<p>@dusty,
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<p>You hit the nail on the head. Part of the reason colleges can raise their prices is due to the willing, lemming-like rush off the cliff to get a BA at any cost. </p>
<p>And the irony is that the more people there are w a bachelors degree, the less a bachelors degree is worth.</p>
<p>@dustypig </p>
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<p>Your example is terribly flawed. Say you are selling this $100 sofa for your greedy boss. It is his sofa. Someone who can only afford a $60 sofa approaches you to buy it. They really want this sofa and it is a good fit for their family room, so you decide to give it to them. Fine. But you need to find a way to make up the difference so your boss doesn’t get mad at you, so you dip into the families coin jar to borrow $40. Now you were going to use that bucket for groceries and your gym membership, but now you can’t. So now, instead of the family coin jar having $200, it only has $160. You have to say no to the gym membership. BUT your boss didn’t have to charge $100 for the sofa. You see, here’s the funny part. The regular price for the sofa was $60 all along, but your greedy boss tried to over charge for it. Had the boss told you to sell the sofa for the $60 it is worth, you wouldn’t have had to take away from something else. I feel like this example is more applicable to financial aid.</p>
<p>What in heaven’s name are you talking about? Are you saying that Vanderbilt doesn’t set its own tuition price, that there’s some outside force doing that (aka the greedy boss)? Or are you saying that financial aid officers have to use their own departmental funding to provide financial aid? Am I missing something here?</p>
<p>GMT, apparently the demand for Ferraris is higher than the suppl! Speaking of cars, the other day on my way home I saw a Porsche parked in the tiny lot of a shabby house. The poor Porsche doesn’t even have a garage. But I can’t say the owner is crazy. He must love nice cars and can’t afford to buy a nice house too, or he may be paying for his kid’s expensive college at the same time? Just saying</p>
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<p>The family paying only $10k is definitely being GIVEN the balance of the tuition cost. And that money is OPM:
<p>OPM is still real money. The money that is given to the $10k paying family is money that can be spent on something else. </p>
<p>A garage sale is a flawed analogy, because a garage sale is a one-off project, not a regular operation which has to balance annual revenue with annual operating costs. </p>
<p>Hey, @Benley, nice to meet again on the “other side” ;)</p>
<p>Where I work, the secretaries will spend multiple-months’ salary on a stupid designer handbag. </p>
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<p>You can thank employers for using bachelor’s degrees as screening criteria for job applicants for jobs where the actual skills needed do not require a bachelor’s degree.</p>
<p>Well, as long as they have enough for retirement, who can blame them? Comfortable retirement is paramount after all right? 
seriously though, come on, paying for your kids college is - well let’s say a little different than spending big bucks on handbags. Seeing you are so determined, I am sure your son will be able to find the merit money needed. Good luck!</p>
<p>@dustypig Your entire analogy missed the aspect of withdrawing from an endowment. </p>
<p>@GMTplus7 You are right. It was a flawed analogy. But, I tried to work with it lol. I think I did a pretty decent job ;-)</p>
<p>The logic may make sense to someone who doesn’t understand why Harvard considers itself to be a university and not a liberal arts college.</p>
<p>@emeraldkitt4 I never asked why Harvard UNIVERSITY doesn’t consider itself an LAC. I know that Harvard as a whole is a research university. I asked why some students applying to be undergraduates don’t consider it to be a LAC when they would be students of Harvard COLLEGE, a liberal arts college. Your comment was unnecessarily personal and completely irrelevant to this thread. I suggest you delete it before a mod comes and does it for you.</p>
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Of course it is, but I was only adding another anecdote to your Ferrari observation. </p>
<p>For the life of me, I can’t see the point of fullpay families going deeply into debt for Dartmouth, if Duke will give them merit money. </p>
<p>@GMTplus7 I’m guessing that a solid portion of those full pay students are legacy. Perhaps it’s family tradition that keeps them at certain schools.</p>
<p>Harvard College is a reflection of the time period in which it was founded, not the type of institution that it is. Harvard is not an LAC. </p>
<p>@romanigypsyeyes If you wish to discuss that, please go to my other thread.</p>
<p>No, I understand the concept of withdrawing from an endowment. I’m saying that the money is all Vanderbilt’s money, whether it comes from an endowment or from tuition paid by other students. You seem to be saying that Vanderbilt would actually save money by charging less for tuition. I’m still waiting to be told how that works.</p>
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<p>I don’t see the school saving money, but I do see the potential for a lot less male-cowpies with families playing financial games to maximize FA. How many threads this week asking when to sell mutual fund to “best” the FA game? </p>
<p>Annie Beats, I think I see your logic, but it still doesn’t add up. </p>
<p>Let’s pretend that there are two students in a college. The college costs 60K per year. One student is full pay, the other is paying 10K per year.</p>
<p>What you’re saying is, if I’m understanding you correctly, that in that model, the 60K student is paying for himself, and the 10K student is costing the school 50K. If we lowered the cost to 40K, the full-pay student would still be paying for himself, and the school would only be losing 30K.</p>
<p>But that makes no sense, because the cost of educating the two students remains the same whether you charge 40 or 60. If it actually costs 60K to educate each student, then by discounting tuition to 40K, you’re then losing 20K on the full payer and still losing the same 50K you were before on the other student - so your net loss is 70 rather than 50. Of course, under the current model, it doesn’t actually cost 120K to educate two students - the 60K is as high as it is in part because it is subsidizing lower income students. Which stinks for the full-pay family, but I’m not sure if there’s a better alternative; I think schools should be trying to lower costs in other ways, but if costs are going to be as high as they are, not giving significant FA is going to mean that private universities are solely the province of the wealthy. </p>
<p>Re: #198</p>
<p>Remember also that the marginal cost of educating a student varies based on whether the college or department is under or over capacity. If the theoretical college that charges $60k and $10k to two students charged $40k to all, it may get only the wealthy student paying $40k, since the poor student who paid $10k would not attend, leaving an empty seat, reducing the college’s revenue from $70k to $40k, but not necessarily reducing costs by $30k since the college’s capacity is relatively fixed (due to physical plant and tenured faculty, although the adjuncts and TAs that people here seem to dislike are typical ways for college to have some ability to adjust capacity).</p>
<p>Of course, then the college could instead dig deeper into its applicant pool and admit more wealthy students. But, for elite colleges, that lowering of standards could dilute the eliteness of the college’s brand.</p>