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<p>You make it sound like “wealthier” families aren’t paying much tax the rest of the time. “Wealthier” families are already paying a serious butt-load of taxes. </p>
<p>Atlas is tired of being gouged, can shrug on this one and send his child to a good college elsewhere where he doesn’t have to be the school’s ATM. Hence the recent mushrooming of Honors Colleges at public universities. </p>
<p>It’s going to be really interesting what the effect of the Honors Colleges will be decades down the road. I think that they’re great for many career paths.</p>
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<p>Being deemed full pay does not mean you can afford an elite school without taking out loans. All it means is the college is refusing to transfer any of its wealth your way. In our case, merit aid is what will prevent us from transferring our wealth to a large bank. </p>
<p>I know one full pay girl going off to Schreyer (Penn State’s Honors College) precisely because she will have to borrow all but 10k (the amount her family can actually afford) each year. That was going to be true whether she went to Brown or Schreyer. She’ll graduate with about 40k in loans. If she’d have gone to Brown it would have been about 200k. Personally, I’d have encouraged her to take the full ride at 'Bama, but she’s not my kid so I kept my mouth shut.</p>
<p>Penn State wins getting a kid like her. She raises the statistical profile of the students and she’s a motivated kid who will likely be successful in whatever she chooses. </p>
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<p>This is certainly what I’m seeing and it obviously reflects how I feel. However, the common data sets at elite schools are still telling a different story. Apparently, there are lots of full pay families out there who are making that 60k per year happen. PLUS loans, home equity loans, and loans from retirement are still options that full pay families are taking. I’ll believe the sea change I’m seeing with my own eyes will have finally swept the country when we can look at the elites’ common data sets and see drastic decreases in 1) the percentage of full pay domestic students and 2) PLUS loan amounts. (Unfortunately, we have no way to measure for the percentage of parents who are borrowing in retirement and home equity to pay elite tuition).</p>
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I hope hosting the soiree is worth it for them, cause it’s gonna be a helluva hangover.</p>
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<p>The elites will probably be the last to notice this, because they still have plenty of applicants and matriculants from high ($200,000+) income families who do actually save enough of their money to comfortably afford expensive college list prices.</p>
<p>It is the less selective privates that are feeling the pinch first, as many students and parents find them to be less of a value due to lack of eliteness. An example is Seton Hall, as described at <a href=“http://chronicle.com/blogs/headcount/seton-hall-u-announces-merit-based-tuition-cut/28947”>http://chronicle.com/blogs/headcount/seton-hall-u-announces-merit-based-tuition-cut/28947</a> , cutting the price to in-state Rutgers level for 3.0 GPA / top 10% rank / 1200 SAT CR+M students. Having to compete on price with a state school that is underrated by in-state students seems to indicate that its previous pricing model was not working. However, most of Seton Hall’s students do not qualify, so there are still plenty of less qualified students from wealthier families to pay higher prices.</p>
<p>If your friend was going to have to take 200K in loans, then her family certainly was in the top 5% or more of wage earners. It’s surprising to me that families with that kind of money can’t manage to save something toward their child’s college education.</p>
<p>Well, Atlas does lobby for non-renewal of the Higher Education Act. In its place, Atlas suggests the following (which I got from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank)</p>
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<p>What are human capital contracts?</p>
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<p>And remember, <em>Atlas Shrugged</em> is make believe. I find it interesting that some want to use make believe for public policy.</p>
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It makes sense to me. Either way, if the government wants to even the playing field through education, there will be some sort of wealth redistribution. The socialistic model actually happens in this country for K-12 education. For families with one or even no kid, and for families that send their kids to private schools, they are stuck with the local school tax for the entirety of their lives. Sure, you don’t have to choose a house in a zip code with best schools but school tax is everywhere and 'developing" areas are seeing school tax hiking even more often.</p>
<p>My idea of lower price is asking elite schools with huge endowments to draw a bit more from their endowments and run a little more efficiently so the middle / upper middle class families can get a little break. Maybe I am just being greedy as they are? I agree that many full pay families do take out loans and cut back to make an elite education for their children possible. To them, it’s not a luxury good but a gift they deem valuable and choose to give their kids even if it means a change in lifestyle for years to come.</p>
<p>“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>Sometimes it scares the heck out of me that you claim you went to Vanderbilt, which is a very good school.
