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.
I re-read the article and stand (partially) corrected.
>Since 2014-15 school year the cost attending a public four-year university has fallen by 21 percent, before adjusting for inflation.
Not sure how the cost is calculated though. The cost will be tuition, room and board, fees, less scholarships/grants (effectively college lowering the price to get the customer in), less various loans. If the loans are excluded from the cost this is not accurate, this is still the money the school will be getting, and the student will be paying. Also notice 2014-2015 and ONLY public four year school qualifiers (cost at private colleges continued to go up, although, according to the author, less then inflation).
> Once tax benefits are factored in, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis, the average American is paying the same amount for tuition as they were in the 1990s.
Yeah no, this doesn't read like an honest analysis but as an attempt to drag the facts, kicking and screaming, to align with the author's agenda.
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. Can't wait for their fine tuned LLM.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Depends on the state. When I was in college, California community college was very affordable, but when I transferred to a Wisconsin school to get a 4-year degree, I learned there that WI community colleges charged the same price per credit hour as UW. Things may have changed since then, but at that time, if you lived in WI, you may as well go to a UW if you can get accepted, cause a community college wouldn't save you money.
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.
> There's no point in going to university anymore when you can just go straight into big tech.
Assuming wanting to work at big tech is a goal, I'm not aware of any of the big tech companies recruiting for entry level roles outside of colleges. The "boot camp"/"hire anyone with a pulse" period was a ZIRP era anomaly.
No one (statistically) is getting hired for a coveted job today without a degree. The first thing they check; without and you go straight to /dev/null.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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 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.
> 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.
> 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].
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).
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 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.
Well, I think that's half right, in that "how large percentage of lessons are run by assistants" isn't necessarily a great measure of "quality of teaching" either. In some cases the TAs may be better teachers than the professors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
>Since 2014-15 school year the cost attending a public four-year university has fallen by 21 percent, before adjusting for inflation.
Not sure how the cost is calculated though. The cost will be tuition, room and board, fees, less scholarships/grants (effectively college lowering the price to get the customer in), less various loans. If the loans are excluded from the cost this is not accurate, this is still the money the school will be getting, and the student will be paying. Also notice 2014-2015 and ONLY public four year school qualifiers (cost at private colleges continued to go up, although, according to the author, less then inflation).
> Once tax benefits are factored in, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis, the average American is paying the same amount for tuition as they were in the 1990s.
Yeah no, this doesn't read like an honest analysis but as an attempt to drag the facts, kicking and screaming, to align with the author's agenda.
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. Can't wait for their fine tuned LLM.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
Depends on the state. When I was in college, California community college was very affordable, but when I transferred to a Wisconsin school to get a 4-year degree, I learned there that WI community colleges charged the same price per credit hour as UW. Things may have changed since then, but at that time, if you lived in WI, you may as well go to a UW if you can get accepted, cause a community college wouldn't save you money.
Assuming wanting to work at big tech is a goal, I'm not aware of any of the big tech companies recruiting for entry level roles outside of colleges. The "boot camp"/"hire anyone with a pulse" period was a ZIRP era anomaly.
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.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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.
- 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 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'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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
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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?
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.
These are otherwise shrewd people.
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.