@“Snowball City” The New England states have reciprocity if your major isn’t offered in your home state: http://www.nebhe.org/programs-overview/rsp-tuition-break/overview/
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Let’s disregard the snipe at the OP, but you have a point, many are country clubs with classrooms - how many climbing walls and sushi bars do we need?"
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another reason for the local CCs to be beefed up a bit academically and allowed to issue non-STEM bachelors degrees. Most CCs do not have the pricey frills. They’re just mainly for education.
Seriously, so many bachelors degree programs don’t need sophisticated labs, etc…let those degrees be issued by CCs.
@AroundHere Just spent an hour on a beautiful spring Saturday watching the lecture you posted a link to in #53. Fascinating. Thanks for the recommendation.
The state flagships in New England are better than some Northeasterners seem to think. They don’t top the USN rankings but they’re not at the bottom either. I think we tend to be spoiled by the plethora of local college options and it results in some New Englanders turning up their noses at some very good offerings. If those privates weren’t so accessible I don’t think you’d see as much concern about the quality of our publics. It reminds me a little of the Modern Family episode where Jay is delighted to have been admitted to his hotel’s “Excelsior Plus” level…until he realizes there’s an “Excelsior Ultra” level.
$14,000/yr. for tuition and fees isn’t cheap but it isn’t going to bankrupt most families either. I know many families who had the option to attend private colleges and got an excellent education at a NE flagship instead. Sometimes they had to work to get the classes they wanted and they didn’t always enjoy as many amenities as their friends at private colleges but the quality of the teaching was solid.
Referencing posts 122 and 53, I wasted an hour watching the video. She undermined her argument with “Share of Undergraduate Revenue Paid by Students”. It’s shortly after 28 minutes in. Basically she’s assuming future donations made by alumni as what they “pay”, but later refers to military members receiving the GI Bill as not having “paid” for their educations.
Did you mean most upper middle and beyond families?
Because when the median family income is between 50 & 60k, yes, 14k can bankrupt more than half of families.
Median family income of families with college age kids is higher than 60K.
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2016/09/16/median-household-incomes-by-age-bracket-1967-2015
In the Northeast this number is probably well over 80K for many states.
Point taken @romanigypsyeyes, but I was thinking of this in terms of the OP’s situation-families who make too much for financial aid but not enough to pay $60,000 a year. In those cases it seems reasonable to pay the $14,000 in tuition it costs to attend a state flagship like UConn or UMass Amherst.
Somebody moved OP’s Brie and now you are offering her yellow American cheese.
This is insulting given that she was quite reasonable and did not even ask for something like Rambol aux Noix (an elusive mating/networking powerhouse)
OP might think it’s american cheese but it’s actually a quite versatile, locally produced cheddar that should be proudly served without qualifications.
^^A post that uses the word “angry” over and over cannot claim to be “reasonable.” Poster has a right to her emotions, but that doesn’t make the cause justified. The fact is that millions of upper middle class kids go to private schools, certainly at rates higher than middle/lower-middle/low-income kids. And millions of others get wonderful educations at public schools. So the “angry” motif is puzzling.
That’s a whole lot of anger, but at least this gave me a good laugh:
@planner03 I agree. I was gobsmacked. The logic failure amused me too in claiming to bridge the gap and then saying that the wealthy snubbed them.
^^^
I was thinking that she really meant that instead of having two extremes at a univ…wealthy who can pay, and low income on lots of aid, with few in-between, that previously pricier schools had kids from all income ranges.
That’s life. Sounds a lot like real estate in places like Manhattan, SF, Silicon Valley, etc. Where’s all the outrage about the lack of ‘bridging’ residential opportunities in those places 
?
As a former low income student, I don’t appreciate being regarded as the token poor kid or the attitudes of people who treat us like social and academic charity cases. It’s presumptuous to believe that we need “mediators” to help us connect with upper income students.
I attended a private school with students from both wealthy and middle income families. They were just like everybody else. Some were great people and others weren’t. In my experience, the wealthiest students were the friendliest. I never felt snubbed by them, or uncomfortable in their presence, and I certainly didn’t need a middle income student to “bridge” whatever preconceived “gap” she or he imagined existed. There are lots of reasons to advocate for representation of middle income families on college campuses, but this isn’t one of them.
