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<p>Or how’s this: attend a military academy or ROTC. Would serving your country really be such a terrible thing?</p>
<h1>Yet another way is to simply say that donations to certain extremely wealthy universities are no longer tax-deductible for the donors. </h1>
<p>I don’t know if I would go that far. But if it became known that School A is going to exceed its threshold and have to pay taxes, then the donor might look for another college to donate to.</p>
<p>Well, I don’t know about that, I actually think that my idea actually goes less far than yours. After all, the universities have allocated their endowments with the expectations that those endowments can grow tax-free. That is why many of their investments have been placed in illiquid asset classes with long return lead-times, sometimes decades or longer. That is also why endowments rarely invest in tax-advantaged assets such as muni bonds, because the endowments are already shielded from taxes anyway. To then declare that those endowments are no longer allowed to accumulate tax-free (beyond a certain limit) would represent a precipitous change to how those endowments are managed. </p>
<p>But declaring that future donations to those endowments would no longer be deductible would not seem to be a particular jarring change. It could be accompanied by a grace period (i.e. no tax deductibility for donations beyond year 2020), and we could grandfather in donations that have already been pledged in writing but have yet to be disbursed.</p>
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<p>Did you?</p>
<p>In any case, the military service academies are very selective public schools. ROTC scholarships are selective also, though perhaps less so than the academies.</p>
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<p>Hey, I never felt entitled to a free ride in college. Seems to me that there are plenty of people who do feel entitled to a free ride to a top college. And to them, I would say, you indeed can have that: how about serving your country? </p>
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<p>The implication is that the person in question actually did study hard. But as I said, most American high school students don’t do that.</p>
<p>Studying hard is a necessary condition for getting into the highly selective schools or full scholarships at highly selective schools*, but it is often not sufficient. Many high school students do not study very hard, but those who do greatly outnumber the available places in the highly selective schools and full scholarships that you are promoting.</p>
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<li>Including the military service academies and ROTC full scholarships, among others.</li>
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<p>^ The middle class HS students who frequent College Confidential aren’t necessarily representative of middle class HS students in general. Their chances for admission to the most selective schools may be higher. We shouldn’t be talking only about full scholarships, either. Adequate need-based aid at a fairly selective private school can turn it into a better value than crappy aid (or no aid) at an average public university.</p>
<p>It all depends on what state you’re in, your family’s financial situation, your qualifications (ECs as well as stats), intended major, et cetera. Public universities often are a good value, but sometimes they aren’t.</p>
<p>For me, going to Vandy was cheaper than UTexas by a few grand a year. Basically, Vandy offered me a ton of need-based aid and all UT offered me were loans. I knew a few other students that were in similar situations, where it was cheaper to go to Vandy than their state’s flagship school. Vandy’s no-loan fa package (*as opposed to UT’s loan-friendly pakcage) was one of the main reasons I chose Vandy over UT. Heck, you actually have to go out of your way to get a loan through Vandy’s FA office.</p>
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<p>I’m confused by this argument. Is the claim that there is a “surplus” of financial aid available, going unawarded because of a lack of qualified applicants? I would assume that all available financial aid is being awarded, and additional preparation by an individual may mean that he/she would increase the amount that he/she receives, but at the cost of someone else receiving less.</p>
<p>If everyone worked (proportionally) harder, wouldn’t the current allocation of financial aid remain unchanged? Perhaps the claim is that if an indiviudal wants more financial aid/admission to a better college, then he/she should work harder than the competition. There are issue with this as well (ability plays a role as well), but doesn’t strick me as strange a comment.</p>
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<p>Well, that wasn’t really my central point, but the answer to your question is probably ‘yes’. For example, at the schools that pledge to meet the full financial aid of all students, surely some students simply don’t obtain all of the aid that they should, often times because of a lack of knowledge about how to position themselves to obtain maximum aid. Let’s face it - many families simply do not know how to optimally ‘shield’ (a euphemism for ‘hide’) their assets for the purposes of maximizing their financial aid. Another example would not be regarding financial aid perse, but rather regarding other ways to reduce costs. Many families do not actually know how to establish state residency to reduce tuition at an OOS public school. For example, it may make sense for a given family to ‘move’ to the particular state in which their child will be attending a state university. Heck, it may even make sense for that child to attempt to defer admission for a year (e.g. send him off on a Grand Tour to Europe) so that the family can complete that move to the new state. Granted, this is most easily done if the parents were perhaps contemplating moving to the new state for career purposes anyway. For example, if you’re a manager at Intel operations in Arizona, and your child gets into Berkeley, then that’s when you should consider pursuing an internal transfer opportunity to Intel headquarters in Santa Clara. </p>
