Ivy League Prices Are Pushing $90k a Year

The Price you Pay for College by Ron Lieber has some interesting background. Essentially, some colleges started raising tuition and then offering more financial aid and discount packages. This made them appear to be providing more to the students who got aid packages and they selected those schools more often. For the wealthy families who could afford the higher prices, they also felt the schools were more selective. The other colleges soon followed in order to maintain their perceived value.<p>The second driver is the student loan system where the government has allowed special rules that make it almost impossible for lenders to lose. The lenders offer huge loans without regard for the ability to repay because they know they are protected.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Price-You-Pay-College-Financial&#x2F;dp&#x2F;006286730X&#x2F;ref=asc_df_006286730X&#x2F;?tag=hyprod-20&amp;linkCode=df0&amp;hvadid=507975958237&amp;hvpos=&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvrand=2486194474399669191&amp;hvpone=&amp;hvptwo=&amp;hvqmt=&amp;hvdev=c&amp;hvdvcmdl=&amp;hvlocint=&amp;hvlocphy=9008468&amp;hvtargid=pla-948972210161&amp;psc=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Price-You-Pay-College-Financial&#x2F;dp&#x2F;00...</a>

If you think of Ivy League colleges (plus MIT, Stanford) as places where students learn, then this tuition is non-sense. If you think of them as 4-year recruiting agencies, then it makes sense. A lot of employers think &quot;if this guy was good enough for Yale, he&#x27;s probably good for me too&quot;. Of course they go on an interview people, but Ivy League act as great filters. At zero cost for employers.<p>What is baffling to me is the value proposition of second tier colleges which charge pretty much the same tuition as the first tier. Have you heard of Wake Forest University? According to the US News ranking [1], it is ranked at 29 among &quot;National Universities&quot; and charges a tuition of $62k. If you were to see a resume of a candidate graduating from Wake Forest, would you jump on it?<p>(Note: I don&#x27;t want to dis Wake Forest U. I just found it on google minutes ago, I don&#x27;t think I heard about it until now, and I have no idea if it&#x27;s good or bad. But it certainly does not have the name recognition of Yale, for me, at least)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usnews.com&#x2F;best-colleges&#x2F;wake-forest-2978" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usnews.com&#x2F;best-colleges&#x2F;wake-forest-2978</a>

I am right now visiting McGill University in Canada with my son. He&#x27;s applying to all the top universities in US, but McGill is a breath of fresh air:<p>A)They admit by strict gpa and SAT criteria. No essays needed! Got top scores, you are in!<p>B) they are cheap. For international, it&#x27;s $32k Canadian tuition. This is almost roughly equivalent to in state tuition at U Michigan. For Quebecers, the tuition and fees are around $5k Canadian!<p>C) it&#x27;s huge. 40k kids. And they are all the top kids. Canada builds big schools and just gets shit done.<p>The US system is just such BS. On our tour, the entire group was American, half of whom we&#x27;re waiting on decisions from Ivy&#x27;s which are released this week. It&#x27;s crazy that the US is essentially inviting top students to leave the country for a great but much cheaper education.

I&#x27;m a Brown grad, who graduated in the mid 90&#x27;s. In the mid 90&#x27;s, Brown&#x27;s tuition was an unthinkable $32k&#x2F;year, if I remember correctly. As an immigrant with no family assets, I got a big financial aid package, and being a Rhode Islander, I also got a state grant, and took the rest as loans. It was just barely doable for someone who didn&#x27;t have family assets. Today, it seems truly impossible.<p>Since I&#x27;m from Providence, I visit Brown regularly when I visit my family, since I have lots of memories from the time. Today&#x27;s campus looks very little like it did in the 90&#x27;s. We had dumpy dorms, crappy cafeterias, and rather plain, but functional buildings. Today, the dorms have been renovated or rebuilt to be much more luxurious, the school has built a number of incredibly opulent buildings, and there&#x27;s just a whole lot more space and more wealth on display. The total enrollment went from somewhere around 8,000 then to about 10,000 today, so it&#x27;s not that they&#x27;re building these things to handle more students.<p>It seems that per-student spending has gone way up, and they&#x27;re now providing a luxury education experience, not just a degree.

Universal education in the US is almost entirely about entry into the professional-managerial class and vanishingly involved in actual training or education.<p>For most people, there are no other straightforward paths to this class of society, so even if this price tag puts the student in debt for much of their life, it is still rational to pay this price. A poor middle class person is marginally better-off than a poor working class person in the US.

From TFA:<p>&gt; Financial aid, in the form of grants, scholarships, loans and work-study programs, closes the gap for many.<p>From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;05&#x2F;it-costs-78200-to-go-to-harvardheres-what-students-actually-pay.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;05&#x2F;it-costs-78200-to-go-to-harv...</a>:<p>&gt; About 55% of Harvard students receive need-based scholarship aid with average grant totals around $53,000. &gt; &gt; The school states that families with students who receive scholarship funds pay an average of $12,000 towards their education per year and that students from families that earn between $65,000 and $150,000 typically contribute between 0% to 10% of their income towards the cost of attending Harvard each year.<p>I wonder what the average out-of-pocket cost is to attend these institutions.

