Like others mentioned in comments, the article entirely neglects to address the distinction between grants and loans, talking only about "financial aid". If you have to pay back a loan later, that's still part of the cost.
The article also switches back and forth talking about different timeframes. It starts off by talking about tuition trajectory since 2014. Usually when I hear people lamenting the increase in college costs, they're talking about a much longer timeframe, like since the 1970s. And indeed the article says:
> This pricing strategy took hold in the early 1980s. Since then, Levine has found, the sticker cost of attending a four-year public or private university—tuition plus fees and room and board—has almost tripled after adjusting for inflation.
But then in the next paragraph:
> Only students whose families make more than about $300,000 a year and who attend private institutions with very large endowments pay more than they did a decade ago, Levine said.
Those are two different timeframes. Either may be useful, but you can't support a statement like "well costs haven't really gone up" by just cherry-picking random numbers from decades apart.
The last two paragraphs of the article talk about colleges "advertising their value proposition" and how they "can’t afford to push students away". This smacks of a corporate viewpoint towards higher education that makes me suspicious of the whole piece.
This reads like part of a PR campaign by some college-related interest group to try to influence public opinion. Prices have been and continue to rise. They say the prices stopped rising because inflation (meaning prices continue to rise but if you take inflation into account they do not), but I have not seen the numbers. There's like gazillion ways to measure inflation, if you use the one where it's 20% a year that might be true, but it's just a cop-out.
Also, maybe less people go into prestigious and expensive unis and go into less expensive ones, which brings the average down?
I look into the colleges for my kids right now and honestly unclear how I can afford putting 2 kids through reasonably good schools. Govt tells me I should be able to afford to pay about $80K per year for 4 years, and I do not see how I can do that without getting HELOC/second mortgage and tapping into my retirement savings. I just do not see how these prices are reasonable or go down.
I guess you skimmed the article, as inflation is not the main argument, but rather that most people don't pay the "sticker" price, but get various "discounts"
Somehow, I don't think turning the finances of education look more like the finances of the American healthcare system is the big win they think it is.
That's nice for those who get the discounts. Terrible for those who are being discriminated against.
yes, this 100% . the discounts , scholarships, etc. make a big difference. This is why a college college degree is a better deal then the doom and gloomer naysayer pundits insist. With federal student loans, you are borrowing at close to the prime rate, but for average people, not hedge funds. This is a great deal assuming you graduate. Even 'soft' subjects from middling schools confer a ROI.
Yeah. How come none of their other articles have this at the bottom:
Support for this project was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Per wiki:
With assets of approximately $14 billion, Hewlett is one of the wealthiest grant makers in the United States.
Hmph. I guess the millions of successful college graduates are not providing enough positive PR mindshare, so they had to go buy some.
Gen z grew up hearing stories about their older cousins or even parents going $100,000 in student loan debt for nothing.
Now all of a sudden the colleges are like, well technically we can get that down to 85,000 of student loan debt for an English degree. Don't you want to come to college and have a lot of fun!
I still think college is a net positive for most people, but you seriously need to evaluate where you're at and decide what you want to spend. Unless you get into a dream school, or something extremely specific for your major almost everyone should go to community college .
The reason why is if you have a bad year at community college and you just don't want to do it, you're only out a few thousand dollars versus 20 or 30.
Second, when you're ready to transfer you should have a good idea of what you actually want to do and then you can pick a college appropriately. Optimistically you'll graduate with half the student loan debt .
You can have just as much fun going to a cheap community college, and then a cheap state school. And outside of a small handful of outliers the net results are going to be the same. If you get in the Harvard, go ahead and go to Harvard. But if you get into Billy's weird expensive private school, that's not worth the money.
Between birth rates dropping and student loan reality, we're going to see an absolute tsunami of small school closures. Which isn't good or bad, it's just a sign of the times.
While I'm ranting, I absolutely resent this notion of college being necessary to obtain an upper middle-class lifestyle. It's just not, and I know this from personal experience despite finishing college years later. You end up putting a lot of people in a really nasty loop, you can't afford college unless you have money, and you can't earn money unless you go to college. That also justifies indefinite debt loads, so what you have to go $200,000 in student loan debt. The nice salesperson said you're practically guaranteed a six figure job when you graduate!
You graduated into a bad economy and end up working at Vons. Sucks to be you, by the way Sallie Mae expects your first payment in 60 days. May the odds be in your favor.
There's no point in going to university anymore when you can just go straight into big tech. If you're doing anything mathematical, your late teens and early twenties are going to be some of your most productive years. Why should universities benefit from those years when they don't do frontier research anymore and have degenerated into quasi religious institutions that hand out credentials to anyone with a pulse in order to get rich shackling you with debt? Big tech will literally give you money to be educated.
Also a person with a degree in a subject (years of sunk cost) often feels pigeonholed into that field which may not be enjoyable, well-paid or require you to move to hunt for a job in the field. All negative outcomes.
High school, in the past, prepared people for college, so those who were not cut out already had a clear indication during high school. But due to dumbing-down and grade inflation, they now learn the hard way during college.
you can't afford college unless you have money, and you can't earn money unless you go to college.
not really. there are tons of scholarships and other assistance. hardly anyone who goes to college is writing $30-100k checks.
High school is often sending the best kidsto college with half their first year done already with AP classes.
Between AP and dual credit, my kid should graduate HS with somewhere around 30 hours of college credit.
College graduation vs dropout rates have been trending in the opposite direction than this take would suggest though. It could be because to be secondary education being better than you say or because colleges experienced the same kinds of changes. Either way though, the numbers suggest fewer people are finding out they aren't actually cut out for college after graduating high school.
>not really. there are tons of scholarships and other assistance. hardly anyone who goes to college is writing $30-100k checks.
