Paying for College -- The Rich Are Different | Hacker News Reader

Paying for College -- The Rich Are Different

paul.kedrosky.com

23 pointscwan25 comments

I was lucky to be hired as department web designer in my freshman year and eventually moved my way up to bigger and richer departments throughout my years at UofT. Essentially paid my tuition with their own money, and got dept. deans on my good side.

For all of you starting school in September, the first 2 weeks are when all the positions fill up. If you want to earn income on campus, go meet with your department secretary/advisor right now to build rapport.

And be prepared to knock on doors and introduce yourselves to them. I found that daunting as a freshman because I was used to the off-limit sacrosanct staff room at my high school, but college lecturers and tutors and especially advisors expect it, you won't be interrupting them (if they don't want to be interrupted they either won't be there or, worst case, will ask you to come back later) so there's nothing to be worried about.

Here is the actual article, which is barely five paragraphs and two images, as opposed to the original link which merely links one of the images:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/how-americans-p...

It's surprising that student income put toward their education is the same across the board. Would have thought the wealthier wouldn't work during college. I even know some students whose parents won't let them work.

100K+ is not exactly rich. I'd be interested in comparing with $1M+.

families making 1M+ probably aren't sitting around responding to polls

>Would have thought the wealthier wouldn't work during college.

Why? How do you think the wealthy got wealthy? The vast majority, at least in the US, got there through hard work, and if they're smart enough to accumulate wealth then they're probably smart enough to instill those same values in their children.

I'll add a data point: I come from an upper-middle class background - no butlers, but my parents' house is pretty nice, and we've had some very nice vacations. My parents started with nothing, but my dad worked ridiculous hours for 20+ years in the finance industry and it paid off. As for college, my parents paid for 3 years of undergrad and I paid for the fourth (housing, food, tuition, expenses, everything), out of a combination of my own earnings and well-invested savings. I worked as a TA for four semesters (one of which I TAed two classes), a research assistant for one, and I ran the CS dept. TA lab for one. I also had paid internships every summer, starting the summer between high school and college.

For grad school, my parents paid my tuition (but nothing else) my first quarter, and after that I paid my own way between TAships every quarter, an additional internship during one quarter, and another summer internship. Oh...and I also started a company halfway through grad school.

The only times since in the last 6+ years (I'm 24) that I haven't had a job were my freshman year and the summer between undergrad and grad school. So...you might want to rethink your assumptions about the work ethic of people from wealthier backgrounds. I'm actually kind of offended at the suggestion that having relatively affluent parents would compromise my values or their parenting.

"I also had paid internships every summer"

From your family's standpoint, the pay you received was probably immaterial compared to value of the experience. What if you had received two internship offers one summer: (1) A boring but well-paid position, and (2) a really exciting/enriching opportunity that didn't even pay enough to cover your living expenses? Would your family have forced you into #1, or would you have been subsidized for #2? Given the time and money your parents had already invested in you during the first 20 years of your life in hopes of helping you be a happy and prosperous adult, it wouldn't be rational for them not to hand over, say, $10K to help you out given these circumstances (presuming that your family has accumulated sufficient wealth that the $10K really wouldn't make much difference in their lives).

I'm not making some sort of, "Oh...your rich, so blah..." sort of comment. My family would have supported me while I pursued #2 I ended up with well-paid internships each summer, so it didn't matter anyway. And, I didn't work during the academic calender (sans a few consulting gigs here and there).

Kids from poorer families often end-up taking jobs while in school which have a negative NPV for their lives. Why pay $10's of K per year to go to college and then spend 20 hours/week waiting tables instead of studying? Is it rational to graduate debt free with a 2.5 GPA? I was about to claim that these kids take such jobs because there's no way for them to borrow money for living expenses while in school, but this may not be true -- I'm not at all familiar with student loan programs. Perhaps these kids have an irrational fear of debt?

Or, could their fear of debt be rational? To allow "middle class" folks to attend Harvard Business School, the school partnered with Citi to extends well over $40K/year in living expenses debt at a low interest rate. As an MBA from HBS is quite a ticket to a good income, students have little fear of going into hock. However, the poorer kids are probably more likely to be working while attending mediocre schools close to their families' homes. Will their post-college earnings be high enough to make taking on debt rational? One would hope, but I'm a believer in the "education bubble."

>From your family's standpoint, the pay you received was probably immaterial compared to value of the experience.

You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that I have any sort of access to my parents' money. My bank account contains only what I've earned (and been given over the years at e.g. my bar mitzvah, though most of that was depleted by paying for a year of college, and that's only because of a roughly 450% return over 7 years...my dad managed my "portfolio" very well for me, which is a benefit I will admit a lot of people don't have).

>What if you had received two internship offers one summer: (1) A boring but well-paid position, and (2) a really exciting/enriching opportunity that didn't even pay enough to cover your living expenses? Would your family have forced you into #1, or would you have been subsidized for #2?

