Boston University Undergraduate Costs Reach $80k | Hacker News Reader

Boston University Undergraduate Costs Reach $80k

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132 pointsseibelj228 comments

LOL. I had to drop out of (MIT, not BU, but w/e) due to not being able to get financial aid (even though I think it was technically during the "we will give you as much financial aid as you need to attend" era), due to parents having income marginally higher than some federal cutoffs but unwilling to provide documentation or loans. Ultimately worked out fine, but I'm pretty unsympathetic to the "soak people for $82k/yr and then offer some discounts" price discrimination lie.

Agreed. The financial aid also fools people into believing 80k per year is not insanely greedy pricing.

Similarly, I didn't attend some schools I was accepted to because the debt would have crushed me.

That's why I don't get the big push for canceling student loans. It feels like rewarding people for irresponsible behavior, and ultimately punishing those who acted responsibly.

Further, I expect it would drive tuitions even higher. Who cares what it costs if you don't have to pay...

Canceling student loans is purely a political play. I agree wholeheartedly with your opinion. I worked my way through school, granted it was 50k all told over 4 years instead of whatever the hell it costs now.

Maybe my ignorance is showing, but putting a cap on loan amounts for undergrad would probably protect the student quite a bit.

I agree with capping loan amounts on future undergrad loans, but there's a whole generation of people who were encouraged into predatory tuition & loan combos under the promise the degree would get them a job which would make it easy to pay off the loan. This was (and still is, though Gen Z seems to be catching on to the scam) a systemic issue with predatory lending, and since the federal government has control over many of these predatory loans I think the political push to cancel them is entirely understandable. It may be a largely political play, but then again nearly everything the government does seems to be due to largely political reasons.

I understand the idea that these loans are predatory might be controversial, but this idea comes from the fact that going to expensive universities and paying for it with loans is pushed by high schools, parents, universities, and society alike as the sure-fire path to success. To an 18-year-old with no way to really comprehend the amount of money they're spending on education or what life looks like after university, they likely will take much of this at face value.

I distinctly remember back in school one of my friends got a loan check and said “oh wow this is 2.5k more than I need, I’m gonna buy a new (second and unneeded) laptop!”

I was so stunned I couldn’t come up with the words to say. Maybe the real issue is teaching kids the value of money.

Giving an 18 year old a bunch of money who has never lived a day of their life outside of their parent's supervision will always have its issues. Personally, I liked when my friends would get their student loan checks. It meant they were about to buy a bunch of beer and weed for all.

I find this "whole generation of people who were encouraged into predatory tuition & loan combos" thing to be incredibly unconvincing. College tuition rates started skyrocketing largely AFTER Google became a thing. There's no excuse for refusing to put in the research into wages and how long it would take to pay off these loans.

There were decades of people before internet searches were available who decided to prioritize a lack of debt over going to the absolute best school they could. The most expensive school any of my classmates went to was Tulane, and the kids who went there almost all went on GI bills. Now, across the river, where the people were more affluent... those folks definitely spent more money on their college educations. Can't say I've seen their investments reflected on their Linkedin profiles, though.

When everyone in your life is telling you to take out loans and go to the best school, I think it's understandable to not question it. There are plenty of things we take for granted and don't question, this is one of those for some people.

I'd rather just make student debt "regular" debt, i.e. dischargeable through bankruptcy. Maybe secured by the actual diploma, so you can't claim to be a graduate if you default on the debt, but you'd obviously have the education.

This changed in 2005, under GWB, and was not the worst thing he did (screwing up Afghanistan, invading Iraq, PATRIOT, TSA, ...) but was still a bad thing he did.

Australia has an interesting system, the government owns the student debt and once you earn above a certain amount it raises your tax rate slightly until the debt is paid off.

Those who can earn enough money eventually pay it off, but they're not worried about debt collectors if they're not earning any money.

People who don't ever earn enough simply don't pay it off and it's not a problem.

