<p>College will alsways be expensive until people realize that the amount of knowledge a person has is not proportional to their college's USNEWS ranking.</p>
<p>"But back to the OP, do any of you have any ideas about how the costs of a collge education could be reduced without sacrificing quality?"</p>
<p>It already has been - consider the spread of really excellent community colleges across the country.</p>
<p>"I thought that for private insitutions, the FAFSA information is used by these institutions to make finaid decisions."</p>
<p>Correct and that means they know how much free money there is and they will spend every dime of it. There is absolutrly no incentive for the colleges to control costs when a third party is paying.</p>
<p>In the current setup the public doesn't even know what the actual price for a college education is. The sticker price is meaningless because of all the preferential pricing schemes used. What you would see happen if colleges did not have access to your tax forms is that the sticker price wold have to fall more in line with actual price charged the average customer.</p>
<p>Now would the universities still give institutional aid in this new regime and how would they do it? Well there would be three tacks they could take. One is to use the finaid to reduce the price across the board. Two is to turn it all into merit aid. The third is to use it to bargain for those "holistic" admits they really want. </p>
<p>Would such a system be more or less fair to the poor? I don't know. It would certainly benefit the middle class and put even more admissions pressure on the rich in the form of more kids willing to apply ED with lower sticker prices from the schools. All in all though I would rather put competitive market pressures on the schools to lower these make believe sticker prices and control costs. If this forces them to us institutional money to lower the costs so be it. We can always increase direct aid to students from the government.</p>
<p>I mean stop for a minute and consider if we administered the food stamp program the way we do Pell Grants and Stafford Loans. Saheway and HarrisTeeter with their own finaid offices deciding exactly what kind of package they were going to offer Janet versus Jack.</p>
<p>"Would such a system be more or less fair to the poor? I don't know. It would certainly benefit the middle class and put even more admissions pressure on the rich in the form of more kids willing to apply ED with lower sticker prices from the schools."</p>
<p>Wouldn't benefit the middle class. It would just benefit the top quintile who like to think of themselves as being in the middle. Median family income in the U.S. is around $55k - let me know how it would benefit folks 10% to either side of it ($45k - $62k.)</p>
<p>*
if we administered the food stamp program the way we do Pell Grants and Stafford Loans. Saheway and HarrisTeeter with their own finaid offices deciding exactly what kind of package they were going to offer Janet versus Jack.*</p>
<p>might be a good thing-
Janet is on foodstamps because she is in community college and only has a part time job- trying to give her child a better life- vs
Jack- who is a drug dealer to keep his income under the table- so his resume is very spotty and isn't looking for significant work</p>
<p>I don't have a problem with helping Janet- Jack not so much</p>
<p>Mind you in my world the FAFSA does not go away, but it is just between the family and the government. Government aid is then set up in such a way as to meet a percentage of the determined need, possibly on a sliding scale with higher need kids having a higher percentage met. Whatdo you use as the target tuition? Make the average state school tuition or the average tuition or whatever seems an appropriate target. </p>
<p>This essentially amounts to a voucher good for post secondary education and with that voucher in hand the student then negotiates his best deal but the school needs to at as much of an information deficit as the student and his family are to make this negotiation work. Right now the school sits there and knows your exact net worth, liquidity, obligations etc and you know squat about their costs or abilty to make concessions. It is an incredibly imbalanced negotiation.</p>
<p>I looked up the Common Data Set for Princeton (which reports 0 for athletic scholarships, btw).</p>
<p>For the year 2005-6, it had 4,719 undergraduates (plus around 200 part-timers who will not figure in the following calculations.</p>
<p>Princeton disbursed $59,208,200 in financial aid, which consisted of
$2,245,900 in federal aid
$$449,499 in state aid
$2,915,100 in outside scholarships (NMF,Rotary, and so on).</p>
<p>If all the scholarship monies were used to lower tuition, room and board instead of providing financial aid, the total cost would be lower by $12,500, bringing it down to around $32k.</p>
<p>OK, but many, many people have EFCs under $32K. What do they do?</p>
<p>
[quote]
Princeton disbursed $59,208,200 in financial aid, which consisted of
$2,245,900 in federal aid
$$449,499 in state aid
$2,915,100 in outside scholarships (NMF,Rotary, and so on).
