What does "afford" mean to you?

Parent Cafe
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<p>I think that’s probably right. But there are some of us who are also averse to encouraging our children to take on debt, especially if the only purpose of the debt is to allow them to attend a more prestigious and more expensive school.</p>

<p>If there is a good reason for taking on a modest amount of debt, then it makes sense to do so. Our D considered just such a move because her second-choice, less-expensive school did not have her preferred major. We would have supported that decision - to the extent of covering part of the additional cost for her. She ultimately decided that graduating debt-free was more important, a decision that we also supported.</p>

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<p>Annasdad, I borrowed the entire amount for my MBA. So the opportunity cost of leaving my job (the program was full time) plus the loans- clearly crazy. My starting salary after the MBA was more than triple what I had been making before B-school. Interest rates in the early 80’s were astronomical compared to what they are today.</p>

<p>Best decision I ever made. Debt is a tool. Some people are risk averse (and your D is clearly among that group) which is fine. Others are not. But risk can be modeled; you can backstop that risk; you can look at alternative plans and choose the one that has the best outcome. I would never tell any kid that graduating debt free is the most important outcome of getting an education. It is one element among many.</p>

<p>There are many families who should not take on any educational debt for their children’s education. And you may deride the program I attended as being no better than many other institutions which also offer an MBA. I could have attended at night and kept my job; I could have worked for another decade to save up enough to cover my tuition; I could have taken a generous merit offer at a less prestigious institution.</p>

<p>But it doesn’t make me a dupe for doing it- and the outcome (on purely financial terms) simply could not have been achieved at a less prestigious institution. The place that hired me doesn’t recruit from ABC business school even though the curriculum is probably identical. The company uses the top 5-10 business schools as an efficient sorting device; they’re busy running a multi billion dollar enterprise and don’t have time to read 100,000 resumes every year. The like the efficiency of the B schools doing the sorting for them; the schools hand over a resume book every year with a couple of hundred resumes, and then the company cherry picks a few dozen from each school to interview, and then makes their hires. Cheap, easy, seems to work well.</p>

<p>I can’t imagine suggesting to my kid that they attend a college without their prospective major if I could afford to help bridge the gap. That’s me.</p>

<p>But debt is not a demon (contrary to your posts.) Debt is a tool and like all tools, has its function.</p>

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<p>Did you actually read my post - the part where I said:</p>

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<p>And my comments in general refer to undergraduate education. I would make no representations about graduate and professional schools - you may well be right when it comes to MBAs. Though I did quite well for many years with my night school BS and my night school MBA, both from a university you probably haven’t ever heard of, I was an independent consultant, and what I knew and how I used what I knew were a lot more important to my clients than my pedigree.</p>

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<p>I did offer to help bridge the gap. She made the decision. I would have supported her either way.</p>

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<p>Were you actually to read my posts, you’d see that I don’t consider debt a “demon” - you’d have seen that I’m currently refinancing to take some equity out of my house. (Of course, the equity is there to take out because I resisted the temptation to borrow back when money was easy and value were inflated, because at that time I had no good use for the money.)</p>

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<p>Annasdad,</p>

<p>Can you provide links to studies that show that the outcomes for kids at Cleveland State and at Harvard are the same? Because that doesn’t match with either my own experiences or what I observe from looking at friends and co-workers. However, I recognize that what I have is anecdotal so I’d be interested to see the research.</p>

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<p>Curiousjane, I would not summarize the research in quite that way. Of course, the average HYPSM graduate is going to be more intelligent and academically accomplished than the average Cleveland State graduate. But the average HYPSM matriculant is more intelligently and academically accomplished than the average Cleveland State matriculant. In other words, the average HYPSM student has far more potential starting out than the average Cleveland State student, so it’s no great feat for those schools to turn out superior graduates.</p>

<p>What the researchers (multiple studies over a period of 30 years) have done is try to control for the entering characteristics of the students, then with those controls in place, looked for statistically significant improvements in learning and tried to correlate them with a number of factors.</p>

<p>Here’s a summary of what they found (from Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini, “How College Affects Students, Volume 2: A Third Decade of Research.” San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005): “The dimensions along which American colleges are typically categorized, ranked, and studied, such as type of control, size, and selectivity, are simply not linked with important differences in student learning, change, or development. Despite structural and organizational differences, institutions are more alike than different in their effects on students. After adjusting for the characteristics of the students enrolled, the degree of net change that students experience at various categories of institutions is essentially the same.” (p. 641)</p>

<p>[Amazon.com:</a> How College Affects Students: A Third Decade of Research (Jossey-Bass Higher & Adult Education) (9780787910440): Ernest T. Pascarella, Patrick T. Terenzini: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/How-College-Affects-Students-Jossey-Bass/dp/0787910449/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337483069&sr=8-1]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/How-College-Affects-Students-Jossey-Bass/dp/0787910449/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337483069&sr=8-1)</p>

