<p>So to summarize, for the upper-middle (and @AnnieBeats, even though we’re not top 1%, we’re both really upper-middle class), the very top privates and state schools have gotten more expensive, but many LACs and other privates have gotten cheaper or at least have not gotten more expensive (through merit money).</p>
<p>For the poor, the very top privates have gotten cheaper, but pretty much all other college options have gotten more expensive (unless you live in a state like CA where the flagship public system tries hard to make themselves affordable to the poor).</p>
<p>@skrlvr: That depends on whether a kid in that class can get merit aid or not. For the somewhat high-achieving kid, state schools may have gotten cheaper (the really high-achieving kid would have gotten merit money from a state school in all eras; only difference is that 20 years ago, he would have gotten a free education at A&M and now it would be at 'Bama). For the dumb kid in that class, state school would have gotten more expensive.</p>
<p>Sure, I agree, if we are only looking at the individual. But as a whole, since students from higher income families do better on SAT/ACT tests, these students as a group are more likely to get merit aid.</p>
<p>Except that the list price for publics has really exploded (on a percentage basis, even more than the privates have). So state schools have still generally gotten more expensive for UMC.</p>
<p>Since the institutions are ‘non-profits’ and our government is so insistent on intervening and is a major cause of COA inflation, I propose the following: Let all full pay families have an annual tax deduction amounting to 50% of the annual cost. This would apply to all private institutions and to those attending an OOS public institution.</p>
<p>What is the problem with giving priority for high education to the most academically capable students who will be most able to graduate? This is how other countries do it, including socialistic countries in western Europe. </p>
<p>@Pizzagirl Lets take Vanderbilt for example. Vanderbilt gave out $41,000,000 in financial aid this past year and more than 60% of students has some sort of aid. The average student paid about $36,000 out of the $65,000 COA. That means that the average student is receiving $29,000 in aid. What’s the point of making the sticker price $65,000, if Vanderbilt is eventually going to pick up half the COA anyway? Wouldn’t it just make more sense to make the sticker price $36,000 and spend that extra $29,000 on amenities for the student? </p>
<p>$41M in fin aid divided over roughly 6800 undergrads is actually a little over $6K in fin aid each. </p>
<p>So if Vandy got rid of their whole fin aid grants disbursement, and used it to lower tuition, COA would still be around $60K (and you won’t actually have any extra money left over to spend, BTW). The other $23K in average aid is likely athletic scholarships, merit aid, loans, government grants, and other outside scholarships. In 2011 or so, Vandy also gave out an average of $24.5K in merit aid to 9% of their undergrads. That’s a total of almost $15M spent on academic merit aid. If Vandy stopped rewarding merit aid as well and applied the saved money to an across-the-board tuition cut, COA would drop by an average of $2200. So if Vandy stopped giving out grant money of any kind (other than athletic scholarships), COA would go down by a grand total of 8.2K to $56.8K. . . .</p>
<p>Sure @GMTplus7, let’s raise the marginal tax rates like those socialistic countries so that we can provide free tuition to those accepted to college. I guess this would mean, though, that the family of a high achieving wealthy student would be subsidizing the tuition of a high achieving poor student. But wait, isn’t this the situation that happens at most of the Ivy League and other elite schools with their ‘redistribution’ in the form financial aid?</p>
<p>Are you advocating for forced governmental redistribution, rather than letting private corporations voluntarily do it? </p>
<p>You are missing the point entirely. Socialistic countries with high marginal tax rates, which offer free or cheap public college education, don’t offer it to students because they are poor. They ration it to students who are most academically capable. They “redistribute” the money to the students who are good academic risks, and it’s likely that these are disproportionately more affluent students.</p>
<p>The socialistic countries don’t give a flip if you are “1st gen college student”. They just want to make sure that their money spent on public universities isn’t going to be wasted on a student who isn’t going to cut it in college.</p>
<p>The need-blind full-need schools are generally at the top tier. You generally have to be pretty academically capable even if you are 1st-gen (which I believe gives only a small bump at some schools) or URM, etc. Athletes are cut some slack, but even they, at least at the Ivies, have to on average meet some threshold that is decently high. Considering their high graduation rates, I daresay that need-blind full-need schools are admitting very few students that aren’t able to cut it in college.</p>
<p>BTW, concerning the Vandy numbers, mine didn’t include athletic scholarships.</p>
<p>OK, neither did yours.</p>
<p>Still, taking $19K from the COA drops it down to $46K/year. Quite a bit less than $65K/year but still far from $25K/year.</p>
<p>We are debating apples and oranges. My discussion is about how tuition should be priced/funded. You are discussing criteria for admission. I never said poor and academically capable are mutually exclusive. </p>
<p>So if Vanderbilt charged a list price of $46,000 per year, but gave no need or merit aid, then it would be financially inaccessible to 80-90% of the families out there. Vanderbilt probably does not want to limit itself to getting students from the 10-20% wealthiest families and excluding those from all others.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I can see the appeal of colleges doing this to much of the forum demographic, who are at the income and wealth level where Vanderbilt may charge somewhat more than $46,000, so they would get lower costs, as well as a lower selectivity barrier due to not having to compete with applicants from the bottom 80-90% families in income and wealth.</p>
<p>I’m really not. One of the biggest complaints on this board is the financial aid practices of elite schools. Aren’t you among those who can’t stand the fact that families at Harvard are paying different prices for the same ‘service’?</p>
<p>In terms of academic capability, 75% of the students at Harvard, for example, are in the top 5% of all test takers, with a 97% graduation rate. So these students are most academically capable. Students from wealthier families pay more (comparable to paying more taxes) to support the high achieving students of less well-off families (who pay less in tuition, comparable to paying less taxes). It’s not like the students of wealthy families in the model you describe are getting it ‘for free’, because they are paying more taxes. which goes to the government and then goes to the institution. With the elite college model, you eliminate the governmental middle-man.</p>
<p>With respect to merit aid at state schools, because of the retreat of state funding for higher ed, the problem here is that the less affluent students are taking out loans to give to the school in the form of tuition, and then this tuition money is used to support the merit aid for more affluent students. That is a problem because money is being transferred from the less affluent to the more affluent.</p>
<p>I’m sure you’ll have the most problem with this reasonging–it’s not a good idea in general to transfer money to the wealthy because that harms overall economic growth. The reasoning is as follows–I’ll let the economist Paul Krugman explain, when he discusses the reasoning in Standard and Poor’s latest report “Because the affluent tend to save more of what they earn rather than spend it, as more and more of the nation’s income goes to people at the top income brackets, there isn’t enough demand for goods and services to maintain strong growth, the report argues”. </p>
<p>The current merit aid model can then be seen as a way of transferring wealth from the less affluent to the wealthy. If the above claim is correct, it’s this kind of system that hurts economic growth overall.</p>
<p>Not really. So the Ivies are akin to your socialistic country example. Different, more idiosyncratic admissions criteria, but with Robin Hood behavior at the school level rather than the country level.</p>
<p>And wouldn’t the elite college model actually be a plus for wealthier families, since they are only being ‘taxed’ for those years in which their children attend those schools, rather than over the course of their working lifetime?</p>