What was all this student loan forgiveness talk about then? Scholarships apparently haven't been cutting it, otherwise there wouldn't be a trillion plus of outstanding student loan debt.
I had plenty of scholarships and even the GI bill covering me. But I still ended up with 40k in debt at a state school (note that I took 5 years in college).
Luckily, software jobs in the beginning of my career was a strong market, so I aggressively paid them off early into the pandemic. About 3-4 years post grad. But I know that's not the normal story.
My point still stands though. The idea is people get jobs and pay the loans back.
Yeah, how's those working class wages going?
A lot of those scholarships are locked along racial and gender lines. Immutable traits that, as a society, we have decided, as a foundational principle, are an unfair, unjust, unkind, and uncivil basis to discriminate upon. Equal representation is great. What's not great is producing a system that's so financially unsustainable for working class people that they're told to go solve what is framed as a merit-based challenge in exchange for money, but the qualification criteria for some crazy high percentage (something like 2/3rds, if my memory serves correct) of the challenges exclude certain cohorts of people based on demographic traits they have no control over, including race and gender. It's just a very unbecoming look for a progressive institution, it feels like we're deliberately trying to relive the racial and gender conflict of the last century by continuing to deliberately view all human interaction through the lense of race and gender, and framing race and gender filters as "merit" filters, almost as if to suggest that you can be a fundamentally flawed person by having the wrong chromosomes or ethnicity, rather than by viewing human interaction through the lense of interacting with actual individual people, who all have incredibly rich, deep, unique lived experiences that are not defined exclusively by demographic traits.
I believe it's this point of view that leads to the common perception of higher education among the actual working class - that the American college experience was once something great, but got so watered down in pursuit of ideals other than education that it has essentially turned into a big summer camp for the adolscent offspring of the rich to extend the "party" of youth for a little bit longer, hopefully increasing their social credit score in the process, with actual learning being a "nice to have" along the way.
extend the "party" of youth for a little bit longer
Extending the party of youth is roughly one of the benefits of social welfare. When we took the children out of the factories in the 1920s, we extended their youth. When we sent them to college, we extended their youth. When we economically constrained them with high real estate prices, we extended their youth.
Extending youthhood is fine, so long as we do it appropriately. For example, if we did it right, someone entering retirement enters a new youthhood of carefreeness. If we do it wrong, someone enters youthhood in theirs 20s as a dependent of their parents. There's a lot of wrong versions of the last thing I said, where people are kept children in academia to be parented indefinitely by tenor.
It's delicate. We want to provide as much youthhood as possible in a good way, if we can.
As to your first point, you can only be speaking of white men. To this I'll say, white men that come from the same economic situation should have access to the same scholarships. That's a easy one to fix. If you are working class then you are working class, this life is hard enough already.
> framing race and gender filters as "merit" filters
Do you have examples? I haven't gone systematically digging into this, but the general impression I've gotten is that this sort of explicit demographic filters are largely associated with the "equity" crowd rather than the "merit" crowd.
I suspect such reframing is very recent.
The sticker price arms race will continue until the incentives change. Having an absurdly high listed tuition price is simply effective advertising, even if almost nobody actually pays that price. Surely the most expensive colleges must be the best.
Colleges know that outside of a few suckers, few will pay the full price even if they have the money. So they offer massive discounts to get you to sign. To help seal the deal, they will market the discount as something special for you based on your "merit". "Normally we charge $75k, but since you're so awesome we can give you a $30k merit scholarship." Sounds like you're getting a great deal as long as you don't find out that the actual average charged tuition is $35k and you're actually the one getting milked.
We are going through this now with our youngest. All the private schools are $85k+/year but every one of them has offered a merit scholarship that brings the price down to around $5k above the public schools. Such a great deal.
How do you change incentives when the people in charge of the incentive system have a interest in maintaining the status quo?
This is typically where the government steps in.
It did. It is part of the system. This is how it works.
1. Colleges set exorbitantly high prices.
2. The government-supported system assesses families' ability to pay though FAFSA process, where you submit your tax returns (not that you have to, IRS is government as well) with your wage/business income, then list all your assets (minus retirement accounts such as 401Ks) and liabilities. Then the FAFSA spits out your expected contribution, TELLING you how much you can afford to pay for your kids education.
3. Colleges and government then use this number to determine how much "financial need" you have. They can "meet your financial need" by letting you pay less than the sticker price (it's called "need-based scholarship"), or allow to take loans on favorable terms to close the difference between the sticker price and your ability to pay (that they determined). More often it's a combination of the two (depending how desirable college is and how good of the student they perceive your kid to be).
meanwhile, the idea of paying out the nose for most post-secondary education overseas is laughable. You never have to go into 5-6 figures of debt just to get an education. Even 30 years ago US colleges had a huge amount of tuition covered by state governments. But decades of cuts pushed more of the tuition on the student and now people in the propoganda just want DoED as a whole to crumble.
Isn't that exactly why we're in the position we're in? Near universal financial aid driving up prices?
Lots of European countries have cheap (not free) excellent universities.
The price signal is almost the other way around (the more expensive, the less likely it is to be a good place).
How do you explain other countries where education is basically free?
This is consistent with the top-level response, about expense signaling quality.
Consider the quantity of people coming from outside the USA to study. It may be that foreigners looking for prestigious schools are searching in the USA because their own system is middling (except maybe for a flagship school?). Thus, they're also doing the damage to the USA's education market while not affecting their own domestic one.
> foreigners looking for prestigious schools are searching in the USA because their own system is middling
See how you called it "prestigious" not "expensive", and "middling" not "cheap"? Price contributes to the feeling of quality of any product but it's neither necessary nor sufficient. There's more than that just the price.