<p>The same source also lists factors that research shows do distinguish colleges in the degree of educational attainment their students obtain:</p>

<p>“student involvement in the academic and nonacademic systems of an institution, the nature and frequency of student contact with peers and faculty members, interdisciplinary or integrated core curricula that emphasize making explicit connections across courses and among ideas and disciplines, pedagogies that encourage active student engagement in learning and encourage application of what is being learned in real and meaningful settings, campus environments that emphasize scholarship and provide opportunities for students to encounter different kinds of people and ideas, and environments that emphasize scholarship and support exploration, whether intellectual or personal.” (p. 642)</p>

<p>The problem is that there is not good data on what colleges do better jobs at those factors - and they don’t correlate with prestige, selectivity, or any other commonly available factors.</p>

<p>If you want further information, please refer to the source. I’ve learned that getting into long debates about the subject here is pretty pointless, so I’m not going to get into it further on this thread. The data shows what the data shows.</p>

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<p>I was accepted to our state U with a full ride and monthly stipend, and to a very good LAC with work study and some parental contribution. I told my father that I would be happy to go to our state U knowing I had 3 siblings behind me. My mother thought it was a great choice, but my father told me to go to the LAC. As an 18 year old, I didn’t know better, but I didn’t want to be additional burden to my parents. Looking back, I will always be grateful for my father’s permission to go to the LAC. I didn’t feel I had the right to ask him to pay extra and I wasn’t going to talk him into it. My college education was a life changing experience for me. It is something I would always be grateful to my father for.</p>

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<p>Affordability, in addition to the financial end of it, requires parents to really ‘know’ their child before a final college decision is made. It is definitely a leap of faith to analyze your 18-year-old’s tendencies, study habits & idiosyncracies and say that he/she would do just as well at Tier 2 or 3 LAC with great merit aid over a high-powered research U. with no merit aid that would cost $100K MORE than the LAC over 4 years. It’s the dilemma of parents trying to do right by their kid, sometimes at the expense of their own lifestyle or retirement. And sometimes that pricier choice ends up being the right choice.</p>

<p>This type of decision is made in different variations time & time again, every spring. Bottom line is you just don’t know. That’s why it’s SO important to get out there early junior year of HS, visit, do research, start out with a laundry list of schools & eventually narrow it down to a manageable number of applications. Only then can you get a sense of what your kid wants, and what you feel comfortable spending.</p>

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<p>I agree. When we think about college costs the conversation often turns to what the student’s anticpated income will be, and whether they will be able to pay back loans. But for us a big part of the decision of what we can afford is anticipated costs after college. Yes, we can probably manage to pay our eoc for a more expensive college right now, but what will that mean down the road? I have seen, with my mother, that health issues can arise, making working to expected retirement impossible, while cost of insurance and care can go up dramatically. There are many scenarios that can quickly change a family’s financial picture. </p>

<p>We don’t know what the future will hold for the student or the parents, but I think both should be on our minds when we determine what we think we can afford.</p>

<p>Right now, to answer the original question, afford means to me that IF there is real value to a more expensive choice, and we can do it with no debt, contribute to retirement and maintain an emergency fund…then we would probably decide that we can ‘afford’ it.</p>

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<p>I have noticed in my life how different it is for people, the meaning of the word and the idea of being able to afford something. I think it depends on what it is that you are paying for, for one. We all have a lifestyle that we are accustomed to. In my opinion, being able to afford something is being able to buy it while still living within the same lifestyle.</p>

<p>If the payments are not going to change that particular way that you live then, it won’t be missed. If it was for something as important as getting the kids to college then it would be more important to use extra money for that instead of using it to save for later.</p>

<p>The amount of debt as a whole that you would take on, for me does have limits though. And the amount that i would put out for college is limited too. It also depends on how much effort is being added from my child. If she is working and paying for some things, as well as working to keep the grades i would be more willing to pay more as opposed to her not caring or failing.</p>

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<p>Annasdad, the real world doesn’t operate controlling for inputs and outputs. In the real world, you either get to graduate from Cleveland State or another institution, and you spend the rest of your life either explaining that you were indeed smart enough to have attended other institution but felt that the marginal improvement in your educational experience of the more expensive place was nowhere near what it would have cost you in dollars and sense. Choose whichever institution best meets your needs and your pocket book, but claiming that people who go into debt to finance a Harvard education for their kid are idiots for not realizing how much money they could save by getting the same experience someplace much cheaper that only the truly elite have heard of is not an argument supported by facts.</p>

<p>I pointed out my MBA experience only to show you that “prestige” is clearly in the eyes of the beholder- the MBA curriculum from school to school is virtually identical. Everyone takes accounting, marketing, operations research, etc. and it is ludicrous to think that the experience of learning how to do a discounted cash flow analysis is materially different at HBS vs. University of New Haven. But that “prestige” you so deride has actual and measurable impact in the marketplace- and not just in that first job, but over the long haul. </p>

