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<p>katliamom: yeah I get that, and even covered that point in an additional post (since I had gone pas the edit time limit). If Maryland (or your state) charges xx times as much for a junior college education than does California, then its time for the Marylanders to lobby their state legislature. But the broader point is that Maryland has been charging 3x as much as Calif. for a long time; it ain’t new. The folks in Annapolis (state capital) choose to spend money elsewhere.</p>
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<p>That’s exactly the same way it is here in Illinois. No one blinks an eye at a valedictorian / top student going to UIUC. It’s considered a smart use of money. </p>
<p>The Northeast lags the rest of the country in this, due to historically weaker state schools.</p>
<p>Well, I don’t think that’s accidental. I think the privates in a state like NY must have some influence over the legislature. This is the only reason I could ever come up with to explain why the SUNY system has such unappealing architecture at most of its schools. It really is a shame.</p>
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<p>I would probably bet all of my net worth (may not be that much) that HYPS or any of top 20 could fill it’s class with all full pay students without bringing down its standard.</p>
<p>The idea that full pay students would some how be of lower quality than FA students is just laughable. Most full pay students would be able to participate in ECs that FA students wouldn’t be able to afford. Most full pay students would be able to pay for private tutoring for SAT/ACT. More often than not, those full pay students have parents with college or graduate school education, therefore probably have higher IQ. Many of those students probably also graduated from some best high schools around the country. </p>
<p>The reason top tier schools give FA to some students is not because those students are so much more qualified than some full pay students. They are doing it to give some students better opportunities and diversity to their school.</p>
<p>I was a FA student, without it I wouldn’t have been able to get a college degree. But my college could have easily replaced me with another full pay student who would have been just as qualified.</p>
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<p>ITA, oldfort. In fact, I believe the top 20 could raise their annual rates to $100,000, offer less FA than they currently do, and could still fill their classes with quality (on paper) kids.</p>
<p>It depends on what you mean by “qualified”. Will you be able to field a decent football team? Get enough fools that will marinade in chlorine 2-4 hours a day for your swim team? Get students representative of this country so that discussion about social issues and problems are not happening with just outsiders talking about them? A bunch of rich kids discussing poverty, sounds like a real learning experience.</p>
<p>BC could fill its class with the Catholic kids in the metro NY area alone. But it doesn’t want to be a NYC/Boston Catholic school. It also doesn’t want to be vanilla in flavor. </p>
<p>It used to be that the ivies and other select schools were comprised of legacies and their friends and relatives with a few token brainiacs on scholarship. The reason admissions has been opened is to give the school diversity, not to make money. So “qualified” is a very subjective term. </p>
<p>I was a scholarship kid too, but it would not have been easy to have replaced my stats with a full pay kid. But even more important, my background was quite unusual. At a school where most of the kids came from the Eastern coast, I brought some diversity to the school. My experiences, my life, my viewpoints were quite different from most of the kids’ there. In my hall alone, out of 14 girls, , 8 were from the NYC area. Throw in Boston and DC and the locals and you were left with me.</p>
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<p>Really?? DD took a full year of Organic Chemistry at Santa Clara University (where she is a student) two summers ago…MOST of the class was premed students…from Stanford.</p>
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<p>Lima, I’d be genuinely interested in the source of your knowledge in this area. I’ve read numerous articles and interviews given by some of the most generous schools and they always say that their endowments, not their students, are funding institutional grants. I don’t know if this includes scholarships, since many do not award merit aid, but if that portion comes from tuition funding it seems that it would be equally available to full pay students, at least for the many schools who separate merit aid from need components.</p>
<p>There was an interesting article a few months back, may have been NYTimes or Inside Higher Ed, that put the true cost per student closer to the $80K/year mark. While this figure certainly cannot be accurate for all schools, it led me to believe that the claim that full pays support higher need students is a myth.</p>
<p>My theory has long been that college costs are rising rapidly simply because they can! It’s a “use it or lose it” mentality and, coupled with enrollment management, is a recipe for disaster. When schools can increase their ratings simply by boosting tuition, there’s a serious flaw in the system. There is no real oversight to any of this, although last year’s Ed bill did attempt to tie some federal aid to keeping tution increases within a normal range (and yes, almost all schools receive federal funds in the form of federal student aid). The American Enterprise Institute recently released this report, which concludes that increases in administration and institutional costs are the real culprit behind the “out of control” cost increases…which will likely continue until some accountability is introduced into the system.</p>