The US is an economic powerouse, it attracts top talent in every area or level because it offers opportunities and high rewards. Even the language is part of the cycle which fuels this talent attraction. This brings results, the results bring prestige, and the prestige brings in more talent.
An expensive school in Bulgaria will not attract that kind of talent because fewer people are attracted to living, working, or learning the local language there. Heck, even a no-name US school couldn't attract talent by jacking up prices.
> The US is an economic powerouse, it attracts top talent in every area or level because it offers opportunities and high rewards.
The US is an educational powerhouse, and we attract top talent, sometimes charge money to educate these visitors (undergraduate and graduate work quite differently), and then, wait for it, we kick the people we educated back out.
Seriously, check out the visa types linked from here:
https://educationusa.state.gov/foreign-institutions-and-gove...
I don’t know the history, but if I was in charge of a non-US country trying to import skills, maximize my country’s future success, and even slowly weaken the US, I would love these rules. If I were a US lawmaker, I would struggle to invent a more self-destructive, not to mention inhumane, policy.
So, in answer to your comment, no, our educational system is crap at retaining the top talent it attracts, because the US made it mostly illegal for that talent to stay here.
Do other countries allow nearly everyone who wants to attend to do so? In the US, while you can't necessarily go to whatever school you want, pretty much everyone has multiple choices of schools they can attend. Even people with Down Syndrome are now earning bachelor degrees. Not special programs for those with learning disabilities but degrees in regular programs. If they're able to pay, they're able to attend. Since most of this is financed via student loans, living expenses are covered too regardless of if the student has any realistic prospect of ever paying off the debt.
Wealthy progressives in other countries put their money where their mouth is. Wealthy progressives in the US only pay lip service to progressive values because they only support wealth redistribution when it's being done with other people's money, then they magically flip and become some weird hybrid mercantilist-nationalist conservatives who insist upon privatizing gains, but only up until their brilliance fails them and they need to come beg the US taxpayer for handou- err... bailouts, emphasizing the values of the collective good as justification for forcing the rest of us to socialize their losses.
This is why Ivy League schools have endowments larger than the GDP of some micronations and are financially being run like hedge funds, while still simultaneously being supported with US taxpayer money. The progressive orthodoxy does not hold these institutions accountable for institutional greed and selfishness because of a shared cultural affinity between progressive politics and higher education, and because all of the negative externalities of the spiritual sins of selfishness and greed at institutional scale are forgiven for the virtue of being a nonprofit under the idiosyncratic, dogmatic priesthood of progressivism.
The US doesn't have progressives. We have conservatives and conservatives LARPing as progressives when it's financially convenient for them.
On a related note, this is also why Canada and the UK can make single-payer healthcare work and why the US can't. Some of those shadowy GOP dark money donors are the same faces that the public would associate with progressive thought leadership. They're following a Machiavellian playbook where they attempt to portray themselves as publicly virtuous while remaining the same soulless, greedy multimillionaires or billionaires that instinctively think from a place of unadulterated self interest behind the scenes.
By outside forces, of course. Women entered the legal profession in the 1920's, but wages did not catch up until the Equal Pay Act was enacted under the Kennedy administration. There were plenty of labour market arbitrageurs profiting from the game, but the Civil Rights movement proved stronger.
Unfortunately, all of the labor market arbitrageurs went away, and now we're stuck in this weird economy where women get paid 83¢ on the dollar for identical work performance, in an economy that is deeply entrenched in boundless corporate greed, and yet no major companies appear to have effectively capitalized on the free, automatic, statistically-guaranteed 17% ROI that's just sitting on the table by replacing men with women. I guess our laws against unlawful gender discrimination in hiring must be so strict that no large companies have ever been able to do it at scale without getting caught and fined, no? How else do you explain for-profit companies turning away free money?
The word "loan" doesn't appear even once in the article, which I find bizarre and confusing. It talks about "financial aid" multiple times but doesn't mention how much of that aid is in grants and how much in loans. If the loans have to be paid back later, that doesn't truly lower the cost of college attendance.
This is nothing more than an advertisement for the loan organizations. The secret that colleges should stop keeping is that you are taking on indentured servitude by attending.
I grew up in a different class than most of my peers. It’s interesting to see how many of them are willing to go all out for their kids when it comes to college. Touring many schools, application prep, savings accounts, meal plans, etc.
It sometimes seems as this support comes out of nowhere after years of not being involved in their child’s life.
So my question is what motivates this? Are they right? Is it really important for their kids future to go to a top 70 instead of 130? (I believe top 5 is worth almost any amount of money)
Is this based on college being a good time in their life and they are projecting that experience? Do they feel obligated to “finish strong” in regards to parenting?
The attitude of my parents is to make sure the degree will lead to a job, and then find a local and cheap school to get that credential. I believe there may be taboo class issues around this topic that are not vocalized.
> Are they right?
Maybe
> Is it really important for their kids future to go to a top 70 instead of 130?
There are definitely rough cutoffs. Using your ballpark thresholds, yes, there can be a big difference in 70ish and 130ish in terms of opportunities. The big issue is whether the student will avail themselves of these opportunities.
> (I believe top 5 is worth almost any amount of money)
Oh, definitely not true unless the student avails themselves of the available opportunities.
At top 5, it’s only worth the money (assuming that you’re price sensitive) if the student does one or more things like uses the school alumni network, develops a robust network in school, works with top tier researchers, accesses unique learning opportunities, goes into fields that only pull from these schools (e.g., investment banking, consulting, etc.), tapping into the varsity athlete network, and other things like that.
If they just go and get a degree and then do whatever they were going to do if they had gone to State U, then it’s wasted money.
The classroom education at the top 5 universities is largely not that good. Smaller liberal arts colleges do a better job of classroom education, imho, if thats what someone is looking for.
