Colleges Lose Pricing Power
 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...leTabs=article

some colleges are ridiculously overpriced. I think people have started looking critically at cost, incentives, probable outcome and making decisions beyond getting into the "best" school. And this is absolutely the right thing to do. Next, can we start paying state university coaches a wage based on some sort of reality?

My son attends my alma mater. His tuition is nearly 6 times what mine was, yet minimum wage is only twice as much, and average starting salaries for college students is about 3 times. The more financial aid that has been made available has just resulted in tuition increases not true assistance for students. This also includes the student loan amounts offered to what seems everyone which how is it truly aid if it must be repaid with interest?

Considering how much Alabama is raking in since hiring Saban, do you really think they're in a position to gritch about his salary?

Ain't the free market wonderful?

That said, I think there are a lot of problems still out there. While we're seeing the slowing of tuition hikes and maybe more scholarship money, when you're talking about expensive private schools, most of the scholarships offered don't even bring the tuition up to being on par with public schools.

And don't even get me started on the for-profit education industry preying on our soldiers and sailors and attracting students for cheap crapola degrees at 4-5 times the price of what they'd pay at a brick and mortar institution.

Don't say that over at the other forum oriented towards college kids/parents/admissions, they would run you out with pitchforks

Then they fail at simple math. A $8,000 scholarship may sound star-spangled awesome, but when tuition is 30K/year, it falls flat.

My advice to someone going to professional school especially is to go to the cheapest public school you can find, get the 4.0 you'd never get if you went to Reed College or someplace like that, take your MCAT/LSAT and consider yourself smart for saving around $100K by not going to some overrated private school.

Honestly, most of them only let their kids apply to their one in-state flagship, HYPMS, and a bunch of schools who make it rain with merit aid. So in their brains, when their kid wins $20k in merit aid at Kalamazoo, it means all privates are cheaper than all publics.

They also believe that if you went to a state school, you had a far inferior education to their special snowflake

One of my best friends went to Reed College and got an absolutely world class education in physics and math. He then went to Portland State to brush up on his pre-med requirements.

Reed is a hard-ass college which has a bizarre hippy dippy grade policy where they believe that education, not perfect GPAs matter. They do keep track of your GPA, but so long as you have a C-average, you're doing great.

The fact that he had a C-something average really came to bite him in the ass when he applied for med school. He can't even get admitted in the Caribbean despite a pretty stellar MCAT.

Sometimes, that simple state school education and the accompanying high GPA can be a really good thing.

Also, some state schools have honors colleges which are a lot like private schools, but at a much lower cost.

I loved my state school experience, and I think it taught me to be my own advocate. In a school of 40,000, nobody cares what you do, YOU have to care.

I agree with you. I went to a larger (30,000+) private school for undergrad, paid $2,000 a semester for it, and I definitely learned early on that in order for me to have fun and have a great college experience, I had to care and I had to try. Going to an out-of-state school that forced me to come out of my shell did a lot for me...and I didn't end up with $100,000+ of debt like some of my peers. While I understand the allure behind a smaller, more 'prestigious' school, I got into graduate school just fine without it.

I honestly think it depends on the school and the person. I went to two large public schools for my undergrad. The first was halfway across the country and the other was about two hours from home. I did not enjoy my education at either institution and felt like my time was being wasted a great deal of the time. I'm currently in my last semester of getting another bachelors at a small private school. The last two years have reminded me why I liked school and have pushed me harder than I ever was at either one of my previous universities. My writing and research skills have vastly improved because of my professors.

On the subject of the type of person: I was already my own advocate coming out of high school. I more or less coasted through my previous college years, hardly working for the grades and still doing really well. There were some good aspects because it made me find my niche socially, but that is about it. In the long run I feel that my private school education has taught me and honed more skills that will help me in the long run than. My professors have pushed me farther. Also, I felt that my state college professors were more interested in their own research than helping their students. Few were available for office hours and I distinctly remember quite a few saying "if you can't come into my hours, tough luck." At the private college, my professors are constantly researching (my thesis prof just published a book while leading 27 students through a year of thesis) and yet have time. They accept appointments. I see them all over campus eating in the commons or in hallways ready to talk about many things: courses (not just their own), what to do around town, job prospects, etc.