To prevent abuse from the universities raising costs too much, if they want to participate they have to adhere to set rates for degrees. There are a couple of universities that don't participate in the system but they're no-ones first choice

I really like the diploma idea. Its mostly reasonable to me but not sure its enough. Lots of people leave before getting degree. After first job the degree doesnt really matter that much.

The point of a secured loan is that if you don't pay, the creditor can sell whatever is securing it and recover some or all of what is owed to them.

Taking away someone's diploma because they defaulted on their loan would just be destroying value. It's the equivalent of a bank foreclosing on your house and then burning it to the ground.

Not cancelling student loans is also a political play, because of the securities that depend on this unpayable debt (SLABs).

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/rmbs-to-slabs-history-r...

So right now we are prioritizing SLAB investors' profits over giving consumers more spending power. If college graduates suddenly could spend their loan payment money on other goods and services, it would be great for the economy. Loan repayments have been frozen for years now and nothing bad economically has happened.

But instead we're just protecting the rent seeking of the wealthy, which isn't really worthwhile economic activity.

Personally I think SLABs are extremely unethical, but even if you disagree with that, SLABs are unsustainable and look a lot like the subprime mortgage bubble.

I agree that there needs to be something to drive the cost of education down, but I don't know if a tuition price ceiling is the way to go. I think a good start would be punishing schools that spend elaborately on buildings, athletics and excess/overpaid administrators while also paying their grad students doing a lot of the teaching work starvation wages (or if you're UCLA, don't even pay them at all!) and neglect spending directly on education and tuition. I think an endowment cap is a great idea in this area, to force schools to lower tuition by having to spend a certain part of their endowment, rather than letting them hoard money.

Some other things that are extremely good ideas is letting the interest rate be renegotiable/refinancible. For example, why did I have to continue paying 6.5% on my loan when rates everywhere else were near zero? And also letting people discharge loans in bankruptcy like pretty much every other debt.

The bubble will burst any day now, since enrollments have been declining for years at this point. Until then, the only people benefiting are student loan servicers, useless and overpaid administrators, plutocratic athletics departments, and investment bankers, NOT students or people doing the actual educating.

You need something SLAB-like because otherwise everyone declares bankruptcy between finishing their degree and getting a first job. Congratulations you just cancelled all new student loans.

Something like dischargeable in bankruptcy after 15 years could work though.

It's the easily available financing (secured against bankruptcy) which has enabled the cost spiral; eliminating this would start to put pressure on university prices.

This would cause them to be somewhat cost conscious in certain areas; explosion of administrators, and use of capital contributions for excessive facilities.

I think it's fair to be against student loans. My point is that by being against preventing the declaring of bankruptcy of student loans you're in effect arguing for either a system where the providers are forced to give out loans that won't be repaid or a system of no student loans. You should make it clear which of the two alternatives you're actually advocating for rather than advocating for a vague policy without exploring its obvious consequences.

I agree with capping costs. However, not cancelling loans for a small sum of, say, 5-10k per person wouldn't be so bad. Just as you or I had to work through school and scrimp and save doesn't mean we should make others suffer that same way. The logic seems reminiscent of hazing to me.

I know someone who attended the public university in Mass for English. They graduated in 2010 with 100k in loans as the first college graduate in their family. Owing to the job market for the last decade, they primarily worked in the service sector and never made a dent in the student loan principal.

How many decades should we punish people for?

It's a really tricky problem to solve, granted.

I feel like student loans should be treated more like FHA loans, who generally do more to make sure the loan is worth it.

If loan givers had a vested interest in the success of the grantee, they'd do far more due diligence than they do today. They'd not give someone 100k for an English degree, for example.

That said, some of the diligence is expected from the borrower as well, IMO.

100k in loans for an English degree

Demand a refund not a handout

Why would you take out 100k in loans for a degree that can’t pay for itself?

