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I only skimmed the article after the first couple of paragraphs. The whole $42,000 price tag for a private college is quite a misnomer. My sister went to Michig
by bowlich 12y ago
I only skimmed the article after the first couple of paragraphs. The whole $42,000 price tag for a private college is quite a misnomer. My sister went to Michigan Tech, I went to a private liberal arts college. After four years, she has more debt then me.
Your public institution is about as stingy as it can come with it's funding. That $18,000 price tag is going to end up being your final price. If you are a good student, that private college will throw scholarships at you hand over fist. My college's price (starting at $26,000/yr) would typically get slashed by 50% at the start of each year just by the dividends off the school's endowment -- which it does not figure in to it's advertised costs since it various drastically from fiscal year to fiscal year. After that, load on a bunch of random scholarships and I would be down to around $9,000/yr. I had a couple friends whose parents took jobs at the college to get their kids a 90% discount on tuition. They actually ended up making money going to college.
- existencebox 12y agoI think that latter statement is very unfair. Myself, any many other "good students" I know still faced ~100-200k in expenses (both tuition and otherwise) at the end of 4 years. Even being offered essentially a 'half off' masters did little to lessen the overall impact; and that was all I got. Granted, I was well enough off financially to recover from this, but other close friends in less advantageous positions came out with 50k+ in debt, and they had "significant amounts" of assistance. I found my university at least to be just as stingy as the public universities you speak of.
- gmarx 12y agoMy apologies in advance for being pedantic on the web but I think there is a chance a HackerNews reader would appreciate this: "Misnomer" means something is improperly named. It doesn't mean merely misleading.
- geebee 12y agoA very high percentage of UC students pay no tuition. "In an email to NPR, a Berkeley spokeswoman said about 40 percent of undergrads there don't pay any tuition at all." http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/11/24/366370724/california-college-students-walk-out-of-class-to-protest-tuition-hikes http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/11/24/366370724/cal...
- eli_gottlieb 12y agoI remember back in my undergrad, "tuition" was approximately 1/4 of what students actually had to pay. The rest was "fees". Strangely enough, tuition wasn't allowed to rise faster than inflation, but our "fees" got larger and multiplied each year. How about at Berkeley?
- geebee 12y agoyeah, universities can be sneaky about that http://registrar.berkeley.edu/feesched.html http://registrar.berkeley.edu/feesched.html looking at this, it isn't too bad at berkeley.