<p>I can’t imagine that anything I learned in business school justified the salary my first company was paying me. But the first thing you learn in Econ 1- it’s called a labor market for a reason.</p>

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<p>blossom I think annasdad is pointing out there are various roads to the same place. We all have anecdotal stories of graduates from “less prestigious schools” that ended up in the same place or “higher” than graduates of so called top notch schools. He is saying it is the person not the school.
Feel free to correct me if I am reading this the wrong way.</p>

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<p>That’s close to my position, Tom, but I would put it slightly differently: What a student does while they are at college is what determines the ultimate value of the student’s undergraduate education, and matters far more than where they go to college, because the opportunities to do those high-payoff activities exist at almost every college. </p>

<p>But as I said, it’s pointless to continually argue this with people who are worried that if they go to a no-name college they’ll have to spend the rest of their lives justifying their choice to other people. And to repeat: the data is the data; it changes some minds, but not all.</p>

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<p>Okay- so you are saying that a students that take advantage of the opportunies provided at the majority of colleges can have can have an equal educational experience to that offerred at the elite schools. I can see that.</p>

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<p>recalling a phrase from back in my day that I shared with my son at the beginning of his college search…“Bloom where you are planted”</p>

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<p>One of these days I am going to have to read that study to see if I agree that it actually says what annasdad tells us it says. But life is short and I’m afraid the study may not be.</p>

<p>The problem with studies is that they cannot predict individual outcomes. And most of us here are concerned about our own individual kids. We know them better than Pascarella and Terenzini do. Our knowledge of our own children is what’s important here. We may indeed simply know that a large directional state university is not the place for that particular child to receive the best possible education. It may be for some - wonderful. It may not be for mine - also wonderful, given the diversity of higher education in the US.</p>

<p>Perhaps I am misreading you, annasdad, but the tenor of your posts seems to be that the least expensive option is always just as good as the pricier ones. It’s fine to point out that a committed student can receive an education at the lowest-cost school that’s “just as good” as at the pricier options. But we have many threads each year detailing the falling-apart of previously committed students; and “can” does not equal “will.”</p>

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<p>But would that same “falling apart” student have fallen apart regardless of which school he/she was attending? Who knows? </p>

<p>My S2 fell apart his first semester at the disparaged directional state u. His falling apart had nothing to do with the school. His circumstances would have caused him to fall apart at the smallest most intimate/highly ranked school in the country.<br>
Some of the threads regarding committed students falling apart have been at “big name” schools.</p>

<p>With the help of his really good advisor, S2 regrouped and graduated in four years.</p>

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<p>True, but my point is that we can’t know in advance that our kid will be that committed student, wherever he or she goes. Which would make me less comfortable in assuming that he or she would get an education equivalent to those at the more prestigious institutions.</p>

<p>I do believe that, for individual students (the only kind I’ve had to support :)), it can be worthwhile to pay more for better-known institutions. Not simply because they’re better-known, but because of what they offer that individual student. I don’t believe that life is over if there’s no Ivy name on the resume; but an Ivy name isn’t going to be a drawback, either. None of my kids have attended Ivies, fwiw - just musing here.</p>

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<p>It’s worse than that. It’s a number of studies compiled over 30 years, all of which report similar outcomes. Might be a bit much to try to absorb at one sitting.</p>

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<p>I would not go that far. I would say that there’s always an affordable alternative that can serve every student well, regardless of that student’s academic merit or the family’s financial situation - and therefore, that it makes no sense to take on huge amounts of debt (or allow one’s kid to) to send a student to a school that is beyond the family’s means to afford with neither debt nor pain.</p>

<p>If a family can pay for an expensive school, then fine. As PizzaGirl said on another thread recently, an expensive school is a luxury good. In my opinion, if you can afford either a new Lexus every year or a full-pay Ivy League education and choose the education, that’s wonderful (and probably what I’d do myself were I in that happy position). If you can afford both, so much the better. But if to do it you and your kid are going to have to jointly take on a huge amount of debt, then yes, I question the wisdom of that decision; and I reject the argument that there’s a correlation between price (or prestige) and quality.</p>

<p>Had you asked me two years ago whether a student could get as good an education at a state directional than at a high-prestige college, I’d have answered, “Don’t be silly.” But then I encountered the data, data compiled by two senior professors of education who have four Ivy league degrees between them and who have spent their lives studying the effect of colleges on students, and allowed myself to be convinced. Call me na</p>

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<p>I’m not going to call you naive. But do you see a teeny bit of irony in citing the 4 Ivy degrees P & T have between them?</p>

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<p>I don’t know, Annasdad, I hear you on here all the time acting as if the institution of higher learning is immaterial, but I think it’s kind of disingenious of you. For one thing, I believe your daughter is going to Truman in Missouri? If this is true, then you are just flying under the radar, acting as if education is easy to get anywhere. Truman is well known as a hidden gem with very high rates of grad school attendance.</p>

<p>I think you are just having us all on, personally. ;)</p>