At a certain point, the colleges start to look like perfectly price discriminating monopolists: rather than charging the highest price to each customer, they set a maximum price ceiling and then subsidize the gap to the customer's marginal ability to pay.
Going to a “top tier” school can, depending on your financial situation, actually cost you roughly what a state school would. You can argue there are too many hoops to jump through, or anything else, but that’s a different argument.
I think you're confusing depth and breadth. It's like the Harbor Freight coupon. Everyone gets 20% off with a few exclusions. But the people paying less than 80% (to continue the Harbor Freight metaphor) are few and far between.
There were exceptions, particularly for wealthy folks and people who were 'on the line' income-wise, but the majority got significant financial aid.
Just to give you an idea, from MIT's stats[1]:
* Average need-based MIT scholarship: $47,593
* Students awarded a need-based MIT scholarship: 59%
* Students attending tuition-free: 31%
* Class of 2019 graduates with no student loan debt: 76%
* Average student loan debt for those who borrowed: $23,226
The trope that the expensive schools are the cause of the massive student loan debt problem is just that; a trope. When only 24% of the class graduates with any debt at all, I'm not convinced MIT (and similar) are the problem. This is largely due to MIT and similar schools having massive endowments from which they can draw for Financial Aid; there are cheaper schools, certainly, but they have coffers that are less deep (referring to private schools), meaning students end up having to take more debt.
This is largely due to MIT and similar schools having massive endowments from which they can draw for Financial Aid; there are cheaper schools, certainly, but they have coffers that are less deep (referring to private schools), meaning students end up having to take more debt.
It is reality that expensive schools cause the massive student loan debt problem, but expensiveness isn't totally buried in sticker price but total cost of attendance. Schools like HYSM don't saddle attendees with as much debt despite their high sticker price perhaps because of endowments.
Boston area schools being "basically free on paper" to middle income families is a reflection of the fact that a student from a ~100k income family has better options for getting ahead in the world than attending these institutions at any cost but these institutions would lose legitimacy without "economic diversity" tokens so they have to reduce the price. Going to Harvard (or similar) if you're not from the kind of people who go to Harvard is a high risk, high reward gamble with years of your life. These schools have to reduce the potential downside in order to get the quality of candidates they want to get from the demographics they want to get them from (i.e. they want to be able to pick the very best people from the "can't afford to attend" demographic). Also it's good PR.
If you're the son of a plumber and your options are going to MIT for CS, or UMaine's "we match your local in-state tuition" deal paired with their crappy CS program the Maine one actually looks attractive because you're going to be surrounded by people a heck of a lot more like you (on a life experiences level), you're not gonna be bottom of your class and you won't be running the Boston rat race when it comes to housing, a part time job, commuting, and all the other "life" stuff". If you're the kind of high-achieving individual who goes to Harvard from a middle class background you're all but guaranteed to live more comfortably than your parents and retire comfortably regardless of the choice you make. Rolling a degree from a lesser state school into a stable job at BigCo isn't something you're worried about. The networking value add from Harvard or MIT isn't as much of a value add because you have no frame of reference for it and won't be making the kinds of life choices where it can be most helpful anyway (remember, no safety net, you're gonna be the one that builds it). So if you're gonna "win" no matter what you choose why add the additional risk of Harvard, MIT or some other program you could wash out of?
I suppose at some point someone has to pay. But you're not rich at $90k. And I just don't see many of those households earning between $90-250k a year wanting to pay for such a privilege.
From my perspective, you've got to be either very rich, or very poor going into those schools, because there's no reasonable room for those in-between unless you're taking out significant life-changing debt to do so.
And after it's all said and done, you're overwhelmingly statistically unlikely to be making so much that the debt didn't even matter.
unless you have a very weird financial situation, no US student is going into anything like that much debt to go to either of those two schools. it looks like you got those numbers by just taking the tuition and multiplying it by four. both schools offer substantial aid packages for eligible families. the average yearly tuition contribution for MIT is something like $17k, not far off from in-state tuition at most public universities.