> Is this based on college being a good time in their life and they are projecting that experience?
Maybe.
There’s probably a lot of intuitively knowing that it’s better to go to a good school without necessarily knowing what about going to a good school makes it matter.
> The attitude of my parents is to make sure the degree will lead to a job, and then find a local and cheap school to get that credential.
Smart, but very limiting if you have ambitions beyond being a middle manager.
> I believe there may be taboo class issues around this topic that are not vocalized.
Class issues, yes. Taboo… I’m not so sure.
> unless the student avails themselves of the available opportunities.
I was imagining it in personal terms. I would have paid any amount of money for myself because I believe it would have worked for the reasons you mentioned.
> knowing that it’s better to go to a good school without…
That’s likely.
> but very limiting if you have ambitions beyond being a middle manager.
Say more. That kind of thing sounds worth paying for.
> Taboo
For example, someone might secretly think state school education was a waste of time, but not want to talk bad about their peer’s schooling. Or want their child to socialize with other well-to-do families.
> Say more. That kind of thing sounds worth paying for.
I’m not sure what you have in mind.
I’m assuming “get a local and cheap degree that gets you a job” means going to a community college and a directional school (at best).
The whole mentality behind this thinking is “I’m going to be the best worker bee I can be”. Worker bees cap out at middle management. When you go to schools like this, you are surrounded by future worker bees, that will probably be your mentality, and that will almost certainly be your social circle. It’s hard to escape worker bee status in that context — possible, just hard and not probable.
Note that there isn’t anything wrong with being a worker bee. The world needs a lot of them.
Upper management, owners of big businesses, politicians, etc. are thinking about how to utilize worker bees to accomplish goals grander than “getting a good job”. It’s a very different way of thinking. It’s not particularly difficult, but it’s foreign to most people who aren’t surrounded by it.
Note that I am not referring to a flagship state school, which usually produces the majority of your local and state leaders (see below).
As a side note, this worker bee phenomenon is in play at elite schools as well. The worker bees get “good jobs” as analysts at investment banks, entry level positions at consulting firms, or (later) associate positions at good law firms. They do their worker bee thing, make the principals a lot of money, and then plateau / wash-out mid-career when they realize that they don’t have the social capital it takes to be a rainmaker. Some folks adjust and do well for themselves, but others don’t.
So to address your comment about being “worth paying for”, it really boils down to a few things. Does the student already have a lot of social capital that they will be able to build on top of? If not, are they socially capable enough to do the things they need to do (mostly build social networks that will let facilitate them being rain makers and/or power brokers later in life)? This is a lot to ask of a kid who is not already part of the upper-middle class or higher (e.g., the capital class).
If a student is just going to go to college, play video games in their dorm room, maybe roll in the hay a bit, and be an average student with a mediocre degree, then paying for a top 5 school (or even a flagship state school) largely is not worth it, imho.
> For example, someone might secretly think state school education was a waste of time,
As long as the “state school” is the flagship school or the A&M school, then this would not be a smart thing to think. Exceptions exist (e.g., UCLA), but these are largely known schools.
It all gets back to how the student utilizes the opportunities presented to them.
> but not want to talk bad about their peer’s schooling.
Probably a good idea in general.
> Or want their child to socialize with other well-to-do families.
Well, this is a smart move for building and/or maintaining social status.
That said, outside of the northeast corridor and California, the state flagship school probably produces waaaay more local and state leaders (business, political, etc.) than top 5 schools. I’ve definitely heard of people having limited access to their state power scene because they went to an Ivy instead of making the right connections at State U.
Edit:
Note that there are other scenarios that make elite schools good.
If you want to become an academic/researcher (I suggest not doing this unless you know someone who will give you the “inside baseball” version of being an academic), the elite schools give folks advantages that state schools don’t.
If you are in a STEM field and you want to meet other super smart and super motivated folks to work with in STEM later, then elite schools can be a good deal. But again, we are back to social networking.
If you want to go to an elite law school or certain grad schools, I actually recommend most people go to State U. For most majors, the effort required to be middle of the pack at an elite school will put you at the top of State U. A super high gpa and recs saying that you’re one of their 1%er students ever are worth way more than being merely above average (e.g., 70th percentile) in a pool of very motivated and intelligent people.
It’s rough listening to folks at Ivy graduations who busted their butt to get into an Ivy and do well (but not top of their class) moan about how they are ending up at the same good-but-not-great law school as their buddy who had zero stress before and during college. Note that the Ivy grad may be better prepared for law school (maybe), but one has to wonder if the stress, money, and effort were worth it.
Attitudes around college in the US are really fascinating to me, because I’ve found they vary a lot from region to region and I think really reinforce class divides. I grew up in an area/class where my parents and their friends believed:
- All universities and even community colleges are equally good, except for maybe the Ivey league schools they’ve heard about, but no one actually goes to those.
- All majors are equally good, except whatever makes you a doctor, which is the best.
- Colleges on the east and west coast are very bad because they are purely for liberal indoctrination
- The highest earning career path from college is becoming a doctor, and if you become a doctor you are very upper class.
- what is majoring in finance? Is that like being a bank teller?
- what is studying computer science? Is that like working at Best Buy?
Once I got to college and met what I now think of as “the American urban professional class” I found a completely different set of beliefs, where college rankings were do-or-die, everyone wants their kid to go into finance, consulting, or tech, or get an MBA, and everyone seems to inherit large corporate networks from their parents.
I’m sure this has all sorts of culture war implications. I know the politics of the community I grew up in has more to do with distrusting/disliking the urban professional class than any wholistic political ideology. Probably both groups should learn something from each other.
> I believe top 5 is worth almost any amount of money
Is it, though? Of course people who go to Harvard et al. do well afterwards, but many of them came from wealthy families and were bound to do well no matter what. If you’re poor, Harvard [1] is less likely to make you rich than UC Riverside [2].