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<p>I meant the latter. Obviously if everybody studied harder, then probably no overall systemic change would occur. But come on, let’s face it. Not everybody is going to study harder. Heck, we have an entire pop socio-culture that militates against scholastic achievement and instead celebrates intellectual mediocrity - witness the popularity of Jersey Shore and the Kardashians. Like I said, most American high school students are simply not interested in academic achievement, and that’s not going to change.</p>
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<p>Still missing your point - sorry. If you are simply telling an individual to stop whining and to work harder if they want more financial aid, that’s fine, but this does not introduce “overall systemic change” either. It just changes the winners and losers, unless there is a significant structural problem in the disbursement of financial aid that would be eliminated if some portion (not everyone proportionally?) of the applicants worked harder?</p>
<p>^ I would want to know more about family income distributions at the wealthiest, most selective schools. How many middle income students apply to and then enroll at these colleges? Are they truly being squeezed out by wealthy full-pay students and low-income, high-need students? </p>
<p>My impression is that many highly qualified middle income students simply don’t apply to these schools because they believe they have no realistic hope of getting adequate need-based aid. They may or may not be correct, depending on the school, their circumstances, and what they consider adequate aid.</p>
<p>However, I believe that if more of these students applied, and if colleges felt more pressure, then more of them would find ways to lower their costs. That might mean admitting fewer wealthy but less qualified applicants.</p>
<p>^ So the argument is that the number of slots in a class are the limited resource at the most selective schools, not the amount of available financial aid, and that these schools can afford any amount required for their admitted students. Makes sense - given the reports that these schools are money machines, accumulating wealth for no apparent reason other than the accumulation of wealth.</p>
<p>However, the “College Confidential experience” is that a very large number of students are not shy about applying to the selective schools, borne out by the number of applications that these schools receive. And many of the CC crowd do not appear to be independently wealthy. Given the large number of applications, I have a hard time believing that even more applicants, no matter how qualified, will apply ‘more pressure’. The schools have a diversity goal - perhaps admitting a certain percentage of full pay students is part of this goal :-).</p>
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No. I have a friend who has spent two decades in financial aid at three different school, and this is way off base.</p>
<p>Merit-based aid is awarded to the “best” student who meets certain criteria. Universities WANT to award that money (for a variety of reasons including fund-raising, as who wants to donate scholarship money to school that isn’t even awarding the money they have?) and advise donors to either leave academic limits to the school (essentially meaning there ARE no such limits) or to make the limits sufficiently reachable that it will be exceptionally rare for NO ONE to qualify. The only merit-based aid that is likely to go unclaimed in a given year is that aid which is tied to non-academic requirements - if the Axl Rose Scholarship can ONLY be awarded to children of aging hair-band stars and no such children are enrolled then it lies fallow, otherwise it goes to the best such candidate.</p>
<p>Need-based aid is awarded without regard to academics, so studying (as you suggested) will not help! There is more give here, as these funds are largely drawn directly from endowments or billed to the government, but funding is based on statistical projections based on past history, and growth in these areas is limited - if Harvard suddenly found out that EVERY student needed the maximum level of aid, they would likely remove that promise rather than excessively deplete their endowment. Likewise, if Pell grants suddenly went through the roof it is likely that lawmakers would take steps to reduce the amount of the grants or to limit availability.</p>
<p>Regardless, between the two types of aid there is not NEARLY enough unawarded money to back up your idea that “many students would have found a school that would have provided them with extensive aid - whether financial aid at a rich private school, or merit aid somewhere else - if they had simply studied far harder.” Some, yes, but relatively few.</p>
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This solution only works when (a) it is reasonable and and financially sensible for the parents to do so and (b) all the in-college children are accepted and enrolled in the same state! In the first case I can say categorically that my particular job only really exists in a few places, even if I changed employers - it is highly unlikely that I could transfer or change employers without taking a substantial pay cut likely exceeding any improvement in tuition.</p>
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<p>It’s fairly easy to estimate some of this. From a school’s Common Data Set or from U.S. News you can determine what percentage of the students are full-pays. At Columbia, for example, 48.5% of the students are full-pays. Colleges differ a bit as to the household income level at which they cut off need-based FA, but at the wealthiest schools it’s generally in the $180K to $200K range. So roughly half the students at Columbia come from the top 5% to 6% highest-income households. (A few full-pays may come from families with somewhat less income but much larger assets)</p>
<p>At the other end of the income scale, the Chronicle of Higher Education puts out data on the percentage of Pell Grant recipients at each school, who would represent students from the bottom end of the income scale. As far as the colleges are concerned, Pell Grants are free money, so each school that gives any need-based aid is going to make sure each student eligible for a Pell Grant gets one (unless they fail to complete their FAFSA or FA application on time). At Columbia, 15.1% of undergrads are on Pell Grants. This is fairly high for an elite private university; at Yale it’s 8.9%, at Harvard 6.5%. Most elite private universities hover around 10%, give or take a few. Pell Grant recipients generally come from families earning $40,000 or less–that is, roughly the bottom 25% of household income.</p>
