
<p>Okay, so I used USN&WR when I should have used Princeton Review. Your whole “bread is buttered” point is still absurd. How does the media industry depend on higher education to butter its bread? Even more ridiculous is the fact that the media, by unfairly engaging in boosterism for some institutions of higher education, is unfairly engaging in denigrating…yes, you guessed it…institutions of higher education. So much for that conspiracy.</p>
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<p>This goes beyond the scope of just comparing one college to the next on some contrived metric to whether higher education is a good investment in general. In general, it is not. In general, a person is better off, financially, going into a skilled trade right out of high school than going to college. There are, of course, exceptions. A degree in engineering or in some of the natural sciences ends up being worth it, and a better choice than going straight into something like plumbing or welding right out of high school, but most majors are a negative financial decision. </p>
<p>Simply put, it is a luxury to go to college and get a degree in sociology or English or probably 85%+ majors. The value in college does not come from a simple dollars in, dollars out analysis, much like the value of many luxury goods cannot be quantified so easily. How much are the status and smooth ride of a Lexus worth to its owner? Or the speed and acceleration of a Ferrari? It’s the same when it comes to being a psychology major, but also happening to understand the origin and rise of Carthage from its beginnings as a Phoenician colony to a rival of Rome about a millennium later. It’s a luxury not afforded to the vast majority of the world to be able to put mental energy into obtaining such non-pragmatic knowledge. But, to say it is wholly without value is probably wrong.</p>
<p>So, rankings such as the one cited by the OP are disingenuous on a number of levels. First, they perpetuate the myth that college is a financially sound decision for most people and, beyond that, they perpetuate the myth that an elite, expensive college is somehow worth more financially than a more reasonably priced place like a good public school in your home state.</p>
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<p>I’m going to give you one more chance to understand this. It’s quite simple. Princeton Review generates its revenue primarily from standardized test preparation. It is helpful to their bottom line if more people with midrange SATs try to elevate them to be competitive at schools like Swarthmore. You may think this is peanuts, but Princeton Review generates $145 million in revenue per year. Princeton Review is part of a larger industry that is ancillary to higher education. Other entities, such as this very website, or Kaplan, or Barron’s, or any number of college ranking and evaluation companies and services are in this cloud of entities orbiting the institutions of higher education, that combine to form a billion dollar multi-media industry. I don’t think anything you read from any source with financial revenue generated from the prestigious image of higher education can be seen as unbiased.</p>
<p>I hope that clears things up for you so that you’re not forced to call me “absurd” again. What’s absurd is thinking that paying $47,050 for a degree from Swarthmore makes good financial sense. It doesn’t.</p>
<p>^ It makes at least as much sense as expending that sum at any other elite private school. Where I would agree with you is that there are great values to be had at top state schools, and someone with the smarts/stats that are required to get into Swat (or Williams, Yale, Harvard, whatever) will likely be similarly well served if they attend their state school- it is more the particular talented person than where they obtain their B.A. that will determine future success. That said, “fit” is not totally without merit as an intellectually/socially happy student will be a productive student.</p>
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<p>Not really. Schools with more presitgious brand names produce a higher ROI than Swarthmore. MIT, Caltech, Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth… the usual suspects. In the case of schools like MIT and Caltech, the data is obviously skewed by the higher proportion of engineering and natural science majors, in addition to the superior brand name among the general public. In the case of the Harvards, Stanfords, and so on, you get the more extensive and better-placed alumni network in addition to the superior brand name.</p>
<p>So, to say it makes “at least as much sense” is not correct, in purely financial terms. The top private schools hover at around a 12.5% ROI, which is about 1.7% better than Swarthmore, but still shy of the best public schools.</p>