I want you to just THINK for a moment. Let’s say Vanderbilt made the sticker price $36,000 - no ifs, ands or buts, I don’t care if you are dirt poor or the child of Bill Gates, that’s the sticker price, pay it or don’t come. Hmmm. Let’s see. What do you think would be the socioeconomic makeup of the resulting class? Think real hard on this one. </p>
<p>" I agree that many full pay families do take out loans and cut back to make an elite education for their children possible. To them, it’s not a luxury good but a gift they deem valuable and choose to give their kids even if it means a change in lifestyle for years to come."</p>
<p><em>I</em> personally have lived well below my means yada yada in order to be able to give those “gifts” to my kids, but I still think that elite education is a luxury good. Great if you can, and personally worth it to me and mine, but it’s not as though there aren’t plenty of opportunities at (insert state flagship).</p>
<p>To me, the fact that Harvard and Vanderbilt and whoever aren’t easily affordable to the middle class / donut hole may be true – but the bigger issue to me is ensuring that state flagships stay easily affordable to the middle class, not worrying about elites that only educate 1% of the college-going population in the first place. The elites just aren’t that important in the scheme of the broader college landscape. CC is truly a bubble, - most kids don’t do sleep-away / boarding schools, they go to a directional or state u within a relatively short distance of home. </p>
<p>@Pizzagirl I am in no way arguing for the complete removal of financial aid. No one is. But if the average student is paying $36,000, let THAT be the sticker price. Say you have a family who can only pay $10,000 per year. Vanderbilt would only be giving them $26,000 compared to $50,000. Why can’t you see that? Why make the sticker price so insanely high, when Vanderbilt is going to be picking up more than 1/2 the cost of it anyway? The remaining money that would have went to aid could have been placed elsewhere. My Vanderbilt degree taught me logic and reasoning. So Pizzagirl, go back through the thread, reread what I said, and “THINK for a moment”.</p>
<p>@AnnieBeats:</p>
<p>Haven’t we determined that getting rid of all Vandy fin aid grant disbursements and using it to lower sticker price tuition would only bring COA down to $46K? At that point, any new fin aid grants (from Vandy, not loans or government grants or outside scholarships) would mean substantially more money coming from somewhere, like the endowment. But drawing down the endowment isn’t a sustainable long-term strategy.</p>
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<p>@PurpleTitan Yes. I think Honors programs (with their own dorms, most rigorous classes etc.) have some potential to fix problems at large public universities. Years ago I considered UVa’s honors program (eventually deciding against it but the Echols scholar program still is intriguing). Even if there would only be enough students at a University to make honors programs for a few majors e.g. a general “Honors Engineering” (rather than one for every engineering specialty) and “Honors Humanities” - that could be good enough. I am somewhat skeptical though. </p>
<p>First they need more transparency (and maybe even a set of objective “autoadmit” criteria just as they have for admission to the Texas flagships). Few of the National Merit (with high test scores and grades) at my son’s High School were selected for any of the Honors programs at the state flagships although some of their classmates were (at instate AND out of state). My suspicion is that other subjective factors came into play (getting app in early, good essay, luck, and probably diversity considerations) which resulted in filling the honors college early leaving some very obvious candidates for Honors programs struggling between well regarded privates or normal programs at the flagships. In one case I remember a guy with 34 or 35 ACT (similarly high SAT, SAT II etc.), lots of APs and very high grades was not placed in Honors at A&M (maybe a screwup on someone’s part, paperwork error etc, and it is possible to transfer into Honors at A&M with a 3.5 after freshman year but still…). The bigger problem I see is that notification of acceptance into the honors program does not seem to be made at the same time as the admission decision at some Texas schools - so students are left without enough information and will pick the elite private over the not-guaranteed-to-be-in-honors-public. And some states (Colorado Universities such as Colorado School of Mines have a limited one just for humanities and others don’t have any) don’t have honors programs at their flagships.</p>
<p>@PurpleTitan No, we haven’t. And the correct figures were not used.</p>
<p>@AnnieBeats: How were the correct figures not used? Are you saying that Vandy is lying on its Common Data Set?</p>
<p>Lots of options for covering college.
AP tests in high school will give course credit oftentimes at the local public to reduce total credits needed.
Community college credits taken at the same time are even better, and if you take two years of carefully selected courses, you could transfer in as a junior, knocking your costs by half.</p>
<p>Americorps programs will earn you an education credit to be applied to tuition or loans.
Some employers will pay upfront or after the earning of the degree.
The military is still an option for some, it’s how my brother financed college.</p>
<p>I understand that it can be a shock when your kid is not eligible for need based aid, even at schools that run $60,000+. But consider that if PROFILE estimates that 1/3rd to 1/4th of income is available for tuition, even families making $50,000 are expected to pay $12,000.( except at the most endowed universities)
Their kids also have not had the advantages of a family earning $500,000, yet they may be considered as academic equals.
So why wouldn’t a university want to give them a chance to prove what they can do with more resources? </p>
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<p>And to me, a much, much bigger societal issue is the ~50% drop out rate in large, urban high schools. I will not care one whit about the cost of Harvard or Vanderbilt – or even the public flagships – until we decide to tackle the ignorant teen agers that we are continuing to produce. (What the top 1% of colleges cost is not even worthy of discussion, just like the cost of a a Ferrari.)</p>
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<p>But there IS no “extra $29,000.” Vanderbilt gave that up, in your scenario, to lower its sticker price to $36K. With a sticker price of $65K, Vanderbilt is still getting full pay from some of its students (you say it’s a minority but I don’t know the exact percentage). If they went to a $36K sticker price, they would never get anything above that. You seem to think that lowering their sticker price by $29K would actually net Vanderbilt extra cash. How can that possibly make sense? </p>
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<p>Vanderbilt is not “giving” them anything – they’re <em>receiving</em> $10K from this family no matter where they set their sticker price. If they don’t think their bottom line will allow them to admit a student who can only contribute $10K, then presumably they will tell that kid that his COA is higher than $10K. If the student then declines to attend, I’m sure there are plenty of other students in line to take his spot.</p>
<p>Look at it this way: suppose I hold a garage sale, and I put a sign on my old sofa that says “$100.” If someone then haggles me down to $60, you could argue that I’ve just “given” them $40 with which to buy my $100 sofa. But the reality is that I’ve received $60. If I had priced my sofa at $60 to begin with, I would not have “saved” the $40 that I didn’t have to “give” to the buyer. </p>
<p>And I totally endorse all of @skrlvr’s posts. Except that, while Ayn Rand references normally make smoke come out of my ears, I recognize that higher education costs are not the same thing as contributing towards the good of society. And to the extent that an educated populace is good for society, I would say there should be renewed public funding of state schools – but also, that “educated populace” in this case is open for debate since I don’t think our current mode of demanding that students who are never going to be intellectually-minded spend 4 years to get a piece of paper with “B.A.” on it so that they can go get a job that they could have done right out of high school, necessarily makes our society better.</p>
<p>@PurpleTitan I got it from the Vanderbilt magazine.</p>