Looks like white (non-Latino/Hispanic) high school graduates make up about 30.3% of UC/CSU eligible high school graduates according to http://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/stgradnum.asp?cChoice=StGrdEth2&cYear=2015-16&cLevel=State&cTopic=Graduates&myTimeFrame=S&submit1=Submit . For comparison, 41.5% are Latino/Hispanic, 15.0% are Asian (non-Latino/Hispanic), 4.6% are black (non-Latino/Hispanic), and 4.5% are Filipino (non-Latino/Hispanic).
“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.”
I hope you and all other posters who feel this way are voting for political representatives, both locally and nationally, who actually want to make higher education more accessible and supporting funding for public options which can service people from all walks of life.
"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.
I don’t really get this gripe. You can pay the sticker price. If you want to be considered for a discount, i.e. taking some of the school’s resources, you play by their rules. Or you attend public schools. Or you seek out merit aid, most of which doesn’t require disclosing your financial statement.
“Despite this, we not only tolerate this situation, but we fall all over ourselves praising these institutions.”
So, step off the hamster wheel. Don’t play the prestige game. I can’t think of one state in the northeast that doesn’t have a state school which will provide a decent education for a lot less money than a private. Attending a private is a choice and a luxury. It’s the Porsche or Audi, not the Chevy Cruze or Honda Civic.
@noname87 said this back in post #31:
“Schools provide a lot more services today then when you went to school. A lot of this is driven by demands of the students and parents. They want diversity (economic and geographic), tutoring centers, well staffed heath centers, well equipped labs, computer centers, fancy gyms, nice dorms, great food options, great student centers and so on. Guess what, that cost money.”
Very, very true. Comparing schools today to the schools we attended back in the 70s or 80s is like comparing apples to oranges. These institutions are much different and have a much different cost structure than they did back then.
@Quietlylurking I am 100% with you mate. College admissions and education is all about $$$ and if your in that bracket of not being fabulously wealthy but not eligible for need based aid you are going to take it in the shorts. I refused to play the game, and it is a game, rigged in favour of the universities and the super wealthy.
81 Compare US colleges and universities to the no frill German universities (no dorms, no gyms, no sports, just buildings with classrooms and offices and maybe a library). They can afford to give their kids free college education. Our priority is not the same as theirs.
Maybe this is the problem. Going to college should be to get the best education possible, not to attend the school with the best sport team, gym or dorm. Dorms and food are bad in most colleges anyway.
“My only point, from the beginning of this thread, is that the current system works for no one except the very wealthy.”
Sort of like the K-12 system, taxes and now healthcare !
Re: #83, #84
But if a college offered top quality academics leading to a bachelor’s degree with all of the essential academic services, but no frills (think of the amenities of a community college), and lower costs, would it be considered desirable?
@Zinhead: “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.”
This is somewhat true, but at the elite privates, the cost of education is typically more than even the full list tuition cost (they do dip in to their endowment for that).
At the less elite privates where cost of education is less than the listed tuition, there are typically pretty steep discounts and most students there do not pay full tuition.
CUNY is like that. It provides a first rate college education.
“The pricing structure of higher education is terribly out of whack, …”
Yes. I think that it is out of whack in more than one dimension. I think that there is a failure of university administrators to keep costs under control. Some of this may be due to university ranking systems where the university can improve its ranking by spending money (eg, the huge volume of ads that I assume most of us started getting right after the first PSAT has to cost something). Some of it may be due to the need to have fancy buildings and great athletic facilities, whether to attract students or to further improve rankings. Some of it might be because they can charge more and people will borrow the money to somehow pay. There is also an apparent randomness of cost and games that we are supposed to play to try to get the price down. It is ugly. I continue to wonder why McGill can house, feed, and educate an American for 1/2 the price of a comparable US institution. I don’t think that it is because the Quebecois are eager to spend their tax money to educate English-speaking Americans.
“Despite this, we not only tolerate this situation, but we fall all over ourselves praising these institutions.”
I feel fairly strongly that the very fine universities where I attended have abandoned my kids. I remember this every time that they call asking for money. I therefore do NOT fall all over myself praising these institutions, regardless of how much I loved at least one of them when I was there.
“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 if they lose them.”
One thing that reading CC has done for me: It has made it clear that other folks also have a tough time with this. For the upper middle class a university costing $70,000 per year is painful, but $20,000 per year is affordable. For someone making $30,000 a year with no savings, $20,000 per year per kid is a lot of money.
But then, for someone who is in the upper middle class because 40+ years ago they had great grades and multiple 800’s on the SAT and were in some URM class that got them into a top university, and now that puts them into a different class so that their kids with even higher grades can’t get into the same top university, the in-state $20,000 school is not what the kids aspire to. These aspirations might be a big part of the issue since here in New England most (or all?) of the states have very good in-state options.
“So, step off the hamster wheel. Don’t play the prestige game.”
This is probably the best advice. If enough people say “no” to outrageous prices, and also say “no” to alma maters who call and ask for donations right after sending us newsletters that say that they are trying to avoid kids in our racial/ethnic group, then the universities would need to adopt. There are affordable and sensible and academically very good options out there. As long as we go to extreme lengths to find a way to send our kids to the big name prestigious schools, they will keep doing what they are doing.
But to be fair, however bad all of this is, it is not as bad as the excessive amount of stress that the system puts on our kids.
“excessive amount of stress that the system puts on our kids”
A lot of the stress I see in young people these days starts with their parents and their parents’ expectations, quite honestly. These kids aren’t operating in a vacuum. They pick up on parental concerns and preferences.