If your family exceeds the cutoffs for financial aid, but for various reasons cannot provide for college expenses - you are going to go into a lot of debt. One of my friends from the time managed to take 120k for an english major that left them with a $12/hr job at graduation.
I don't know all the ins-and-outs of today's student loan options, but say that 120k is taken at 5% spread across 20(!) years, the monthly payment on that kind of loan is around $800/mo. Did this person not have a clear idea of what recent college grads with English degrees make? I mean, it seems like a serious misjudgment to bury themselves in that much debt without a very clear path out of it.
I'm not suggesting the "learn to code" or "only STEM degrees matter" trope, but if you really want to become a writer, or a teacher, or anything else where an English degree is required, you can get that at a much more affordable price: I know someone from a "poor" family who did exactly that, but went to UMass Dartmouth and now has a successful, average middle-class life as an editor. They did not need to go to six-figure debt because they knew they would have a really hard time paying that off...
If you realize 2 years in that you're down ~60k, and a 5 year program will cost an extra 40k then you aren't going to change majors.
Umass Amherst is only ~25% more expensive than Umass Dartmouth on paper ( or at least was when I was attending ).
For myself, I got a physics degree and flipped into software engineering - I went bust in my first 2 years out of school but I was able to put things together and paid off my debt comfortably. The debt did ensure I stopped pursuing grad school for physics as the math became impossible to justify.
I appreciate that this comment can be read two different ways.
There's no obligation for parents to pay for their kids education, yet the way the system is set up, you'd think there was.
There's no (as yet generally accepted) obligation for anyone else to pay for young adults higher education. Society has generally chosen to subsidize some costs for young people who seek such subsidy using formulas which assume that parents of means will also do so, but this does not reflect an obligation of parents to do so.
None of those median salaries put you in the 'wealthy' category.
This is in fact exactly what's happening. It's impossible to bankrupt out of student loans, so in theory it's a no risk loan from the loan providers perspective.
Schools almost never totally phase out financial help, but they do reduce it to negligible portions e.g. $500 work study on a 50k bill. This helps keep their financial aid stats healthy while still getting paid.
This type of affect will only show up when viewing the percentiles of debt students are taking on. Adding a bunch of folks who only take on $1k in debt is a great way to draw down the average.
Something is really rotten with this country if the only tools to get ahead are a 5% shot at a “better life” (though people seem far too politically correct to provide a counter factual outcome if you don’t get into an elite institution).
Given that everyone was living in Boston post-graduation and the base CoL is somewhere between 40 and 50k per year. The MIT folks had somewhere between 2 and 20x the disposable income at graduation. Meaning their debt burden was much lower.
Umnass opens doors in MA the way smoking pot makes it easier to make friends in college. You instantly have some token thing in common with a sizeable minority of the people around you and that gets you a head start on developing relationships.
Once you've done something in the industry, almost no one is going to give a hoot about what school you went to, they're going to care about what you've done in the industry, but at the start at least, you may have to settle for something a little shittier.
I did ok in college and very well in the private sector. I started as a sysadmin for a small finance company and am now a senior software engineer at Amazon Alexa working on ML for search. Hard work always pays off as long as your in the right field ( comp-sci is a great field ).
But for Boston College, Boston University, or Northeastern? You’re probably going to end up paying more than MIT and get an education that’s indistinguishable from UMass, quite possibly worse in some respects.
What people have been saying in this thread is not incorrect (though should be nuanced): the ivy leagues are worth it for the caliber of the student body and reputation; otherwise, go to a (Tier 1) public school.
Unless, of course, you don’t want to and can easily afford otherwise.
Isn't Northeastern still a big cooperative education school?
I assure you that those of us in engineering know the difference between a student with work experience and one with only academic experience.
What matters a lot more than the name of the institution on your degree is experience; getting that experience may be a bit tougher at a small school (you don't have FAANGs or huge biotech firms recruiting there), but it is certainly not impossible.
Three of the last four engineers I hired had no formal CS degree (but they had gone to bootcamps).