The real crime here is charging 100k for an English degree. People should be allowed to pursue whatever interests they want, no question. Why would someone spend 100k on an English degree they can’t possibly hope to have bear financial fruit? The scene from good will hunting comes to mind…

Someone who's only exposure to education included 4 years of English, 3 years of math, and 2 years of science could rationally conclude that English is a valuable skill. Particularly when they don't have familial connections with degrees.

Why would you assume a 17 year old, first generation college student would know that degree wouldn't pay for itself?

Because it's easy to search for salary information on the internet?

Put yourself in the shoes of a naive 17 year old for a second. You're gonna do that when every person in your life is telling you "just go to college and don't worry about the loans because you'll make enough money to pay them off?" That was literally a true statement not too long ago. It's entirely possible every single adult in our hypothetical student's life is telling them this, because it was true when those people went to college.

I did that when I attended college and I didn't have the internet to tell me what a stupid idea it was to blow tens of thousands of dollars I didn't have because I didn't have access at the time. I won't for a single second lament the decisions of people who refuse to do the bare minimum. They aren't victims of the system with regards to being able to simply look at the market and do basic math. They're too lazy to be adults.

When I graduated with a CS degree and an EE minor in 2004 it wasn't clear my degree would pay for itself. When the dot com bubble burst, a ton of people got laid off and software engineering jobs became very competitive. A significant percentage of the people in the CS program at my school changed majors. When I graduated in 2004 near the top of my class from a respectable university and had prior work experience, the best offer I got in the Greater Boston area was for $45K. That seemed to be the ceiling for those in my peer group, too. Those with Master's degrees were getting $55K ($10K premium for a Master's seemed standard).

I was pretty deflated. I ended up applying for a research assistant position and fortunately got it, so I went back to grad school. Along the way I opted to start a company since I at least had guaranteed health insurance as a student. I graduated and ran the company for 4.5 years. The job market recovered some during that time.

Software engineering salaries now are monumentally different than what they 18 years ago. For a long time I questioned whether I had made the correct career choice. Of course, nowadays we can't get enough engineers and new grads are being offered salaries that I still have trouble believing (and that took me years to work up to). I don't have a problem with that, either. It's just the last time I saw something like that, the industry collapsed.

I feel reasonably comfortable with job security now. But, that's a semi-recent thing. I worked my ass off trying to stand out in case another dot com situation was forthcoming. And for maybe the first decade of my career I operated under the assumption my salary could be cut in half if the other shoe dropped.

Anyway, my point I suppose is that society sometimes changes rather quickly and it can be hard to predict what's going to work. As the first person in my family to attend college, I had to navigate uncertain waters. But, when the price of entry to most jobs is having a degree, you go and get a degree and hope you can work the rest out later. Of course, nowadays we understand that the US doesn't put any value in the humanities so getting a degree in it is probably a bad deal. It just wasn't always that way and the current trend hopefully won't last either.

-- It's far easier to get an engineering job without a degree now, at least in the US. Even if you could get one in 2004, you almost certainly were going to get paid less and be relegated to back office scripting.

A college graduate can get a better job than service sector: HR, teaching, etc. That person isn't trying.

In a good economy, sure! 2010 was close to the bottom of the last recession, competition was heavy and "Recent College Grad" doesn't sound so recent after 2-4 years.

Would be better to make the debt dischargeable - it's a form of debt forgiveness that has skin in the game for college graduates, particularly those that didnt do well at all.

And it has the side effect of forcing universities to consider the risks of loaning out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a degree that pays $50k on average.

When students can no longer afford infinite loans, the price of these degrees will magically drop like a rock.

It must be understood that making them dischargeable would make student loans unfeasible - the lending rate to adjust for the risk would be so high that unless it were subsidized it would be impossible to pay.

It would give the people a way out today - a few years of bad credit sure, but worth it if you are really underwater with them.

Maybe after a certain time period but what’s to stop people from declaring bankruptcy immediately after finishing a degree and before working. It’s hard to have a loan backed by no asset that’s dischargeable in bankruptcy and given to people with more debts than assets.