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
Which measure are you going off there? Because I see the "Chance a poor student has to become a rich adult" metric at 41% for UC Riverside and 58% for Harvard.
There is the "overall mobility" metric that favors UC Riverside, but the way that's being measured would seem to skew in favor of whichever college has students in lower quintiles (a top quintile kid can't move up 2 quintiles).
Ah, you're right, I misread. But 41% vs 58% isn't a big enough difference to pay "any amount" for IMO - and the gap is much smaller with other public universities like Irvine (55%) and SUNY Binghampton (54%).
Quintiles is a poor measure given the extremes of inequality. The Pareto distribution of income and wealth has folks in the top 10/1/.1/.01 percentiles with vastly different lifestyles compared to the other percentiles.
Sure, but an individual income in the top 20% ($130,000) is enough to be comfortable pretty much anywhere in the US.
"Any amount of money" when the statistics are still a coin toss sounds like a gambling addict. That's insanely bad odds for "life savings" amounts of money...
Money is not the same as status, and opens different job opportunities like key government officials . I would be more interested in a survey that includes whether the participant was satisfied with their career trajectory
I know someone who is a guidance counselor at an ultra elite high school. He globetrots every year to a plethora of institutions that are desperate to attract those students. All presumably because they want the alumni bucks when they have their own children. For a certain class, higher education serves an entirely different purpose.
I just searched for "best predictor of career success" and found a bunch of conflicting results. Open networks, conscientiousness, grit, intelligence, class, etc. This is actually reassuring, since if there were a known path to success everyone would crowd into it. Curiously I didn't see any articles or studies saying "it's partially random" because no one wants to hear that.
I think academic prestige is best understood as a safety net. It won't guarantee success, because nothing can, but it can do a decent job preventing failure. In that respect the parents are right. Academic assistance is a way they can convert financial resources into something that can't be taken away from their children (and isn't subject to the gift tax limit).
That said it's easy to go overboard, and many do. Unless you want to work in a small number of careers that have target lists of schools they recruit from (which again is because the credential is a selling point to clients, not because the education is better), there is no difference between a public university and a prestigious one.
To the extent parents know that prestige is signalling all the way down, and does not imply being better at what you do or knowing more about your subject, they do have some inside perspective compared to the population at large.
> I just searched for "best predictor of career success" and found a bunch of conflicting results. Open networks, conscientiousness, grit, intelligence, class, etc. This is actually reassuring, since if there were a known path to success everyone would crowd into it. Curiously I didn't see any articles or studies saying "it's partially random" because no one wants to hear that.
I'm not sure which is the best for career success and it's incredibly difficult to quantify your parents network effect, but conscientiousness, intelligence and grit make for a very happy life. You'll naturally gravitate toward intellectually stimulating things, work hard at them, not care about meaningless things around you, and enjoy every minute of it.
> but conscientiousness, intelligence and grit make for a very happy life
OK, but do you think these traits are primarily the results of nature, nurture, luck, or individual practice?
> Academic assistance is a way they can convert financial resources into something that can't be taken away from their children (and isn't subject to the gift tax limit).
This is a really good summary. The end result is a permanent, non-transferable, protection with strong resistance to “inflation”.
> they do have some inside perspective compared to the population at large.
Would that advantage manifest as playing into the system - looking for opportunities for signaling? Or discounting - finding good education with less signaling value.
> Would that advantage manifest as playing into the system - looking for opportunities for signaling? Or discounting - finding good education with less signaling value.
Good question! I think that can play out both ways, ultimately based on how wealthy the parents are. If money is no object, play the prestige game. If you are middle class and know the rules of the game, maximize value.
For example, I am acquainted with parents who are teachers at a prestigious private school. Their child attended said school because of subsidized tuition, and then attended college in an honors program at a state university in the middle of the country. He was paid to attend! The parents are fully abreast of all the studies on the effects of education, both being teachers and being in the middle of the college admissions frenzy that goes on in these schools. So they know how the game works, and they are playing it to the max for value.
On the other hand, at this school are children from generational wealth who play obscure sports from an early age to give them an edge in admissions. The children never need to actually earn a living, and the target school admission is seen as a defense of a family legacy and bragging rights for the parents - pure prestige.
I wonder how many of those peers that can evaluate the quality of the teaching itself.
I'm guessing a lot of people (especially those without an university education) look at how impressive the buildings and facilities are because those are the status signals they understand. I don't think many check how large percentage of lessons are run by assistants.
So too many US colleges end up being 80% overly expensive hotel and 20% education.
Because the 80% overly expensive hotel is precisely what you're paying for. Quality of education is a bare minimum requirement. The rest is the people you'll meet. Be that your neighbors in the expensive hotel or the professors you'll work with, or the activities that will bond you with those people.
It’s well understood that teaching quality is a small part of the package value, so I dont even know if it matters for this decision.
Lack of involvement can come from multiple issues. I don’t spend as much time with my kids as I’d like. Partly so that we can have good education, a decent home, activities, and college without stress.
The push into college is kinda the last hurrah for parents to set their kids up. Taking it seriously helps the (soon to be adult) kids take it seriously, finding a good fit can have an outsized impact on what they do next.
I do wish we lived in a world where we could be both involved and supportive of future endeavors. I grew up in a lower middle class home. College involved atrocious debt while my parents were uninvolved as … they were still busy working.
Why can’t we have time for ourselves in society?
I think this a poor justification for uninvolvement. All families need resources - so satisfying that can justify all your time. But for many people on this forum that does not occupy all their time and attention, except for brief exceptions. What differentiates quality of upbringing is not resources. So working harder at your white collar job does not make you a better parent.
