Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion go to college or no?

I'm not talking house. I'm talking savings. It would deplete them quickly.

Even excluding tuition, room and board for the better part of a year can easily run $10,000. Parents spend thousands of dollars a year on their children while they live at home. If an EFC of $10K per year shocks middle class parents, I wonder why they have been so uninformed.

10-15K looks a lot less than affordable, though, when your household income is only 45-75K.

I agree that parents who have been writing checks for private schooling probably won't find that particularly shocking, no.

But it can come as a pretty significant shock to learn that someone ELSE thinks that you can afford to write a check for 20K annually when your income is 90K and you, personally, estimate that your "discretionary" income is more like 16K annually.


Useful link:

http://projectonstudentdebt.org/index.php

This contains reasonably up-to-date info. One problem is that colleges have a vested interest in pledging to offer to meet "100% of need" but the catch is how they determine "need."

Students/families often do have to beg or borrow in order to make up the difference between what they can ACTUALLY pay, and what the college says that they can.

It's not like those costs suddenly disappear when the kid goes away to college. Kids still need food, clothes, and medical services when they're in high school and college. Also, many parents might defer buying a laptop (use the family PC), a car, or a cell phone for their kids during high school, but these become necessary tools that can't be deferred any further come college.

So, yeah... the parents might be paying more than $10k a year to support their kids in high school, then they'll be adding another $10k for room and board in college, plus all the other expenses that crop up.


Probably because that's more than ten times as much as it took back when they attended college.

When I was a student (80s), tuition rose by more than the cost of inflation every year. And every year, the colleges claimed that "tuition does not cover the whole cost of your education," as though we were being subsidized.

And they make this same claim every year, while still increasing tuition by more than the cost of inflation (this may have slowed slightly in the last couple of years). Yeah, right. It really costs $60,000 for eight or nine months of classes at Yale or Harvard? I mean, REALLY? Or are we spending our money on buildings we don't necessarily need so that we can hire more faculty members who won't get NIH grants or tenure?

I went to an elite private college. I know how good my education was compared to what my peers at public colleges and universities got. No one cancelled a class because fewer than 20 students had enrolled (some classes were actually capped at 3 or 5 students). The biggest class I ever took had 50 students in it. There was never any stress about overcrowding and the possibility of waiting a year to take a class. I never took a multiple choice test. Ever. Everything I did was graded by a human, usually the professor who was teaching the class. And the standards were pretty high. Etc.

Yet even knowing what I do, and even though I happily okay, grouchily, pay for private schools for my kids, I'm beginning to question if elite colleges are actually worth it. At the rate things are going, costs will be over a quarter of a million dollars for four years when my eldest is ready to go to college. Maybe way more. Who knows? And what about when my 8-year-old is ready for college?

So, I've been paying close attention --- and I'm disgusted.

But... but...
I have heard this from many people who went to elite/highly selective colleges.

Here's the thing, though-- all of that was also true for me-- and to an only slightly less true extent, for my DH. My general chemistry labs were taught by PROFESSORS, not grad students. There were fewer than 25 students in my O-chem class, and only two of us in the spring quarter of Biochem.

We did NOT attend private schools, nor particularly elite public ones, either, for that matter. I attended a small REGIONAL state university. I would happily send my DD there if she wanted to go. It was a GREAT education, and it was at a bargain basement price-- then, and even now, it's quite affordable.

Seriously. My tuition was ~1300 a year when I started, and the ONLY reason it took me five years to finish was that, frankly, I was dirt poor and had to work full time. When I finished, tuition rates had risen to a shocking 1800 a year. LOL. They are still under 10K, nearly three decades later.

So I do question what I'd have gotten at, say... Stanford. My classmates and I were accepted at VERY prestigious graduate/professional schools (Caltech, MIT, Johns Hopkins, etc), in spite of coming from a program that graduated just 3-8 majors annually. We've all done fairly well for ourselves, given the field and all. The program was/is solid, but more importantly, it was aimed at teaching UNDERGRADUATES.

I think that is actually the key, myself. It leads to all of the rest that Val mentions (which I agree are important benchmarks to look at in determining the overall quality of an undergraduate program).

I also knew (in graduate school) people who did come from an elite institution as undergraduates, and those who came directly from those programs that had PhD students... tended to be the ones that suffered from the problems Val hints at. They tended to be shy of 'hands-on' work, and not particularly independent either in or out of the lab. But it was both not-so-elite public schools and elite private ones.


I can see the value in a selective college which teaches only/mostly undergraduate students. I can. I'm just not convinced that it's worth the premium when it can be had at places that don't want BOTH arms and legs for the experience.

That's interesting. Maybe the undergraduate focus is key, or partially so. Or maybe we both just got lucky and picked good schools. I was pretty surprised at what would earn an A at the big public university up the road. It was B- or C level work at my college. Some of ther facilities were better, but they were also shared among students....

I moved to California in the mid 90s and was appalled at the stuff I heard from pretty much anyone who had been to a public college out here, including UC Berkeley. While fully acknowledging that other states may be different, here's what was common here:

• Couldn't get a class I needed for my major and so had to graduate in five years
• Couldn't get a class I needed for my major and so had to go to summer school and cut my summer earnings
• My class was cancelled due to enrollment of <20 students (this is the norm in community colleges now; I taught at one and it was always a threat hanging over your job in the next term)
• 100-500 students in most of my freshmen/sophomore level classes
• I took lots of multiple choice tests (again, this is the norm among the educator/reviewers I've met over the last several years, and they're from all over the US)

Now, I also know that there are some dreadful private colleges out there! So I'm not saying that private is just better. Definitely not.

ETA: This stuff all came from current college students or recent graduates. The situation is very rough today, as well (there's even a bill in the legislature that would allow credit for online classes if a student can't get into a class at his B&M college/university).

I'm still not sure precisely what I think of college.

For me, it was free (technically I made a profit my first year) and helped me avoid working meaningless jobs for five years, so that was a plus. I was doing *something* so people left me alone.

However, socially/emotionally, it was pretty much five solid years of despair, isolation, and often chaos, so that was a negative, and a source of recurrent nightmares in the present day.

Education wise, I didn't have any interest in the classes, particularly engineering, which was what I was being paid to do, so I can't tell if I learned much of anything and after a couple of years, I could have cared less.

The biggest thing I got from it was a Ticket to Law School, meaning that it allowed me to go to law school.

I like the fact that I'm employable because of college, but I hated the actual experience of college and would prefer to have those five years of my life back.