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    Joined: Feb 2011
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    Jon, my own perspective is just as strongly held an opinion that nobody should PAY for graduate studies.

    wink

    Why? Because in any non-professional degree program, that PhD is essentially wasting your earning potential while you do something that offers mostly marginal additional earning power. Now, it's fine if its about something other than money-- but NEVER go into hock for it. Never. They ought to be paying YOU-- via teaching assistantships and tuition waivers.

    But I don't really understand things like law and optometry school, to be fair. It's a curious model for someone like me.



    Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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    I'm a little sensitive about the term Tiger Mother, but it appears that Harvard fears for the well-being of bright but uncompetitive children placed with Tiger Kids.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...6-ee43-11e2-bed3-b9b6fe264871_print.html

    Q&A: Bill Raduchel on getting into Harvard and the future of newspapers
    By Thomas Heath
    Washington Post
    July 19, 2013

    So here is a question every parent might ask. Other than high SAT scores and straight A’s, what does it take to get admitted to Harvard?

    The challenge at a really selective college like Harvard is finding people who can still find self-esteem in that competitive environment. If you are not the best at anything, life in that environment is not a lot of fun. And every admissions officer who is there a long time, more than a few years, probably had a case or two where he or she pushed someone into the class, only to have it turn out in tears.

    You learn to look for what we called “translatability.” Do something where you were the best. A kid who got straight A’s and was going to get B’s wasn’t going to work if academic success is how they get self-esteem. So you had to look for people who could come into a very competitive environment, who could still find self-esteem and who in some way, shape or form was still the best at something.

    How do you figure that out?

    It was never the answers they gave. It was the questions they asked. The questions give a much better clue to how a person thinks. Answers can be learned, can be rote. But it’s the questions. Like the questions Sean Parker asked me that day at AOL.

    What was it like serving on the admissions committee?

    It’s incredibly competitive. If you take the job seriously, it’s really stressful, because at the end you realize you are affecting lives. You are making choices that are intrinsically very hard to do. You want to learn about how to work with people, how to evaluate people, how to make great decisions.

    It was a committee process. Your peers had to vote to let anybody in. If you didn’t get along with your peers, you didn’t get many people into the class. We all had candidates. Some private schools sent large numbers of kids.

    What you are looking for is trying to put together the best class for the college. That doesn’t mean the brightest. You always had conflicts between kids who are very smart but were not otherwise exceptional and kids who were exceptional but not quite as smart.

    The data showed kids who did something else but were smart and not exceptionally smart always did better in life and in grades. The cynics would say the reason was course selection.

    What do you say?

    If you have a good and solid group of friends, college comes down to having the right dozen people around you. And if you find them and prod them on the success, you will do fine. The trick is to go find that group of people.

    The kids who were smart but exceptional, they look in the mirror and look at themselves and say, I’m in charge. And they act accordingly.

    Kids who look in the mirror and they see Mom and Dad and the teacher and say to themselves, “What do they want me to do?” — it’s a very different feeling. That’s what you are trying to sort for. Have you figured out how to take control of your own life?

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    HK: This is why I'm gently encouraging DD8 to take up softball. She's got a cannon of an arm already, a very strong build, and she has the hands to make good contact. With some normal development with a bat and glove, and given the limited amount of competition for Title IX scholarships, she can get me off the hook for college tuition.

    Of course, there's always the chance that, in the next ten years, a massive wave of bankruptcies in higher education wipes out the debt service obligations for all those ridiculous and unnecessary facilities upgrades that have been built, resulting in tuitions falling back to reasonable levels.

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    Originally Posted by Bostonian
    I'm a little sensitive about the term Tiger Mother, but it appears that Harvard fears for the well-being of bright but uncompetitive children placed with Tiger Kids.

    I got the opposite out of that. It seems to me they're more concerned about the competitive kids and the Tiger Kids.

    Originally Posted by Competitive Kids
    A kid who got straight A’s and was going to get B’s wasn’t going to work if academic success is how they get self-esteem.

    Originally Posted by Tiger Kids
    Kids who look in the mirror and they see Mom and Dad and the teacher and say to themselves, “What do they want me to do?” — it’s a very different feeling. That’s what you are trying to sort for. Have you figured out how to take control of your own life?

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    It must be strongly emphasized here that "that was then" is the order of the day in this entire conversation.

    Anything longer than 10 years ago is simply not relevant information about higher ed anymore.

    http://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=76

    Unfortunately.

    The mean costs from that table-- taken at 10y intervals from Public, four-year institutions are:

    1980-- $6,381
    1990-- 8,485
    2000-- 10,711
    2010-- 15,605

    Please note that most "good/flagship" public colleges are double those values, and a fair number even higher.