[/quote]
</p>
<p>These numbers don't seems to add up.</p>
<p>$32K - that includes room and board and Princeton's is exorbitant but for starters you've got to feed junior whether he goes to college or not. Take room and board out of the equation. Also remember there are a multitude of tax breaks, lifetime learning credits etc. For a middle class family that is another 1 or 2 grand off the top. When you get through with that you didn't really think you were going to go for free did you?</p>
<p>Yeah you will have to money some money and some or all of the interest may be subsidized depending on what you can talk your legislator in to doing :-) Bottom line is if you want a private education it is still going to cost you something. We are just talking about controling the rising costs here.</p>
<p>Oops, I left out $53,597,900 from Princeton.</p>
<p>momfromme:</p>
<p>This is why it would not work to merely use the monies set aside for financial aid to reduce tution and fess across the board. Lots of people still could not afford to pay $32k per year. Which ones? This is where declaring income (hence FAFSA) comes into play. If you don't need financial aid, Princeton et al do not need to know the state of your finances.</p>
<p>"Wouldn't benefit the middle class. It would just benefit the top quintile who like to think of themselves as being in the middle. Median family income in the U.S. is around $55k - let me know how it would benefit folks 10% to either side of it ($45k - $62k.)"</p>
<p>OK technically you are right MINI, but these folks are screwed anyway. If God wanted them at elite schools he wouldn't have made them the sons and daughters of cops and factory workers or he would have made them so intellectually brilliant that there would be no denying them. Life ain't fair. All we can do is try to tweak the rules to make it more so or at least for some people.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, they could RAISE COA to $65k, still have half the students ready and prepared and happy to attend at full price - in fact, they'd fall all over themselves to pay it, and offer much, much better financial aid to everyone who couldn't afford it. </p>
<p>It would be more equitable, and make it much more affordable for the vast majority of folks attending. </p>
<p>You still haven't explained why there should be a policy that would only further benefit the rich, and the top 20%ers at the expense of everyone else, including almost all of the middle class.</p>
<p>Americans say they don't think we should mandate equal outcomes, but that instead we should ensure equal opportunity. Education is THE linchpin of equal opportunity. The private elites are trying (although perhaps they could try harder) to make their educations possible for students and their families.</p>
<p>What is the income/assets level at which the EFC is $32K? I ask because I don't know and, frankly, I am certainly above the median income for my state and we have an EFC that is far below that. $32K is too expensive for there to be equality opportunity.</p>
<p>In my view, we should have a massive expansion of support for education with something like the WWII GI Bill program. Let everyone do a stint of national service, from Americorps to the armed forces. Expand the program like crazy. And then pay tuition for those who put in 3 years or so. No one gets their voucher for doing nothing. And everyone who puts in the time gets it. </p>
<p>The original GI Bill was opposed by the elite college presidents. They wanted a smaller bill, with cutoffs dependent on grades and with coverage for only a year or so. The American Legion worked with unions to call for a much broader bill, one that covered many more people, with 4 years of funding and no grade cut off. And we all know what happened -- it created the American middle class. It was the vehicle of equal economic opportunity. We can do it again. Don't tell me can't afford it. If it's a priority, we can.</p>
<p>When the government gets out of the education financing business...the cost will go down. As long as the government helps pay for loans and grants, the universities have no insentives to keep costs down. Imagine if tomorrow everyone had to pay their way....guess what no one can afford to go to school...yes supply and demand. Cost will go down. Medicine was affordible into the government got involved with medicare...the rest is history.;</p>
<p>Honestly emeraldkity what you say may be try but we spend so little on the actual poor that I really don't get my shorts in a bunch over welfare cheats. If he wants to break the rles to get them that is something that ill alwtas go on.</p>
<p>Maybe 1% of high school graduates go on to "elite private" colleges. Perhaps a discussion of schools that serve the vast majority of US college students might be more fruitful?</p>
<p>EDIT: I'm afraid this sounds like scolding. Sorry about that. It was meant as an actual friendly suggestion to discuss affordability issues on schools that BWRKs attend.</p>
<p>I ran the figures for Bowdoin, which has a student body of 1662. In 2005-2006, its tuition was set at $34,2800, and room and board was set at $9,310 for a total of $43,590. it disbursed about $18,200,000 in financial aid, of which $1,049, 840 came from the federal government, $84,175 was provided by the states (from which students came) and some $773,210 came from outside scholarships (Rotary, NMF, and so forth).<br>
If all the financial aid money had been used to lower tuition, room and board, the total cost would have been reduced by about $10k to $34,500.
If federal and state funds were taken out of the picture, the financial aid pot would be reduced by $1,034,015. This would raise the cost of attendance for all students by around $1k to $35k.</p>
<p>"You still haven't explained why there should be a policy that would only further benefit the rich, and the top 20%ers at the expense of everyone else"</p>
<p>Well mini lets back up here for a minute. The question is how to construct a system where we better control rapidly rising college costs not how do we make the fairest of all possinble worlds. Of the 1900 schools on the USNWR rankings list and the 3500 or so post secondary schools the ones that could write their own tickets and take who they please at full freight number less than 100, probably less than 50 and a bunch of those are tiny little LACs of no real consequence in the total educational picture.</p>
<p>What I am suggesting is a system where the schools cannot put the federal aid money in their pocket first before they even begin to make an offer, set a price. By cutting them out of the info loop they don't know what the customer actually has in their pocket so they have to start someplace more reasonable than the totally bogus sticker price they currently use. They would net to start someplace closer to what they really expect to get. Discount rates of 30% off the list are not unusual even at fairly selective schools. That discount rate represents the real price though the price for student A may be 0 and student B full freight.</p>
<p>Another possible approach to the problem of rising costs would be a parent-student union. If a sigificant chunk of the parents of kids scoring over X on the SAT/ACT agreed to negotiate in common for a price it might also work. If 50% of the parents of kids scoring over 1300 on the SAT simply said we will not send our kid to ANY school that raises tuition more than the CPI next year and stuck to it there would be a revolution in college pricing. </p>
<p>I don't think a parent student union is a very viable idea though as a huge hunk of the households you would need to enlist are very liberal and libs are useless in a fight :-) OK I ought not dreg partisan politics into this. The idea is impractical for a number of reasons.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Discount rates of 30% off the list are not unusual even at fairly selective schools. That discount rate represents the real price though the price for student A may be 0 and student B full freight.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Why is that so? Do you have evidence for this argument?</p>
<p>According to airline pricing, the first class and business class flyers subsidize the coach class travelers. The difference between flying on airplanes and attending college is that on the former, first class and business class passengers get better seats, food and services. In college, the full fare and full ride students are treated the same (thank goodness!).</p>