Upper Middle Class Frustration

Paying for College
61

@“Snowball City”:
A lot of the OH publics are powerhouses in a niche field or have some attractive offering.
UCincy is renown in design, musical theatre, and some other stuff and has a famous co-cop program.
Akron also has co-op and a bunch of specialty engineering fields.
Toledo is famous for polymer engineering.
Miami U is seen as a “public Ivy” because of its history, campus, and cachet.
Ohio U for it’s honors tutorial college and is also evidently picturesque.

But there are gems among the SUNYs/CUNYs as well:
ESF is seen as one of the top schools in it’s fields.
Likewise FIT in its fields.
Stony Brook is good for STEM.
I’ve heard people rave about the LAC-like environment at Geneseo and New Paltz.
Some contract colleges at Cornell have articulation agreements with various SUNYs/NYS CCs.
Bing, Fredonia, and Geneseo (as well as Queens College) have a 3-2 engineering agreement with Columbia where you are guaranteed admission to a Columbia engineering major if you meet certain requirements.

62

“We do need to get back to where attending one’s instate school is an affordable option for all.”

THIS. @mom2collegekids is spot on.

The real problem in society is that Americans can’t afford their state colleges. That’s the travesty.
The fact that an upper-middle-class child now has to be both lucky and have great stats to get into Tufts? Or Cornell? Sorry. Not a problem, except for a tiny percentage of the population which feels ENTITLED to them.

63

Eventually these threads always seem to devolve into competitions for “Sacrifice of the Year” awards.

A la: “We lived under a bridge for 30 years, ate nutritious meals prepared from dumpster scraps, walked 10 miles to work each way, and stitched together discarded socks to make our clothing (you should have seen D’s prom gown!). Put 10 kids through Haaavd, full pay, you know.”

:wink:

64

You feel betrayed only if you feel that you were promised or owed something.

Ever read that book “Who Moved My Cheese”? It’s by Spencer Johnson, who also wrote the One-Minute Manager. Here’s a synopsis from the book:

Change Happens: They Keep Moving The Cheese
Anticipate Change: Get Ready For The Cheese To Move
Monitor Change: Smell The Cheese Often So You Know When It Is Getting Old
Adapt To Change Quickly: The Quicker You Let Go Of Old Cheese, The Sooner You Can Enjoy New Cheese
Change: Move With The Cheese
Enjoy Change!: Savor The Adventure And Enjoy The Taste Of New Cheese!
Be Ready To Change Quickly And Enjoy It Again: They Keep Moving The Cheese.

65

Like your position, @ClassicRockerDad, what’s said and what’s between the lines.

What I’m not sure I get is this implication (?) our alma maters owe us something financially. With all the (CC) fuss about legacy, that some financial pat on the head is expected and the lack is “betrayal.”

Yes, things have changed.

Maybe many did stay near home, for college. But the world has opened in new ways. Nor do our kids usually live down the block, post grad. And they often can’t afford a home in our neighborhoods.

66

Some state colleges give preference to OOS students for financial reasons. When one of my daughters was applying, the information session at that state college said exactly that. Now, of course, some state colleges give preferences to their own students, so it’s not a universal thing.

67

It cracks me up when Americans send their kids to the heavily taxed Europe for the “better value” schools, and at home vote down every politician who talks about raising taxes to improve local schools and colleges. We’re such a nation of hypocrites.

68

Everyone make choices how to spend money. You are not going to take it with you when you leave. If someone wants to spend on kid’s education, don’t shame them and tell them they could have gotten the same education for free somewhere else.

69

@brantly So what change can we see, more foreign students, less public funding of state schools, tuition’s outpacing inflation, stagnant wages and salaries; except for college football/basketball coaches.

70

True—but really, it would be more accurately phrased as

Now, I do recognize that some folks in, say, California have a legit gripe about this—but it’s not like even for them UC Merced would provide their kids anything less than a top-notch education

The idea that we can have complete control over the path we and our children take is an odd fantasy, but that’s what complaints of “betrayal” (of what, precisely?) in this context seem to be claiming should be the reality.

It isn’t.

71

That was my son’s freshman common reader.

Well if it’s true, I get to choose the words for my own posts based on my own experience. Cool how that works isn’t it?

For those kids who get shut out of their best options, even a few is rough if their parents have been paying the taxes in that state. Personally, I like the idea of in state kids getting preference, but I don’t make the rules, and my D hated the school at issue for both undergrad and graduate school. So she didn’t go there and everyone was happy.

I am now upper middle income (not class, which is a whole other thing) after being very poor for most of my adult life. We are on our third kid being educated and we feel very blessed to have had good choices for all of them. I like choices so families can prioritize what they will. I have one kid who went locally and commuted because it was best for her future career, one who was accepted at top colleges but chose to follow a very specific program at an honors college with merit, and a third who found all of his, ahem, strange, preferences at a small school that offered merit/talent money. All three were happy. Had we chosen to metaphorically sell kidneys for the last one to go to a tippy-top school, that would have been a valid choice, too.