<p>So if half the students come from the top 5% highest-income household, and another 15% come from the lowest quartile, that leaves 35% of the student body to be filled by kids from households with incomes ranging from the 25th to the 95th percentile. That’s the 70% of households that most of us would consider “middle class” (though many in the top 5% would insist they’re “middle class,” too, or maybe “upper middle class,” and some in the upper range of the Pell Grant-eligible households would also claim to be “middle class”). From that 70% in the middle, Columbia gets 35% of its students. So I’d say the middle class is underrepresented. But notice it’s not because low-income, high-need kids are overrepresented: Pell Grant kids representing the lowest 25% of household income make up only 15% of Columbia’s student body, so proportionally, they’re almost as underrepresented as the 70% in the middle. The squeeze is really coming from the high end, from the 5% most affluent who make up roughly half the student body.</p>
<p>Of course, the high-end kids are going to say they’re just more qualified, and by some measures it’s hard to argue with that. As a group they went to better schools, likely took a more demanding HS curriculum (because it was available to them), had better SAT prep (in addition to which, SAT scores correlate positively with income, to the point some have suggested the SAT is a better predictor of household income than of college success), and engaged in the kinds of ECs that elite private colleges and universities prize (the child of an autoworker from Flint or Toledo is just not very likely to be recruited to Columbia to play squash, or tennis, or golf, or crew, or fencing, or lacrosse; not that it could never happen, but it’s just not very likely). Legacies will also be skewed toward the higher end of the income scale, because face it, Columbia grads tend to be pretty smart, well educated, well connected people who, on the whole, tend to be pretty successful in their careers. Then, of course, there’s the genetic factor, but I don’t even want to go there because that opens up another can or worms. </p>
<p>As for how many applications Columbia gets from people in the middle 70% of household income, I have no idea, but whatever the number, I’d be willing to bet the admit rate is significantly lower for that group than for the 5% at the high end of the income scale. Of course, colleges don’t want us to know, so we probably never will.</p>
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<p>That is probably closer to the top 3% or 4%, not 5% or 6%, of household incomes.</p>
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<p>The 25th percentile of household income in the US is about $25,000 per year, not $40,000 per year. $35,000 per year is about the 36th percentile, and $50,000 per year is about the 50th percentile (median).</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0690.pdf[/url]”>http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0690.pdf</a></p>
<p>(Yes, a reasonable approximation for the percentile rank of household income below $50,000 per year in the US is to just divide the annual income in dollars by 1,000 to get the approximate percentile rank. However, that does not work for above median household incomes.)</p>
<p>^ The Census Bureau’s 2012 Statistical Abstract shows 5.0% of families with incomes of $200,000 or more. It also shows 27.8% of families earning $35,000 or less, and 32.8% earning $40,000 or less. So I was a few percentage points off on the bottom end, but pretty much spot on on the top end.</p>
<p>Maybe this explains the discrepancy between my figures and yours: I’m looking at income figures for families, which probably excludes single-person households and perhaps households made up of unrelated roommates. (I assume cohabitating couples would count as families, but I’m not sure whether the Census Bureau agrees). You may be looking at figures for all households, which probably has lower averages. I mistakenly said household when I should have said families; I think the latter group is the more relevant group for comparison purposes, since presumably the vats majority of kids going off to college are being sent there from families.</p>
<p>“Household” is defined by co-habitation under 1 roof, “family” by kinship.
Income of an estranged father, but not of an unrelated housemate, is counted toward the EFC. So family is what matters for financial aid. Quite a bit of it is available at $50K family income. Not so much at $120K or $150K. </p>
<p>It just doesn’t ring true to define “middle class” (for purposes of this discussion) around a median household income of $50K. That’s not much higher than the average starting salary for a new graduate of one of the schools we’re discussing.</p>
<p>In urban areas I would say family middle class runs from $75K-$150K</p>
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<p>Well, you can use the term however you like, but the fact is in the U.S. just about everyone considers himself “middle class.” According to a 2010 Pew Research Center survey, only 2% of Americans define themselves as “upper class,” and only 8% define themselves as “lower class.” The rest define themselves as either “middle class” (50%), “upper middle class” (19%), or “lower middle class” (21%).</p>
<p>If we assume all the self-identified “upper class” and “upper middle class” people are pegging themselves accurately, those two groups would represent roughly the top quintile of family income, which according to the U.S. Census Bureau would include every family earning $113,744 or more. If the next 50% below that are “middle class,” a middle class family income would represent everything from about $37,000 up to $113,743. Below $37K would be the “lower middle class” and “lower class.” </p>
<p>No doubt many people don’t place themselves accurately on the income scale, but surveys have also shown that people’s perceptions of what counts as “middle class” depend largely on their own income level. According to the Pew Research Center, on average people with family incomes below $40,000 say the middle class starts at $45,000, while people with family incomes above $150,000 say the middle class starts at $100,000 and goes up the there–never mind that a family income of $100K would put you in roughly the top-earning 25% of families.</p>
<p>As I say, you’re welcome to use the term “middle class” however you like, but people quickly start talking past each other on anything to do with the “middle class” because they’re usually not talking about the same groups of people.</p>