I don’t think it makes me a better parent, apologies if that was how it was interpreted.
The point is that there is no other alternative. My observation, at least in tech - is that the expectation of greater than 40 hours of work per week is ever present. There is no choice to earn less, take it easy, and have more time for other pursuits. If both parents are under this expectation then there are fewer hours to be involved. A break of 1-2 years will be held against you in future interviews.
From talking with other parents, this is a common conundrum across industries. No one feels that they have enough time to be a good parent.
More concretely, what work arrangements do you have or are aware of which allow you to cap the hours worked while affording a livable home life?
There are many tech jobs where 40 hours and no more is normal. If you are not in one find a new one.
Where your kid goes to school is a status symbol. And like most status symbols, it is a foolish and conspicuous waste.
Americans love to root for teams and build their identities around what teams they are on. In sports, in politics, in college selection, even which state or city they are from. College selection is just an easy way to buy yourself into a team.
I’m gonna need a steel man here. Is this real status they are buying? If so it has real impact?
These are otherwise shrewd people.
Bragging about where your kid goes to school is extremely common. It signals not only what can you afford (like a car), but also lets you buy and display a bunch of gear. (University name) Dad is like a super common apparel and bumper sticker item. And having, e.g., Stanford Dad is more prestigious than eg New Mexico State Dad apparel.
Yes, but having gone to Stanford is significantly better than New Mexico State. But is UC Berkeley better than community college transfer to UC Davis?
while having paper from Stanford may open some doors for you if you network well while you are there the degree from New Mexico State can get you a lucrative career if you know wtf you are doing. business work on the bottom line and in my three decades in the industry I have found more gems from non-Ivy league schools than otherwise by a wide margin
Your second statement is accurate and contradicts your first statement. Going into the right school puts you on the right team which will make your future career easier, as your school affiliation will send the right signals to hiring managers/business partners/investors/customers/whoever you will need to work with.
One critical point the article doesn't clarify:
Is the reduction in price entirely due to discounts, or is it also counting student loans that have to be paid back?
Because it keeps using the term "financial aid" throughout, but financial aid includes both grants/scholarships and loans.
And if the amount you have to pay immediately is going down but the part you have to pay after graduation is going up by the same amount, that's not necessarily good news.
It's bizarre that the article doesn't address this distinction at all. I want to believe the total price (including loans that need to be paid back) is going down -- but with student debt ever-increasing, I'm suspicious.
A lot of elite universities in particular have given financial aid for ages if you were at the lower half of the parental income scale or thereabouts. But my recollection from the 70s is that upper middle class at least pretty much paid sticker. Today, my understanding is that sticker (for undergrad at least) is largely a fiction that few people (at least non-international students) pay.
Which
Yes, it is largely a fiction. For private universities (the ones typically with the high sticker prices) 16% paid the full amount in 2019-2020. For public schools the number is 26%. [0]
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ignore-the-sticker-price-...
The international students are definitely whales for funding.
> This means that there’s often a chasm between the published cost of attendance, or sticker price, and what people actually pay once financial aid is factored in, or the net price.
Maybe it's different now from when I applied to colleges, and it's anecdotal, but coming from a middle class family with a 4.0 GPA, I didn't qualify for financial aid at most of the colleges I looked at. I could get some merit based scholarship money, but not enough to make a significant dent in tuition, much less total cost (including food and housing). My parents' income was too high for me to qualify for financial aid, but they didn't have enough money to afford for me to go to the colleges I wanted either, and even if they could, they wanted me to pay for college myself. As a result, I ended up going to a much cheaper, less prestigious college, rather than the more prestigious ones I initially wanted, in order to avoid mountains of student debt.
I came from a middle class family (both parents college educated with white collar jobs) and received significant financial aid offers from multiple colleges (2 decade ago). A mix of grants and subsidized federal loans.
I think it depends a lot on the family’s position within the middle class. Upper middle class families will not be eligible for financial aid, while members of the lower middle class have significant non-merit based aid available.
this is a wild take. we don't care about the cost of education 10 years ago. Look at a 50 year horizon and how on a generation basis how much more significantly expensive it is.
Im certain this doesnt include the quality and value both real and perceived, lets assume that it is cheaper, so is the quality
Americans have some of the best and cheapest colleges. First, most people don't have to pay tuition (low income) or a lot lower than tuition. Then, in-state tuition is ridiculously cheap. Citizens are eligible for a LOT of grants and scholarships. They can work on-campus as teaching/research assistants which offer fee waiver and get paid a decent wage! Their parents/grand-parents/etc fund tax advantaged college savings account, which has to be used for college! They can work off campus or any remote job. And finally, a range of federal/state grants, loans, etc are available. Student health insurance is also incredibly cheap. And health centers on campus. And there are no rules that say you must go to college and be done with it at this age (unlike other countries), US is incredibly flexible, you can defer, do part-time, do slowly (work one year, college next year), lots of options!
The only people who pay sticker price are international students. I don't know if we can say American higher education is subsidized mostly by people from third world, taking massive loans, usually half of or almost all of their family's net worth!
I forgot to add Community colleges, which are incredibly cheap. For the final year, they can transfer to top college and get degree from there.
Just in case people haven't heard this, here is my straightforward advice (for those in the US considering college):
1. Unless you have schools falling all over trying to recruit you, go to an in-state public university. By "trying to recruit you" I mean schools literally flying you out to visit and offering you full scholarship because you are an ungodly talent in whatever you do (sports, music, etc.). Schools mailing you letters and offering you $5k doesn't count, that can't offset the cost of private or out of state tuitions. For most middle class people, the jobs you'll be getting don't care about whether you went to UNC or VT, or K-State, or whatever- public state universities are kind of all judged the same and it's not worth the extra cost to go out of state.
a. If you want to really get a good deal, go to a community college for a year or two and live with your parents, then transfer to the state school when you have done your core classes and are ready to focus on your major.
b. Still apply for scholarships even if you're going to a state school with in state tuition. Pretty much anyone can swing a few grand in grants and scholarships, and if you get a job (or are lucky enough for your parents to pitch in) you can graduate debt free. Being debt-free from a state school is far better than having $40k or more in debt from a private school with moderate name recognition.