<p>[AEI</a> - Where Does All That Tuition Go?](<a href=“http://www.aei.org/outlook/100924]AEI”>http://www.aei.org/outlook/100924)</p>
<p>The Delta Cost Project has also published some interesting data and ideas on how to approach this problem:</p>
<p>[The</a> Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability](<a href=“http://www.deltacostproject.org/analyses/delta_reports.asp]The”>7K Metals Review For 2023 - Delta Cost Project)</p>
<p>I think that Amherst College puts out a figure of $80K or $85K as the value of the education that they provide per year. No clue on how they calculate that.</p>
<p>Here is a quote from the Amherst College FA page.</p>
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<p>Here’s how I’m guessing works: Costs can be calculated on a per student basis by $$$ going out (liabilities): buildings, (maintenance, etc.) + construction + salaries + administration, licenses, PR and FA. $$$ coming in (assets): endowments, (investments), annual giving, and tuition. Of course tuition doesn’t simply cover all expenditures, but notice the student who pays full freight is on one side of the formula (as an asset) and the full need student is on the liabilities side.</p>
<p>Now of course it’s not nearly as simple as this, but I’m showing you that there’s a whole lot of difference between full need and full freight; they’re on opposite ends of the equation. Notice that some colleges, such as Williams, can no longer afford lush FA packages and limiting who qualifies. Why is that? Their endowments got creamed with this recession and they rely more on tuition to help cover their costs.</p>
<p>The real question you want to ask is: why does it cost so much? Part of that is the loss of income from full need students, but it also is a result of overpaying some professors and growing administration costs. How could these things go up when inflation is virtually flat?</p>
<p>All of the new dorms, rec centers, gyms and other amenities cost an arm and a leg. Yet colleges have to do it to keep up with their peers. It is a business, and has to attract customer.</p>
<p>Well, from an accounting standpoint, that’s not the way it would work at all! Money coming in would be income (tuition/fees/RB/interest, etc). Salaries, overhead, benefits, maintenance, etc. would be expenses. Difference would be profit/loss. Endowments and buildings are assets, not income, and obligations are liabilities. As investment income from endowments decrease, so the expenses covered by that income must decrease. Students are neither assets nor liabilities…ever. Their pro-rata share of costs are simply covered by different types of income (tuition or investment) and they may or may not generate the same margin.</p>
<p>Lima, it seems to be administrative and institution costs, not instructional costs that are the driving factors. When college presidents and deans and all the various other support staff are added together and all that overhead starts to snowball, it can be very difficult to contain. I don’t think many organizations have the will to cut the fat until it really starts sizzling and burns them!</p>
<p>Williams does still give “lush packages” and the only limitations placed is on internationals who on average paid less than $5000.00.</p>
<p>*All of the new dorms, rec centers, gyms and other amenities cost an arm and a leg. Yet colleges have to do it to keep up with their peers. It is a business, and has to attract customer. *</p>
<p>Very true…</p>
<p>Colleges don’t have the rather austere dorms and such anymore.</p>
<p>Also, security is costing an arm and a leg. Now colleges employ full time police forces and every building has extensive security features, cameras, etc.</p>
<p>Funny. An alum at my school once told me that he paid only $1500 per year to attend BC back in the late 1960’s. When BC tried to double the cost of tuition in 1970, he and other students staged a massive strike protesting the tuition increase. Eventually, a deal was reached, and the increase was adjusted to be much smaller than originally anticipated.</p>
<p>Back then, everyone commuted to BC; there were no dorms whatsoever, and none of the buildings even had names. There was no bling back then. Now, I see bling everywhere on this campus. If we cut these costs, then college would far more affordable.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, these days, colleges want to sell not only an education, but a lifestyle as well. To create such a lifestyle, massive capital expenditures were undertaken, and that is what is leading to the high sticker prices on colleges across the board. </p>
<p>I say that if people stop obsessing over prestige, then colleges would feel less compelled to enter in these sort of “arms races” against other colleges, spend less on dorms and recreation centers and focus more on what counts - the education itself. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, that is never going to happen. People seem willing to pay, because it seems “unfair” to deny their children an education, even though it might be cheaper elsewhere.</p>
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I’ve always found this argument somewhat ridiculous.</p>
<p>Does it make any difference if I pay for my lunch with money from my left pocket or if I pay with money from my right pocket?</p>
<p>I bet in the future college will become a lot more like a 2 school thing. People will do 1 or 2 years at a community college, and then 2 or 2.5 years at a University.</p>