“But if a college offered top quality academics leading to a bachelor’s degree with all of the essential academic services, but no frills (think of the amenities of a community college), and lower costs, would it be considered desirable?”
@ucbalumnus – good question, and my inkling is that it won’t be considered desirable if you feel you’re entitled to Tufts, Cornell or some other country-clubbish LAC.
That said, more and more Americans start their education at a community college and continue it at low-frills state schools, usually while working a bit and not really having time to enjoy the amenities. And they still come out with debt. That’s what we should be frustrated by… not that a privileged students’ options are more limited today than his/her privileged parent’s options back in the 70’s.
Maybe I’m being harsh, but my response to the OP: oh, cry me a river…
Good point by @ucbalumnus.
Note, @kepakemapa & @NoVADad99, and German unis (and McGill & probably other Canadian unis) are no-frills in academic and career development areas as well. The typical German uni experience is attending large lectures where you just hear the professor talk. Then taking tests at the end of the year/term where you showed how much you learned. Mostly self-study. Hardly anything in the way of career services. European undergrads don’t typically participate in research. Most European unis offer virtually no flexibility; you only get to take the courses in your degree track.
Many of our privates (and honors colleges at many publics) offer funded research/internship/travel abroad experiences, free writing centers, advisors to help you get prestigious honors/scholarships/grants, trips to faraway cities to land internships. How much of that do you think is available at a tuition-free German uni?
I know someone who is an undergrad at a top UK uni. They have to write proposals and compete for performance space to stage plays, etc. Even in the '90’s, at an Ivy-equivalent that had a ton of different theatre productions all the time, large and small, performance space was never a concern for anyone. We had a ton of them and they sat free most of the time. In the UK, France, and other European unis, students have to get to the library way early in the morning to find a space to study weeks before the big exams come around. The schools where I attended, quiet study spaces like the libraries would be pretty crowded around finals, but “not able to find a quiet place to study” would seem like something out of the Third World.
It’s fashionable to bash the high costs of American higher ed (and they are insanely high), but the reason they are so high is because the top ones come loaded with amenities and not all of them are non-scholastic. And evidently, most of the most desirable American applicants would rather try to get in to one of those loaded high-list-price American unis than a no-frills tuition-free German-style one.
@NoVADad99: What first-hand experience do you have with CUNY?
This picture doesn’t look all that pretty:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/nyregion/dreams-stall-as-cuny-citys-engine-of-mobility-sputters.html
@ClassicRockerDad I think yours is the best post I have ever read on this site.
I didn’t attend CUNY. HS classmates went there. I hung out at Queens College a couple of times. In the 70s it was free to everyone. It was going downhill, but you can still get a good education if you worked hard and studied.
May I say that I find this thread extremely interesting, but not entirely due to the surface debate. Underneath, I think, is the ongoing confusion of what these terms mean: “middle class”, “upper middle class” and so on. There are relative terms, descriptors in comparison. The problem is: in comparison to what? In statistical terms, an annual family income of 60-80K may constitute a middle class income; one of $150-200K would be considered upper middle class. However, compare current family “reach” - the ability to fund college educations, vacations, retirement - $150-200K would barely compare with much lower income levels (in constant dollars) of decades past. The massive shift of wealth to the “1%” means that what used to be “upper middle class” is now a struggling middle to lower middle class" and those who delude themselves into thinking that they are “middle class” are really “debtor class”, struggling to make payments for status markers - houses, cars, student loans. When the currency devalues, it’s like a massive tax hike, as folks are “making more” and moving into higher tax brackets, but the value of what they are getting is lessened.This, imo, is the subtext of the OP’s lament.
Perhaps more than ever, parents who want to be able to pay for their kids to go to expensive schools – or any school – need to be saving and investing early.
We all make choices with our money, and the more we spend on ourselves, the less we will have left to spend on them. Nobody owes us the fruits of their labor or money that was willfully given to them, and we cannot begrudge a school for wanting to build a large endowment. I’m sure a lot of the people who donate to the school want the school to invest it wisely and increase said endowment. The profit motive is integral to any economy based in liberty, because without it everything stops. Without liberty, our way of life stops.
So let’s be aware of college price levels and manage ourselves – careers, education, budgets, etc. – to be better prepared financially.
Our universities are expensive not just because loans are available, not just because of the usual supply and demand dynamics; they are expensive because quality costs money.
Sure, take away demand or increase supply and price will fall some. But unless we expect facuity and staff to be cut or to work for less, we’re going to still have to pay for the quality we’ve come to expect. There are a lot of factors at work in this mess and there are no simple answers. So money/budget management is key.
Ahem…
“Our universities are expensive not just because loans are available, not just because of the usual supply and demand dynamics; they are expensive because quality costs money.”
Compare the real dollar cost of high level universities 50 years ago to now. Are these programs so much better now due to their hugely higher costs? In truth, universities today are money making machines, essentially hedge fund, patent and real estate entities with tuition and athletic revenues as additional streams. “Quality costs money”? Talk to faculty about their compensation vis a vis administrators, the stripe mining of tenured faculty, replaced by pauper level adjuncts. “Faculty and staff?”
These are profit focused entities with terrific tax shelters on federal, state and local levels. As costs spiral upwards, is there a commensurate rise in value? Discuss.
Many of the top 91 are state universities. Are you targeting privates or publics with your comments? Are you suggesting publics should also lose their tax exempt status?