3. Definitely don't go to a small private liberal arts college. I have good friends that teach at these kinds of schools, and while they are a nice community to work in, they are a bad deal for students. People are starting to figure this out, smaller liberal arts colleges are at higher risk of shutting down. They unite the costs of a private school with the faculty the size of a community college, with the uncertainty of not knowing if your school will be open in four years to give you a degree.
If you do #1 above you'll have done the common sense thing and you'll really appreciate it as an adult when you hear your coworkers complaining about their mountain of debt from their college that sounded cool but turned out to be kinda crappy.
It would help improve things if universities, not the government, was responsible for student loan debt. Schools have no incentive to lower costs when they have no liability
I do not believe this article at all. The evidence they provided is not compelling. Who ya gonna believe, them or your own eyes?
Behold Simpsons Paradox. The question isn’t “are people paying more or less out of pocket”. The question is “how much is the school I want to go to going to cost me”. Perhaps costs are “down” because people can’t attend the good schools they got into and they’re choosing to go to lesser schools. The author would have you believe this is a good thing!
The school I went to and the degree I earned in 2007 costs more than 3x today what it cost me then. But yeah sure go ahead and tell me the real price is going down.
What an imbecile.
This is only secret to people who have money.
Its been well known for 50 years that poor students with good grades get pretty much full rides to top tier schools due to scholarships.
The article disagrees:
> One study found that most high-achieving, low-income students chose not to apply to highly selective colleges with steep sticker prices. They opted instead for schools with lower sticker prices that ended up offering much less financial aid and thus costing more.
Yes, this was my own experience!
When looking at universities, when I saw a high sticker price, I ignored that university, even if in hindsight I had a good chance of being accepted.
I wish I had had someone when I was young who encouraged me to have broader horizons.
I have some regrets about my choice of undergrad school, but it isn't because I went someplace cheap. I could have gone to one of the multiple state schools that would have given me half off just for being born somewhere.
Instead, I went to a school that was in my home town. I learned things when I went to college, but that school was objectively the wrong choice. Not only did it cost double what the state school would have cost[0], I missed out on the reason young people ought to go to college in the first place: a once in a lifetime chance to spend 4 years hanging out and making friends with high achieving people who would go on to shape the face of the world.
Granted, one of my college friends ended up as a senior researcher studying cancer, and another went on to work for Mozilla, but I'm pretty sure in my class of ~300, there weren't too many CTOs, VPEs, star researchers, etc. Simply going to a bigger school would have been a better choice; going to a school that was both bigger and better than my undergrad institution would have been the best choice.
I guess that's what you get when society expects a 17-year-old to make what may be the single most impactful life choice they'll ever have. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
That said, going to a small liberal arts college had its advantages. I learned a lot. Some of that stuff I learned, I've even gotten to use once or twice. But, looking back, if I could send my past self a message back in time, I'd tell me to go somewhere else. I may not have been much better off financially if I had met someone in college at 20 who talked me into partnering up on some insane business venture or something, but that experience would have been priceless.
--
[0]: This was even after I got a scholarship that reduced my estimated family contribution to 2/3 of what the sticker price was, on top of being able to stay at home and save money that way.
The other not-so-secret is that small private liberal arts don't necessarily have stickers all that much lower than the top schools--and, as you suggest, they're much less able to provide financial aid than schools with multi-billion dollar endowments.
This is what I did.
My parents also told me college doesn't matter, just the degree (which was their way of saving money). Not that they paid a dime anyways, they just always felt comfortable lying to me if it saved them any amount of trouble.
One of the most unpleasant surprises I had when researching colleges for my kids was how little merit aid is offered by not just "top tier" but good colleges in general.
Our state school does not have much merit scholarships (and I'm not talking about $500 per year for 4.0 GPA/1500+ SAT, which is not even available to all applicants, that's just insulting). There are colleges which are definitely in the bottom of the rankings where you can get in with 0 tuition or even full ride (no tuition+free room and board) AND you can get some stipend thrown on top. I now have a choice: pay $45K (tuition with room and board) per year for my very academically strong kids at my (reasonably good) state school or $0 at the likes of Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Florida, and to a smaller extent Arizona and Texas (well the last ones would not be free, but at least less than half of the state uni). What do you think I will encourage my kids to do???
4.0 GPA isn't what they are looking for. Rich kids have the money, but not talent. Poor kids have talent, but not money. MIT and the like is a place where the two can meet and work together. They don't need a high GPA, they need a seriously gifted student.
I think the line has shifted though as have, perhaps, expectations of work-study. And more or less everyone at a lot of elite schools (OK, leave out legacies, athletes perhaps, etc.) had pretty top grades; they wouldn't have gotten in otherwise.
Author states its lower "Once tax incentives are factored in". As she is not my CPA, I must call BS.
I have always believed that the concept of a college should be abolished for bachelor's degrees - the concepts can and should be learned on one's own via learning materials, lots of practice, simulations, and an eventual certification. Education should truly become accessible to all. Currently it is nothing but a moneygrubbing racket. A college makes sense for doctorate level programs only.
I'm not sure if bachelor's degrees should be abolished.
But we need to start recognizing that most college degrees aren't required to do most jobs, and it's basically rent-seeking behavior.