I think merit and need, depending on the school, really is ideal.

72

I’m thankful that NJ offers fine public colleges with annual tuition around 14k per year and we have CCs that a kid can do his first two years at to reduce the overall bill. In very few cases can a kid not drive to one of these from his family home.

Good test scores greatly reduce the tuition too. So if a kid studies, work summer jobs, takes loans and makes sacrifices he can get a good education in NJ

Living at school is a luxury. Going to a more expensive school is a luxury.

73

@PurpleTitan -

You assume that the full tuition is equal to the expense of providing an education. Unfortunately, there is little correlation between the the listed tuition and the cost of education.

@ClassicRockerDad -

The $41K figure does not mention research grants.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/04/06/are-harvard-yale-and-stanford-really-public-universities/?utm_term=.9c9bf466de93

The top 91 schools control 74 percent of the total college endowment in this country. It is time they pay their fair share of taxes to help support the other 1,500 colleges that are not privileged with large endowments.

74

Wait! Are you advocating wealth redistribution? :slight_smile:

75

For those who think that the instate options are affordable in the NE, I can speak for MA and say that the flagship certainly is not. Household income of $48K, EFC of somewhere around $6K, COA $24K for the honors program including the Abigail Adams scholarship of $1800 and $2000 merit aid, which appears to be the estimated max for top in-state students. There are some of the state schools that ran around $20K or so.

We set the budget at the flagship price and D had five acceptances that came in at or under that price, most in the top 50 LACs list. I thank goodness for merit money and preferential packaging, it allowed my D some “affordable” choices, if you can consider $25K a year on household income of $48K affordable.

76

https://lendedu.com/blog/student-loan-debt-statistics-by-state-by-school may be an interesting look at student loan debt levels by state and school.

Note that several northeastern states like NH, MA, RI, CT, NJ, and PA are among those with average student loan debt over $30,000. IA, MN, ND, and SC also cross the $30,000 average. UT, NM, CA, AZ, NV, WY, and HI are among the lower range with average student loan debt under $24,000.

77

I’m signing off, because this thread has turned into what it always does when this topic comes up. Everyone is being civil, which I appreciate, but the point I was trying to make is being lost in the shuffle I am afraid. I am not here to argue what people should feel, and how much they should have saved, who is a better parent, who values and appreciates education, etc.

The pricing structure of higher education is terribly out of whack, no matter where you live or how much your income is, yet we continue to tolerate it. We play along with a system where virtually every private has a sticker price of $65-$70K, regardless of quality, and which demands detailed financial information from each of us before they decide what price we will be charged. It’s insulting and outrageous. It violates the basic rules of fairness that we expect sellers of products to abide by in every other area of our lives.

Despite this, we not only tolerate this situation, but we fall all over ourselves praising these institutions. How wonderful they are for setting these arbitrary prices, and then pretending to lower the prices to an amount specially tailored to each family, to just nearly break them financially, but not quite all the way. And don’t even get me started on the schools that gap the needy families.

All I wanted to do was point out that, for whatever reason, the schools have decided that the upper middle class is expendable. They really don’t care of they lose them. They have wealthy domestic and foreign students, and then they have needy students in various degrees, that they select for unknown reasons, but they keep capped at obviously defined percentages. They probably also have undisclosed caps on the various degrees of need as well, since their Pell Grant percentages are suspiciously flat over time. The numbers tell the story, year after year. It’s there if you want to open you eyes and see it.

I have great sympathy for the challenges of low income and middle income people on this forum. I have lurked here for years and I have absorbed the pain and the fear and the hopes of countless parents and students. I have a fairly sophisticated understanding of the challenges faced by the various folks who frequent this place.

My only point, from the beginning of this thread, is that the current system works for no one except the very wealthy.

I have room in my heart to feel the pain of all of you as you try your best to help your kids to succeed. I wish there was room in your hearts to feel the pain of the upper middle class kids as well.

We are all in this together. Let’s try to be kind to each other.

By the way, I have long had a higher education plan in place for my family. I am not happy about it, but I am a very practical person. This place has been a real eye opener and I made the tough decisions years ago.

78

But they do weight GPA more heavily than test scores. This favors less rigorous schools which typically have a higher proportion of URM applicants.

Looking at high school graduation in California has become less relevant as the standards for graduation drop. What is relevant is the percentage of UC eligible students in each group.

79

It also works for the bureaucrats that administer the system.

80

I think quietlylurking expressed what a lot of people in my NE state feel. I don’t completely blame people for not making the sacrifices we did, because we caught a lot of social flack and were the objects of some concealed disdain for our frugal lifestyle over the years. We had to frequently politely decline lunches and dinners out, golf and ski weekends, destination weddings at resorts, etc. and that had negative consequences for our relationships. Even doing that, we still needed FA and were blessed to receive it. FA brought private school prices down to the level of our state university. Nevertheless, $25,000 x 4 x 3 is still $300,000. Not chump change.