    I don't give the private college numbers there because I'm not sure they are accurate, given that they include the for-profit sector. Suffice it to say that the apparent advent of for-profit higher ed in a big way in the late 1980's seems to have resulted in a huge jump in that number, and that the rise since then has not been as extreme as in public post-secondary. But it's still been around 5K per decade otherwise. The other thing is that just within the past 3-4 years (since '08), a fair number of top-notch private schools have reneged on a pledge to graduate students "loan-free" and to freeze tuition for matriculants, to slow tuition increases to no more than 150% of inflation... all those things that kept the increases somewhat in check.






    Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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    Quote
    This is why I'm gently encouraging DD8 to take up softball. She's got a cannon of an arm already, a very strong build, and she has the hands to make good contact. With some normal development with a bat and glove, and given the limited amount of competition for Title IX scholarships, she can get me off the hook for college tuition.

    Dude, not sure if you are serious about this post or not... but if you are, you are assuming she would want to attend a college with D1 or D2 sports (where the scholarships are). A lot of the higher powered academic schools (not all, but a lot) are D3 and don't give sports scholarships. No Ivies give sports scholarships, for example... Plus the cost of traveling squads and development to really be eligible for a full scholarship in any sport is high. And the kid has to really want it... not because mom or dad wants them to earn a college scholarship, but in their hearts. Partly just to get good enough to earn the scholarship and partly to be willing to completely devote themselves to the sport all the way through high school and college.

    And counting on the bottom falling out of the college market and prices dropping down to where you can easily afford them without savings... again, you are day dreaming.

    I'd suggest you start putting money in a 529 account now and don't count on either of these things happening. Your D won't thank you for having no college savings because you expected one of these two very unlikely outcomes to come true. Or... maybe you were kidding...

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    Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
    Jon, my own perspective is just as strongly held an opinion that nobody should PAY for graduate studies.

    wink

    Why? Because in any non-professional degree program, that PhD is essentially wasting your earning potential while you do something that offers mostly marginal additional earning power. Now, it's fine if its about something other than money-- but NEVER go into hock for it. Never. They ought to be paying YOU-- via teaching assistantships and tuition waivers.

    But I don't really understand things like law and optometry school, to be fair. It's a curious model for someone like me.

    I agree that you should never pay for Ph.D. programs for the reasons you set forth above.

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    Originally Posted by Dude
    I got the opposite out of that. It seems to me they're more concerned about the competitive kids and the Tiger Kids.

    That was my take on it as well for the reasons Dude set out.

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    Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
    The other thing is that just within the past 3-4 years (since '08), a fair number of top-notch private schools have reneged on a pledge to graduate students "loan-free" and to freeze tuition for matriculants, to slow tuition increases to no more than 150% of inflation... all those things that kept the increases somewhat in check.

    I honestly missed this one. The reneging, that is. Any good articles on this lately?

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    Originally Posted by intparent
    Quote
    This is why I'm gently encouraging DD8 to take up softball. She's got a cannon of an arm already, a very strong build, and she has the hands to make good contact. With some normal development with a bat and glove, and given the limited amount of competition for Title IX scholarships, she can get me off the hook for college tuition.

    Dude, not sure if you are serious about this post or not... but if you are, you are assuming she would want to attend a college with D1 or D2 sports (where the scholarships are). A lot of the higher powered academic schools (not all, but a lot) are D3 and don't give sports scholarships. No Ivies give sports scholarships, for example... Plus the cost of traveling squads and development to really be eligible for a full scholarship in any sport is high. And the kid has to really want it... not because mom or dad wants them to earn a college scholarship, but in their hearts. Partly just to get good enough to earn the scholarship and partly to be willing to completely devote themselves to the sport all the way through high school and college.

    And counting on the bottom falling out of the college market and prices dropping down to where you can easily afford them without savings... again, you are day dreaming.

    I'd suggest you start putting money in a 529 account now and don't count on either of these things happening. Your D won't thank you for having no college savings because you expected one of these two very unlikely outcomes to come true. Or... maybe you were kidding...

    I'm kidding on the square. You may also have noticed the term "gently" there earlier.

    I'm not kidding at all when I say that my DD will not be attending an overpriced, brand-name school. I would consider forcing a child to play a sport she doesn't like to be kinder than trying to shoehorn her through the requirements for an Ivy acceptance. I consider that game to be like global thermonuclear war... the only way to win is not to play. I knew kids who were trying for that when I was in school, and I openly pitied them. And that was before helicoptering and gaming the system became recognized as necessary components of the process.

    As for tuition declines in the next ten years... look through the news today and you'll easily find an article giving sound financial reasons for NOT pursuing a degree. That says the current price point is not sustainable at current demand levels. Impressionable young people (and the parents who finance them) are reading those articles with interest, and that can lead only to a decrease in demand. You'll find other articles that speak to a trend among young adults to reject debt accumulation. So no, I don't think I'm dreaming there at all. What goes up, must come down.

    Now, I don't expect the Ivies to be among those hurt in price, because that's an arms race.

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