We are parents of a very intelligent daughter (well actually 2). Our daughter has a 3.92 GPA (weighted), is in AP and honors everything, is in leadership everything, etc. (you get the point). She is not ivy league material but certainly the tier just below it - she’ll run a large corporation one day (I am not just saying that - she will). The bad thing is that we have income north of $250k - this may sound like a lot or perhaps not. But our expenses are very high - property taxes, insurance, other children, saving for retirement, etc. We are NOT rich. I live in a 2300 ft2 home that needs work. I drive a 5 year old Honda Accord and my wife drives an 8 year old Honda Pilot - believe me - NJ is an expensive place to live. Can we afford to spend $60k+ on a college per year - depends on what you call afford - I will tell you if we lived on a strict budget we might be able to if we didn’t lose our jobs (can’t take that risk) in those 4 years.
Here is the problem - it’s ROI - spending $250k on college is simply not worth it. It’s not a matter of affording it - someone has to pay the $$ and I think this investment is a bad one. This is a mortgage on an average home in the US that normally takes 30 years to pay off. I know my daughter will get scholarships at lesser schools but she wants to go to a name brand school. From my experience with my older daughter, she will get very little from a name brand school which means I will be forced to pay most of that $250k. This isn’t going to happen - I can’t do that.
I will pay up to the amount of Rutgers (a very poor, oversized, bloated, football-intoxicated in-state school), about $26k per year - I think this is too expensive but I will pay it. That’s it - no more. I told my daughters that they would have to pay the remainder and BTW they aren’t allowed to take out loans - that would be stupid.
The fact is 98% of the time, it doesn’t matter where you go to school. I went to a 2nd tier school in Florida and have a staff of 11, 2 of which are Ivy League graduates. It is the person that matters - only the person! Your university name gets you in the door - nothing else.
So, here I am frustrated because children of poor families are going to Ivy League (and the like) schools for nearly free. This is an unfair advantage of being poor and I am hereby complaining. Would it actually make sense for my daughters to have loans to pay back after they graduate? Shouldn’t children of poorer families have larger loans? Something is very wrong here. We are being punished for doing everything right. This doesn’t make sense to me at all.
My question to you is am I missing something? Will my daughter get a better deal if I chose the correct university (she wants to major in Biology/Genetics/Molecular Biology)?
There are some poor students going to Yale and Harvard on a full scholarship. There are lots of students getting some FA whose parents make $150-200k - and may also live in NJ. And there are a lot of full pay students too.
And there are hundreds and hundreds of poor kids who do not go to Ivys or the tier below, who go to public schools and take out loans. There are even more middle class kids who look for merit aid at private schools or go to their public schools. A small LAC or highly ranked school in the northeast may not even be the best choice for your daughter if she wants to study biology.
Many in your SES play the hunt for merit game at LACs or large public schools. There are a lot of schools that will give her enough merit that with your $26k per year, she’d be able to attend. Some schools even cost less than $26k per year without merit to being with (see pinned list above).
Your daughter might pick Rutgers, but the football team sucks so she shouldn’t pick it just for the football.
Ok first of all, give me a freaking break. There is a reason almost NO poor kids go to Ivy schools. They can go for free, yes, but to do that they have to be ACCEPTED- something that they often can’t do because of resource constraints.
Secondly, if you are so frustrated, feel free to take a lower paying job so that your family falls into that lower income category.
I’d go on a further rant but I see this is your first post and I’m not convinced that this is legit.
Beating up on kids whose families who make a fraction of what you make isn’t the most helpful place to start…
If your core question really is, am I short-changing my talented child by agreeing to spend $100K instead of $250K on her college education, the answer is simply no. I think sometimes it’s hardest to see that when you could just about, kinda-sorta make it work: if you simply could not pay it you would not be agonizing about it. It sounds as if you made the terms of college funding very clear plenty early, so she has had time to weigh out her options. I know many many parents who have made similar deals with their kids: here is what we can afford, it will pay for State U, if you want more or different it is on you to make it happen. And most of them do, without trauma.
But: did you pay for a name brand college for your older daughter? if so, when you say she will get ‘very little’, is that linked to her sister’s outcome? Doing it for one and not the other, based on the older ones performance is not a recipe for good sibling relations.
I have almost no words, and that rarely happens. The solution to your problem is quite simple, actually, Quit your jobs and give away all your assets so that you, too, can be poor and qualify for all that free money the poor are wallowing in. People with this complaint never do, though, because they want the perceived benefits of being poor without actually having to live the lifestyle.
You know that your daughter has the stats to go to a great school. The good news is that some of them give merit aid even to upper income families. Are they Ivy League? Probably not. But the majority of US students aren’t attending an Ivy. The majority of low income families certainly aren’t, so I wouldn’t waste time envying the poor. What you can do is help your children search out merit awards and schools with great programs that will be good fits for them. They’re out there. It’s more fun to search for what you can afford than waste time pining away for what you can’t anyway.