And yet, at the same time, I don&#x27;t think that they&#x27;ve ever had less to offer.<p>We&#x27;re increasingly seeing highly critical re-evaluations of the current higher education paradigm, and we&#x27;re increasingly at a point where an Ivy League diploma has little value save that of a status symbol. (One which basically says &quot;I am conventionally-minded, inclined to do things the &#x27;right&#x27; way, and I hold the correct opinions.&quot;)

The reply to this is always &quot;but only rich people pay list price, everyone else gets &#x27;financial aid&#x27;&quot;. (Really, it&#x27;s just price discrimination, since the school is &#x27;aiding&#x27; themselves.) And my reply to that is, &quot;the school has zero obligation to give you anything; you can attend for three years, and then as a senior, have your &#x27;aid&#x27; canceled just because the school feels like it.&quot; My school kept trying to cancel my &#x27;aid&#x27;, midway through my degree, because of rounding errors in my parents&#x27; tax returns (which I had no control over).

There&#x27;s got to be some P&#x2F;E valuation ratio applied to universities. What schools give you the most bang for the buck, if your goal in college is mostly preparing for a career (as opposed to purely educational, intellectual broadening, social aspects etc.)? Maybe something that compares tuition cost and acceptance rate with alumni donation rate. Tuition cost is straightforward, but acceptance rate also measures a &quot;cost&quot; in how much effort it takes to get into (like a time cost of studying). Alumni donation rate shows how much disposable income grads have, as well as how much they attribute it to their university.<p>Around Seattle, it seems like a lot of Western Washington University grads get into great tech companies, while not being hard to get into. Tuition isn&#x27;t that low though.

Not surprising considering there are state schools charging $40K a year for out of state tuition. The US middle class is being robbed blind.

*If you come from a high income family.<p>Middle-income or low income can go for basically free or the equivalent of &#x27;at-cost&#x27; for room and board.

I&#x27;ve seen a couple comments mention it, but the Ivies offer <i>incredible</i> needs based aid.<p>I come from a solidly upper middle class family and my brother is attending an Ivy for less than $10k out of pocket a year. This has really benefitted him as he can get a degree that he wants to without having to worry about the burdens of student loans. No other school he got into afforded him that opportunity- good state schools would have cost more.<p>There are a lot of caveats: we might be lucky to be in the exact income bracket for cheap tuition (although I do want to stress, the income bracket is fairly high), this financial aid could change at any point, the campus does feel excessive at times. But this opportunity has been the biggest positive influence on his life, and produced a well rounded man who was able to explore his interests . WAI from my perspective

I had a bit of fun with this calculator here.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;college.harvard.edu&#x2F;financial-aid&#x2F;net-price-calculator" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;college.harvard.edu&#x2F;financial-aid&#x2F;net-price-calculat...</a><p>According to this once you hit 300k or so family income you get nothing, even if your living in NYC.<p>So that&#x27;s just 2 6 figure earners raising a family. 200k for a single person isn&#x27;t rich. I can&#x27;t imagine having an extra 80k per year as a family of 4 making 300k.<p>With that much money you could attend state school, save 60k a year and buy a house once you graduate ( down payment anyway).

It should be obvious that college is over-priced and the ROI is questionable...<p>...yet...<p>...parents still send their kids to college.<p>In other words - we are the problem, not the colleges.<p>Unless your kids want to be a doctor, lawyer, management consultant, or investment banker, then the influence college will have over your kid&#x27;s career will be minimal. Nowadays, many trade skills pay more than what a college grad earns after graduation.<p>If you think cost of college is a problem, put your money where your mouth is and encourage your kids to do something different. I know I will.

I was set to go to an Ivy League school 12 years ago and a couple years after the 08 recession. Back then, tuition, combined with room &amp; board came out to $50k a year. I ended up backing out and following a less conventional path because I couldn&#x27;t afford tuition. It&#x27;s hard to imagine that we&#x27;re now seeing $90k a year now in 2023. It&#x27;s just absolutely ludicrous. College in this country is a scam.

Quite a few comments talk about education and knowledge, but from my personal experience that’s not the main thing these colleges offer. It’s the connections, the circles you build and a jump start into a “better life” (fairly subjective too, I would say).

are there any plausible efforts out there (eg rough equivalent of an activist investor) attempting to convince universities to curb their addiction to hiring armies of administrative employees who (often) do nothing and (often) are paid several X what a phd candidate receives as a stipend<p>are there any meaningful ways to change the incentives to something other than raise as much money as possible to hire more administrative employees to raise as much money as possible?<p>(also if my premise is flawed and there are other things that contribute significantly to the burn of universities lmk)

Thank goodness for AI and all the online resources that will be available in the next decade to provide world-class education to EVERYONE for FREE.

Signal is everything for some

AI will cull many universities in the classical sense, or turn them into something closer to a trade school. GPT and friends will grow to teach you everything at a fraction of the price.<p>Soon you won&#x27;t need college for most disciplines outside of hard science, medical, and engineering. And in these you just need someone to walk you through the lab and make sure you don&#x27;t injure yourself or others - something frequently left to TAs and no-pay assistants anyway.<p>AI is going to put a big strain on higher education.