The situation didn't come up, so it's hard to say. I studied something with practical and relatively lucrative applications (CS) rather than stuff like classics (actually, now that I mention it a good undergrad friend of mine had a full ride scholarship because of her family's financial situation, and she majored in classics). If it had come up, well, I'm sure there's a point at which making an extra $1-2k on the summer wouldn't be worth the experiential opportunity cost, but I primarily worked to make money, and would have balked at an internship that didn't even pay my living expenses. Believe me, the educational benefit of grading 400 proofs every week, half of them written by symbolic systems sophomores, suffers from very steep diminishing returns.

> Why pay $10's of K per year to go to college and then spend 20 hours/week waiting tables instead of studying?

There's an assumption here that if you're working, it'll cut from your studying time and make you worse off. In reality, the more you fill up your schedule, the better off you'll be. Adding a job, sport, and club will make you better at studying and you'll have as good of a social life because your rare free time will be so precious that you'll want to plan and spend it well instead of sitting around boozing or getting high. My Mom came from nothing - like, nine kids, no money at all - and waited tables through college, kept a solid B average, I was born before her senior year (my Dad was in grad school), and they both finished up and got into good jobs.

I dropped out of high school, got an almost full scholarship to university anyways, and pretty much screwed around with my free time - the only time I was ever locked in academically was when I was also training as a fencer for 20+ hours per week. Before I was a fencer, I screwed around. After I broke my hand, I screwed around some more and dropped out to start a company. A few years later I studied business with my own money, paying cash each semester while working at the same time. Then I studied a lot more seriously.

Working for money is cool. Not working and pretending you're going to study in that time is delusional - the habits built from working and keeping a job is probably better than extra study time anyways at building character and making you successful.

To be fair, the agreement with my parents is that I should maximize my educational value. If that means taking a poorly paid research position instead of a better paid internship, they are happy to foot the bill. As far as working during the academic school year, I TA for classes (and get paid) but the primary goal isn't to pay for anything significant but to learn. I feel extremely fortunate to have the wealth to pursue my ambitions under my own willpower without worrying about expenses. Now, I have been doing paid summer internships since I was 15 or so, so I do pretty much pay my expenses during the school year.

Also, $100k per year is not rich, it's upper-middle class. I'm not sure where they got that from.

Depends how the poll question was worded. Student income could be derived form a parental allowance.

I didn't have to work during college because my parents paid for all of it, but looking back I wish they hadn't.

Explain, please?

I think there are a lot of life skills you can acquire by working in college that you don't get if someone gives you a free ride -- or at least that's how it appears to me when comparing myself to friends who had/have to work during college.

Did you ever work while in highschool?

That's a tricky one -- I went to what you can call a 'therapeutic boarding school', so I ended up doing a lot of work in high school (manual labor, cooking, event planning, tutoring, peer counseling, etc.) but I never had to go out and get a job.

I know you probably aren't actually trying to blame them for it, but I think its unfair to even state it like that. I'm in college now, with my parents paying for everything necessary, and I started a paid internship the year before university started, and then worked part time for them through the year, and full time again during the next summer. Finally this past summer, I moved to a research position at the university, and still do some freelance work for the company I was interning/part-timing at.

Now on top of a full load of classes, a research position (where the professor has never worked with an undergraduate, so I've been told I'll be treated like a PhD student - and so far it definitely feels like it), freelance work for a company (possibly another, we'll see), I'm still trying to find the time to get a company rolling with some friends of mine. And my parents still pay for everything necessary for schooling (books, tuition, housing, car, food, etc.). All it means to me is I can take the lower paying jobs that are better experience. For instance, I was offered a few jobs this summer, but I took the research position, even though it paid the worst because it looked interesting, challenging, and would help me eventually get to the grad school I want to be at.

This has been a bit long winded, but my point being, just because your parents pay, doesn't mean you have to sit back and do nothing.

You're right, and I was aware of that when I posted, but even with that I still think that everyone would be better off paying for at least part of their tuition themselves.

I was the opposite: Wealthy father but he would only pay as much college tuition / apartment rent as my internships could not.

On the upside he would pay for vacations that I could not dream of funding myself at that age.

I also got very good at being poor :D

Same here, sans the vacations.

I would love to know what claim the author is trying to make with this. The $35k-100k bracket and $100k+ bracket are almost exactly the same in every area other than parent income/savings. Essentially, the way the "rich" pay for college is only "different" in that [newsflash!] they purchase a more expensive product and they pay more for it. Um...was this supposed to be surprising? Informative? They do that with everything else, too.

The fact that grants and scholarship are nearly identical across the range (~$6k) is somewhat surprising. I guess fewer grants/scholarships are need-based than I thought?

Grants are usually need based, but scholarships usually aren’t, since many are granted based on some kind of extracurricular achievement or social legacy related to the student.

For every United Negro College Fund scholarship out there, there’s a Daughters of the Confederacy scholarship or some such, to pick a particularly extreme example. From my (and maybe my sister’s) research while I attended college, this sort of funding is very prone to political back-and-forth and cultural “reactance.”

My guess is that you're seeing two opposing effects balancing out. More grants are needs based buy wealthier people are more adept at navigating the bureaucracy and applying for awards they're qualified for.

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