Kevin: Reed is weird. Your friend should have gone to any of the other schools in the area (Lewis and Clark, Willamette, University of Portland) and he would have had a normal GPA. Reed is fairly clear about how their atmosphere and education is different. I don't know how one attends Reed without knowing what they are getting themselves into.

Consider that your average Reed applicant has a high GPA and high IQ and fully expects to coast through Reed like they did HS. They may be pretty smart kids, but they're still 18/19.

I graduated from a big, state-related school and I think I got a great education, but nobody holds your hand in a place like Pitt. You need to take the initiative if you want a particular outcome from your college experience. IMO, that's a good thing.

One thing I'm curious about with the public/private debate. Do you (basically everyone who's contributed to this thread) think it is worth going to a "big name" if you want to apply to medical school? I recall that everyone I met from my sister's med school class had undergraduate degrees from what I would fancy-schmancy schools. But then, it could just have been coincidence that those are the people I met and there were plenty of others who didn't go to fancy-schmanchy schools that I just didn't know about!

I am so glad that I went where I did. Otterbein was a place that I felt cared for by my teachers, peers, and administrators. That I was offered way more financial aid there than at PSU or Bethany or any of the other colleges I applied to was just the icing on the cake.

Coming out of a not-so-great high school, a small school provided me a place to fill in the gaps, to ask questions, to get help. I don't think that I had the guts for that if I had gone to a big state school.

When I graduated and went to the University of Glasgow for my graduate work, I was ready to be in a big university. I had the writing skills, research skills, and confidence to do well without hand-holding, because my small liberal arts college had taught me.

Would a state school have been cheaper? Maybe. Would I have done as well? Nope.

KR: I think that's a good thing for some people, but some students slip through the cracks. I think it really depends on the student.

As for price, Hypo applied to a lot of ridiculously priced schools. When it came down to it after financial aid packages/grants, they were all within $3000-$4000/year of each other. The "cheap" state school COA (in state) is $25,200. The COA at the most expensive school where she was accepted is $60,000. After applying grants, work/campus job allotments, and subsidized Stafford loans (same amounts) at each school, our expected financial contribution ranged from $18K to $22K per year. Given the variance in starting points, that final contribution range is relatively small. Barnard was right in the middle of those, even though it was the most expensive to start. American was at the high end. U of M and DePaul were at the low part of the range.

I see a HUGE difference in her courses, coursework and college experiences when compared to her friends at U of M and Eastern Michigan (my alma mater). I am envious of the type of education she is getting. She has some big lecture classes, but even in those, the focus is not on reading the material, listening to lectures and regurgitating the information in exams and papers. There is a much larger focus on learning how to process and analyze information. For example, a traditional lit program has you read a lot of things (books, short stories, poetry) and identify elements, identify what it means... themes, antagonists, character development, etc. Hypo's classes do that, but take it a step further to focus on how the themes and meanings reflect society, effect modern day society, relate to things today. It's a higher level of critical thinking but it is also much more abstract. Individual opinions are more valued but need to be justified as well. I remember being very frustrated in my lit classes in college because they were all taught from a "this is what this piece means, this is what the author means" perspective. I've always felt that works of art mean different things to different people based on their experiences and perspectives. Hypo's courses allow for that second point of view.

How will that relate to a real world job? Does that make a difference when it comes to making money? I don't know. But it appeals to her learning style and I do think a school that came from that kind of perspective would have appealed to mine more too. My only challenge in college came from memorizing massive amounts of material (gross anatomy). If you are going to college to be a nurse, engineer, accountant or even pre-med for a clinical career, it may not matter. If you might want to be a writer, a journalist, a political analyst, or a researcher, it might make a big difference because you are learning to see and analyze the world in different ways.

I know that back in the late 80s/early 90s when I was looking at grad schools for a master's in psychology, there were programs more designed for clinical work and there were programs more focused on research. I suspect the research programs were more like what Hypo is experiencing in undergrad and clinical programs were more focused on therapeutic styles/techniques. I was going for a clinical program.