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Comment by jboog | Hacker News Reader

Why is everyone acting like every school charges Ivy League prices?

Most state schools are affordable. Mine is a top school and charges $9k a year in tuition for in state.

You can get all of the social, in person experience at almost any state school. You might not get a job at Google or Mckinsey but you also won't take on 6 figure debt.

The problem is everyone wants to go to the private/out of state schools with sky high tuition and only marginally better academics. Then there's majoring in unemployable fields but that's another story entirely...

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Also everyone quotes Ivy League MSRP prices as if every student is paying them. In reality, Ivy League financial aid is the most generous, and the actual tuition paid over the past couple decades has been decreasing, unlike public schools where it's been increasing significantly.

At USC something like over 2/3 of kids are on some form of aid.

Aid = student loans.

No they give tons of scholarships and grants which amounts to a lot more than the loans these days. At least when it comes to tuition. This is true for private schools at all rankings.

Jacking up tuition then offsetting it with scholarships is both a bigger phychological drawn for students who end up paying the same, plus gets more money from the small set of students for whom money is no object.

9k a year. Unimaginable for 18-years-old me.

Thank god (i.e. the French taxpayer) that allowed me (poor, 2nd-gen immigrant, blue-collar background) to have an Sw Eng diploma for free.

I would've been OK being forced working in France or for French companies for 10 years for this privilege. Tuition was 1000eur/year, and I always found this very low. Scholarships were needs-based and gave me 400eur/month. Tuition was waived.

Lodging was a really crummy 9m2 room all to myself (toilets, showers and kitchen common for 20 people) for 130eur/months.

It was hard life but perfect. I'd never rail against taxes...

What is breaking the system right now is they replaced the crummy 130-140eur/mo rooms with 'at norms' student apartments.

Application of building code and 'humane living' norms at its stupidest. Far less apartments, far more expansive... Met lots of kids recently struggling so hard during their school nights to make ends meet.

But 9k/year of tuition only? Only rich or middle-class kids could do that, and then not even sure how many.

Bit late response here, but wanted to clear this up. Ironically people tend to think the US has a system only "for the rich" when in some ways it may be the most progressive. Wealthy families pay through the nose while the poor pay zero tuition. Meanwhile everyone reaps the benefits of such rich world-renowned schools.

If you can't pay tuition in the US you would probably receive grants to cover 100 percent of it. And as I noted elsewhere, scholarships for good students are everywhere. Schools compete ferociously for rankings and one way to raise the stats of the incoming class is to "buy" lots of smart students with scholarships.

Thanks for this feedback.

IIUC what you say, most of those scholarships and grants are for 'good' students, right? You need some kind of high GPA or over-average SAT results, right ?

Since I don't know much about the US system, I'm ready to believe my view is distorted :-) but then I'm not sure I understand the problem of student-debt ("next bubble to pop", etc.) in the US. I was debt-free at the start of my career thanks to the French taxpayer.

I hope what I brought since to the French society balances that, but I thought it very generous to trust me with a free education, 4000eur/year and a very-low-rent place on my own to try to get an engineering degree, especially as I was still a teenager when I started, and when so many go abroad... There's no downside of failing, I don't have to give the money back. The French taxpayer really wanted me to try and do this, with as little worry as possible about money and finding a night job, and as much focus they could afford for me. My room was clean and livable, common toilet/shower & kitchen were cleaned at least once a week. Internet was free (with huge bandwidth...). I'm sorry but some people found the whole thing shitty and cheap and 'not enough'... This was the last days of a great system.

Sorry for going on a tangent like this.

"Scholarship" is used to mean merit-based kinds of grants essentially, so for good students. Whereas the word "Grant" used generally implies only the need-based versions. It's a bit confusing. There is a national system called "financial aid" where a family applies to the govt with their tax forms and their ability to pay is assessed. Then the govt offers grants and subsidized loans to cover costs. States will also supplement the grants with their own grants, and the school itself does too. Scholarships are just offered directly by the school based on some kind of competitive selection.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain to a foreign skeptic. I'll look into it a bit more, find stats on this.

Looks like total cost of attendance is much higher than $9k/year: https://admissions.unc.edu/afford/cost-of-attendance/ Even if you only paid tuition, you'd still have housing expenses, since most students don't live at home for a school like UNC. So overall I think it's disingenuous to say it's only $9k/year.

Accommodation, transport, food etc. all need to be paid whether you’re attending school or not. If you’re trying to include all real costs foregone earnings are by far the biggest.

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