Absolutely! And as someone who grew up in poverty, let me tell you what those WONDERFUL benefits are:
-Not knowing whether or not you’ll have a place to live at all points in your life.
-Not knowing whether or not you’ll be able to afford food.
-Constant fighting with the state to get our LAVISH welfare (which, you know, is barely enough to keep us afloat most times)
-Not being able to go to the doctor unless it’s a true emergency because you don’t have insurance (luckily, not really an issue anymore)
-Being one small incident away from losing everything- and I do mean EVERYTHING
-Working full time + in college while going to school full time
I could go on, but I think you get the point of how wonderful poverty is. You’re more than welcome to come join us. After all, the payoff for all of that is FREE SCHOOL amiright? It’s definitely worth it, lemme tell ya. (Oh, except for the part where we can’t get in to those schools because we went to crap school districts, didn’t have the physical or mental nourishment to get us to our fullest potential, couldn’t afford tutors or any kind of prep, no special ECs because we had to work after school, etc, etc… but hey, that’s just details!)
Your daughters have gained all the benefits from your current salary to attend a good school, get ECs that make them attractive candidates to attend a top university but your complaining about a few poor kids getting an opportunity to attend a top school.
Those poor kids are still expected to come with their student contributions. If you read these boards enough, many of these poor kids aren’t sure how they will come with the money to pay for the travel to school, winter clothing or their student contributions. It isn’t the easy life it appears to be.
I know lots of people who did “everything right,” even more right than YOU according to your own definition of doing “everything right” (name brand education, saved and saved, etc.). Some of these people nevertheless have only a fraction of what you have due to unforeseen misfortunes (cancer, elderly parents who didn’t plan well, job losses at the worst times, etc.) They would love to be in your shoes.
“Doing everything right” does not guarantee you will not fall on hard times and find yourself forced to face the horror of sending your kids to the state flagship.
I really hope this post is not legit. If it is, you have seriously offended all current students and alumni of Rutgers University, not to mention everyone who could only hope to attend that university.
Finally, a 3.92 isn’t going to get your future -CEO daughter any guaranteed merit money at many, many “name brand” universities. That wouldn’t even guarantee her admittance to a mid-level UC. Of course, you did not reveal her testing scores, which could impact what I just said very significantly.
What is her SAT score? Or this is a pre-SAT rant?
Unrecognized NJ talents who hate football with parents who do not want to pay exorbitant prices usually congregate to TCNJ. I believe they are pretty strong in bio sciences.
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I know my daughter will get scholarships at lesser schools but she wants to go to a name brand school. From my experience with my older daughter, she will get very little from a name brand school which means I will be forced to pay most of that $250k. This isn’t going to happen - I can’t do that.
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What are her stats?
Did her sister go to a name brand school?
Does she understand that she won’t have the means to pay for a top school?
Perhaps you could count the number of poor students attending the eight Ivy League schools for free, using the Common Data Sets and other information that is available.
Then you could compare that number to the 46.7 million people living in poverty in the United States.
If you have any heart at all, you won’t feel aggravated any more.
Sorry… I make a fair amount less than you do (less than half some years), and both of my kids went to respected private schools. One got some merit aid at her preferred school, but it was still well over $26K/year. One is now full pay at a top college. We started saving aggressively for their educations when they were born, and live well beneath our means. It was a high priority for us.
If you had saved aggressively, and could supplement that with some current income, and your kid worked summers and a campus job, and if they just took the fairly low federal loan total ($28K for 4 years), your kid could go to any school they could get accepted into.
If your kid has it in her to be a CEO, she can get there from Rutgers. If you wanted her to have more “name brand” choices (and no loans), you should have started preparing for that a long time ago.
I find your choice of the word “deal” interesting. You gripe about poor families going to the Ivy League for nearly free. You want to know if there’s some way your daughter can “get a better deal.” My husband HATES to pay full price. One of his favorite hobbies is studying various websites for tips on how to get good deals on all sorts of things (especially hotel stays). He feels competitive about it and likes to think he got a better deal than the next guy. But when it came time for our oldest D to go to college, we let her pick the full pay “name brand” college. It wasn’t about the “deal” or the most efficient way for her to wind up with the highest salary. We still believe in the old fashioned idea of a “liberal arts education” having value in and of itself. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with your approach. It’s great that you’re making it clear to your kid what you’re willing to do. There’s lots of helpful information on this forum about the hunt for merit aid that could be very useful to her. But don’t begrudge the kids who qualify for need based aid. The kids getting a free ride to the Ivy League are a very small group in the grand scheme of things.