I've helped interview and hire three additional software engineers for my teams over the past 2.5 years. None of the applicants with a B.S. in SWE could hold a candle to the self-taught applicants. Those are my anecdotes, but we interviewed multiple applicants with B.S SWE degrees from Auburn, the University of Alabama, and the University of Tennessee. None of them were close to being as prepared as the applicants, who were a little older and had no college degrees but decided to pursue SWE independently.
I had a very successful career in construction when I was a young man. First, I wore a tool belt, and then I got into commercial construction management. I work for one of the Top 5 builders in the world. I decided to move back to the states and put down some roots. I expected to land a construction management job in Auburn easily. However, none of the companies would even give me a chance to interview because I didn't have a B.S. in Building Science from Auburn.
As it turns out, everyone and their mother has a Building Science degree from Auburn. So, I also decided to pursue one until I learned how much the people were earning. They were spending ~$100k on a degree only to graduate and earn far less than I earned while wearing a tool belt.
So, I put my tool belt back on and went to work.
I pivoted into SWE a few years ago without a degree. However, to get to the executive level, the head of our company suggested that I obtain a degree. So, I completed an SWE degree at WGU. I didn't learn anything while pursuing the degree, but at least I have that piece of paper hanging in my office now.
I have many more anecdotes I could share to show why I think most college degrees are rent-seeking behavior, but I guess anecdotes don't account for much at the end of the day.
As a self-taught SWE myself, I agree with your observations. Two of the most talented engineers I've ever met were self-taught. The interesting thing about the two people I'm thinking of is that, besides being self-taught, neither one of them actually even went to college. One of them actually dropped out of college, then went on to get hired at Netflix at 23 years old, back when they were only hiring senior engineers.
Me, I have a degree in math, but 97% of what I know is stuff I picked up either on the job, or because I found it interesting. Besides those that picked up CS as a major when it was a hot field, I'm betting that some of them get the love of tech beaten out of them by their college experience. I certainly know more than one science major who felt that way after graduating. (Not me, though. I'm weird, and I still love math just as much as I always did. Maybe even more.)
Whoops, I noticed a mistake!
> One of them actually dropped out of ~~college~~ high school(!), then went on to get hired at Netflix at 23 years old, back when they were only hiring senior engineers.
Great colleges teach some people how to think. Most people cannot critically think, they simply parrot others, go with the herd, although some of those can perhaps communicate effectively. But for those that go to college and get some manner of STEM degree, something that requires analysis, these people can think from first principles. They are worth 10x what the others are at a technical company. Any college that manages to train students how to critically think is well worth the price. Our economy is quite literally held back by the fact that we do not have enough people who can actually think. Perhaps AI will help solve this problem, but so far, AI just seems to replicate the non-thinkers.
I agree with your thesis, but I don't think there are 5 colleges or universities in the US that actually truly teach people how to think critically, with genuine curiosity. I despise people who are smart and educated, but not the least bit intellectually curious. The sad part is that the entire US education system is literally designed to beat the curiosity out of people, at least until you start talking about graduate schools.
I think it is very difficult to do it. You need professors who challenge assumptions and break with the crowd. In college you want many kinds of thinkers teaching the students, and even if you're successful, it takes years for those seeds to grow in young minds to break through prior indoctrinations. And if you think US school systems are bad, they are far better at this than the rest of the world. Please forgive me for the blanket statement, I speak generally not specifically of a particular country.
Learning/teaching how to think is:
(1) Not entirely a function of bachelor's programs that produce conformant wage workers.
(2) Not worth the high tuition and debt at all.
I can't help but imagine that there have got to exist far better and cheaper ways to learn how to think. I would like to see more entrepreneurship colleges that force people to innovate, also to bootstrap without external investment.
College degrees still make sense for things that involve math (like mechanical engineering or physics) because I have never met a single person who put the effort in to raise themselves to a professional level on their own.
Your self-disagreement, as manifested in your first two paragraphs, should be eating you alive, but it isn't because you haven't fully come to terms with it yet.
Strongly disagree. Part of the value of college is new experiences and being exposed to people and things you wouldn't be otherwise. Removing these experiences only reinforces the idea that the only benefit to college and university is to churn out worker drones.
Maslow's pyramid is a thing. Once you are financially secure, those other levels of good stuff open up. For most common folk, college is about financial security because that is what they don't have. If you are born into a financially secure family, you cannot understand that and may give really had advice to poorer folks.
I understand but it's not worth the price tag or even close. There ought to be 10x more price efficient ways of getting that experience if not for free altogether.
Meh, turn that aspect into smaller “camps” or apprenticeship programs without the insane price tag.
People can get new experiences and meet people in much more efficient ways.
For some areas, yes. But for studies that have a meaning lab/shop component, the university setting is quite practice.
That is vocational training. There isn't a strong need for a full-blown college degree for it unless one is also tasked with improving the process.
I think that 3 or 4 years is too large a chunk of one's life and education to take on an all or nothing basis. If 3 years of college are good, aren't 2 years of college 2/3 as good? Or more appropriate for some people?
The current system grades people as failures if they fail to complete the whole course.
It might suit some highly motivated people but the pressure of meeting all the deadlines which have heavy costs for missing (like repeat the entire paper next year and pay again) keep many students actually doing it instead of procrastinating forever. So does the pressure to simply get out of bed to attend lectures instead of learning whenever they feel like. It does sound silly but humans are weak and useless at doing things they don't want to do in the short term with nebulous future benefits.
This happens with mortgages too. People with a mortgage tend to religiously pay it off as required so they don't lose their house while people without, somehow don't manage to build equivalent wealth even though they could be scrupulously investing their spare money just as much. And once you have a house, it's easier to keep it than to keep a pile of money. Often when people die, almost their only wealth is their house. Where did all the rest of what they earned their entire life go?