However, upper level courses are more expensive to teach, since instructors with specialized knowledge to teach them are less common than instructors who can teach lower level courses. So a CC with some BA/BS degree programs would likely have to increase its prices for such programs.
@Sue22
Agree with you. I know a few kids who chose UVM over higher ranked privates, not necessarily for finances, but because they loved all that it has to offer. And for Engineering and Nursing UCONN is a great choice.
When we first started looking at colleges and universities for my daughter, like many, we experienced considerable sticker shock. After we figured out how need/merit-based aid worked, where it was offered (or not), and that we did not qualify for much need-based aid, we confronted the reality that we would not have infinite choice. I’ll admit to some momentary disappointment that Vassar was not going to be an option for my D, but I got over it. Most people don’t have infinite choice. Many have no choice.
I applied to two colleges in the Northeast back in the 1980s. One was my “mediocre” state flagship with COA of 2,200 per year. The other was an extremely selective LAC, costing 11K per year. The cost differential between the two was 1:5. Today, the differential between those same schools is roughly 1:3.
The cost relative to income, of course, has gone up. The price of that LAC has risen by more than a factor of 6 over the last 30 years, while the salary my father earned has increased by a factor of 2-2.5 during that same time period.
So, yes, today full pay at the most selective (and formerly less selective) NE LACs and private universities is a luxury Middle and upper middle class families have to sacrifice, commit to a lifetime of frugality and disciplined saving, possibly incur loans, or go elsewhere. If your kid has good academic stats and you’re willing to contemplate the Midwest or the South, there are many fine public and private options where merit can reduce the COA by 30-40% of list price. There are a few standouts that even offer full tuition for the truly exceptional.
BTW, I didn’t go to that selective LAC. I went to the state flagship with a scholarship. It was a good experience both academically and socially and it gave me the tools I needed to succeed in life. No suffering involved or required.
I no longer live in the NE, but I envy the choice that is available there. I would love to have hundreds of options located within a day’s drive, including those not-so-mediocre publics and “no-name” privates.
The unspoken truth within the corporate recruiting community… there are a LOT of departments at Rutgers that are significantly stronger and more rigorous than their counterparts at Colgate, Colby, Hamilton, Lehigh (even though those four colleges get a LOT of love from the types of families the OP is likely describing). There are a LOT of programs at Baruch that attract significantly stronger students (just on an academic basis) than Villanova, even though Villanova is considered an 'elite" business program among the types of families that OP is likely describing while Baruch is not. And I could give you a list of engineering programs at Public U’s which are considered “better than” many of the privates which the tax/tuition squeezed upper middle class (or middle class) families that the OP is describing love to brag about.
My point?
Caveat Emptor. If you can afford the “elite” college that your kid gets in to (whether by saving aggressively, getting help from a grandparent, living very frugally) and you think it’s 'worth" the sacrifice- then terrific. If you can’t- just know that your anger isn’t productive. It is contributing to the sense of entitlement that your kid’s generation is getting tagged with, it certainly adds fuel to the fire that Rutgers or Binghamton aren’t “good enough” for your special snowflake (facts be damned), and it serves to further demonize the poor… who have their own struggles and issues and don’t need the handful of kids from impoverished backgrounds having to wear the mantle of cheating an upper middle class or middle class kid out of his rightful seat at Princeton or Middlebury.
I see your anger in real life and it’s just not productive. Friends who make the decision NOT to sell the beach house in order to afford a private U, and then spend the four years their kid is at Stonybrook complaining that it’s a suitcase school. Colleagues at work whose kids took the merit offer at Alabama and then complain that their kid can’t come home for cousin Susie’s baby shower and grandma’s 75 birthday party because the flights back to the Northeast are too expensive to go back and forth every other week. And most maddening- the folks whose kids took merit offers at Drexel and places like that and then complain that other people don’t appreciate how elite those programs are.
If your kid is getting a solid, rigorous education which is recognized as such by employers and graduate programs, do you really care what your neighbors think? If your kid is learning how to think and how to question and how to read and write in a disciplined and rigorous fashion, how important is it that their school is “lower ranked” than the one you attended back when dinosaurs roamed the earth?