<p>Enough to forego a more prestigious college in favor of a lesser one? I don’t know.
People do it all the time.
Another thought. Donors often want to have their dollars be used for merit or need based aid.
School stops all aid, wouldn’t the dollars?</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus Then what will stop tuition from reaching it’s projected $100K? That is why there needs to be some serious reform.</p>
<p>@AnnieBeats, but if the cost is “inflated” then you <em>don’t</em> have to spend more of your personal money to make up the costs, because the extra costs never really existed.</p>
<p>If the cost of an education at Vanderbilt is only $36K, and Vanderbilt charges an inflated price of $65K, then the difference between those two figures is pure profit for Vanderbilt. If they can’t manage to squeeze that full difference out of a particular student, then they don’t actually have to shell out any of their own money – they’re just accepting that they won’t get the profit they would have received if the student was full-pay. Maybe there’s some kind of accounting paper transaction where Vanderbilt writes itself a check for $29K – but the money comes out of and goes back into Vanderbilt’s coffers.</p>
<p>I think there’s a difference between donors voluntarily donating to a scholarship fund and full pay students donating whether they want to or not. One is charity, the other is a tithe.</p>
<p>By the way @AnnieBeats, I totally agree with your main argument – that tuitions are way too high. I’m just disputing the accounting you’re using in this instance.</p>
<p>
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<p>If a college can charge a $100k sticker price, while still providing plenty of need-based aid, and fill its dorm beds, why should we care?</p>
<p>btw: $100k for COA will rapidly become the true cost of attendance of a top private college (at least in a couple of years.) The largest expense I would guess is labor. Even those colleges with large endowments use part of that endowment to cover annual operating expenses for the college. Otherwise those annual operating expenses would be built into the cost of tuition/fees. Thus, the current $60k does not cover full fare.</p>
<p>Way back upthread, @blossom posted this:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is a really, really good point. Are students and parents willing to give up all the amenities that colleges typically provide now in order to go back to the lower costs of 20-30 years ago?</p>
<p>If the price of college continues to significantly outstrip inflation, we’re going to get to a point where most colleges can’t even come close to giving adequate aid, the “doughnut hole” will get bigger, and private college will again become a playground for the elites - but with a few token poor kids thrown in. At that point, maybe we actually will see some belt-tightening, although I suspect the cost-cutting measures will involve faculty positions rather than administrative bloat or luxury dorms. </p>
<p>As it is, though, I’m not convinced that the pay structure is actually leaving all that many kids out in the cold or causing their families undue levels of hardship - whereas changing the pay structure certainly would. 60K is a lot of money, but if you make over 200K, you have a lot of money - if not enough to actually pay 60K per year, then enough to have accrued enough savings to manage, or to make taking out some loans, as you would for a mortgage or home equity loan, a reasonable risk. Sure, there are cases of the family who just started making 200K last year and hadn’t been able to save previously, or the parents with precarious jobs, but as a whole, the system seems to work well enough.</p>
<p>And yes, most schools are not as generous as Yale - but those same schools are less generous across the board. If they expect the 150K family to pay more, they also expect the 100K family to pay more, and the 70K family. A very small number of students may come from families with a low enough income that they would be on full scholarship at almost any private, but as a whole you still have more options the more money you have. </p>
<p>@AnnieBeats </p>
<p>
Isn’t that what these elite colleges are doing? They are charging less well-off people what they can actually afford?</p>
<p>I still don’t get your reasoning. Can you make an actual toy example to explain, using real numbers, etc.? </p>
<p>My problem with the situation is that when the elite schools claim their students are the best and the brightest, they aren’t even considering all of the students who didn’t bother to apply because of financial reasons. If they really want to be open to the top students, they need to be more affordable. I know Harvard does give a lot of financial aid, but I guess it’s the hardest on middle class and upper middle class families who may not get that much financial aid. If they are debating between Ivies and great state schools, especially schools like Berkeley and Michigan, it would be in many cases much more attractive to choose the latter.</p>
<p>@GMTplus7</p>
<p>I doubt that the top 5% of wage earners were getting a discount off the list price in the 1980s. It wasn’t until much later that college endowments began to grow sufficiently enough to get the kind of financial aid practices that these elite colleges can provide today.</p>
<p>I can’t find actual numbers. But in 1981, 37% of students in Yale College received financial aid. In 2013, the number of freshman at Yale receiving any kind of aid (I think including loans) was 61%.</p>
<p>@skrlvr I made an example earlier. #181</p>
<p>@Poeme Have you been reading any of the posts in this thread? Your assertion about financial aid and the ‘middle class’ is part of what’s up for debate here.</p>
<p>@AnnieBeats </p>
<p>That analogy is very problematic. The problem is you are not considering actual expenses. And you didn’t consider more than one buyer.</p>
<p>First off, with college tuition, the college has to spend some money to educate students. Let say that money comes from tuition and endowment. So it’s not like even full pay families cover the cost to provide the service. In your analogy, the boss is charging 100 dollars, but it’s only worth 60. So you are saying that the boss charged too much for the sofa. </p>
<p>But with respect to college tuition, tuition must cover part of the expenses. So in your analogy, what are the expenses involved with selling the sofa. Clearly there are some expenses to make the sofa, and then to cover the rent for the building to display the sofa, and then the wages for the sofa seller. </p>
<p>Now, to continue the analogy, the ‘full price’–what the boss wants you to charge for the sofa–should cover part of the expenses. But they aren’t going to cover all of the expenses–remember, some expenses are covered by the endowment.</p>
<p>So try putting in expenses in your model to see what happens.</p>
<p>Is there a list with “per capita spending” (how much the University spends per student)? Rice apparently spends much more ($90,000+ IIRC?) per student (ie spend on average more than list price per student) but I don’t know how to verify that (and presumably the Military Academies still spend the most of any per-student. This is quite different than tuition.</p>
<p>@skrlvr I know it wasn’t a great analogy. Someone prior had created it and I just altered it :)</p>
<p>@skylvr:</p>
<p>I’d peg doughnut hole familes as those making over 200K but less than the top 1% (which is 400K-something now, I believe).</p>
<p>In other words, too rich for fin aid but not so much that 60K/year (especially if that is repeated a few times with multiple children) is a drop in the bucket.</p>
<p>@purpletitan then what does that make me? two incomes, about 100000 a year and not one NPC is giving my D16 anything but loans. We aren’t even talking 60000 a year colleges, just 25000. Just. Ha. I’ve saved 35000 but its not even close to enough. What do we do?</p>
<p>@dustypig:</p>
<p>The increase in services and amenities have been driven by the rapidly more luxurious tastes of the top 5% or so.</p>
<p>You hear of students/parents not considering a school because the dorms are too shabby or the food service is unspectacular (when I went to college, I thought that mediocre cafeteria food was the norm everywhere).</p>
<p>Essentially, this has all been driven by increasing inequality in American society.</p>
<p>@kandcsmom:</p>
<p>As schools lower down the list actually have worse fin aid, you essentially have 3 options:
- The full-need need-blind schools at very top of the heap.
- Getting big merit money from some school(s).
- Possible some public options (but maybe not even dorming at the flagship). </p>
<p>What state are you in?
Stats good enough for merit awards?</p>