There has to be no federal student debt forward. If there is an admission that they dont work, stop doing them!

For as long as it takes them to pay their debt? What part of the "you can't discharge this via bankruptcy, and you're actually going to be an ENGLISH major" do you think tripped them up?

> It feels like rewarding people for irresponsible behavior, and ultimately punishing those who acted responsibly.

Keep in mind that most (nearly all) of the people you're talking about were minors less than a year prior to getting these loans pushed on them by people with a lot of experience convincing very young people to take loans. It's disingenuous to act like they aren't easily preyed on due to their inexperience.

At the very least we need to limit interest rates on loans. Folks shouldn't be debt slaves for the rest of their lives.

Interest rates should depend on the market. Why you want to artificially meddle in everything? Solutions for student loans is simple. Stop government guarantees, and get rid of the government law that makes it not dischargeable. Government caused the problem and you ask for another government “solution”

Hah, everything is the government and government is bad when people want it to be. The government is the thing that makes bankruptcy possible in the first place, and if it didn't exist you'd just have someone hunt you down for repayment and torture you until you comply.

You make the weird assumption that any law requires a big monopoly that meddles in everything. Not true. Anti-slavery law covers the ability to discharge with bankruptcy.

This is pretty extreme take on me suggesting limiting predatory rates on loans.

I'm fine with the federal government servicing 100% of student debt and for that debt to be completely interest free.

But that's as far as I'm willing to go on the issue. If it were up to me, I'd have the feds regulate university expenditures the same way that they regulate insurance companies. You get X% of tuition and fees to go towards construction, overhead, and administration. Everything else is for educator salaries.

> Similarly, I didn't attend some schools I was accepted to because the debt would have crushed me.

Same here. However, I don't think other people should have to suffer through what I suffered just because I had to go through it myself. I want society to improve and for others to receive the benefits of those improvements, even if I myself will never get to enjoy them.

It's like getting upset at the development of a cheap cure for cancer, because it would seem like a slap in the face to all of the people who suffered and beat cancer themselves, were bankrupted by it or died because of it. I never smoked cigarettes, for example, am religious about sunscreen, and I take care of my body and health to avoid threats like cancer, and I've lost loved ones to the disease. Just because I "did everything right" and still suffered through the loss of loved ones to cancer, doesn't mean that I'd be upset if there were suddenly a cheap cure for it, and I wouldn't be upset if it benefited everyone who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for the last 3 decades, either.

> It's like getting upset at the development of a cheap cure for cancer

No, it's like taking my taxes and giving them to someone else instead of services which benefit many people.

I'd also like to eliminate "charitable" tax deductions (handouts to the wealthy) and tax-sheltered retirement accounts with millions in them (like Mitt Romney's Roth IRA), and would support UBI and basic free healthcare (if it came with eliminating a lot of bureaucracy), in case you just think I "hate the little guy".

> However, I don't think other people should have to suffer through what I suffered just because I had to go through it myself. I want society to improve and for others to receive the benefits of those improvements, even if I myself will never get to enjoy them.

The right way to do this is giving everyone the same amount of cash and increasing marginal income tax rates.

It would be politically stupid to reward a small amount of people who have low voter participation rates and instead earn the ire of many who have high voter participation rates.

Simply stopping government funded higher education loans would be a better move that actually addressed the root problem with higher education costs.

If the goal is to help poor people, then help all poor people. Not just a subsection of the poor that happened to borrow money for overpriced signaling mechanisms.

> The right way to do this is giving everyone the same amount of cash and increasing marginal income tax rates.

And in your system, this counterbalances the natural advantage that children born to wealthy parents have how?

It increases taxes on the rich and then uses those tax funds to redistribute wealth.

Canceling student debt on the other hand would be a massive handout for the rich as the majority of student debt is held by rich and upper middle class Americans. Students from from the poorest quartile of households have just 5% of the student debt [1].

1. https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-by-income-level

That would have to be addressed with estate taxes and lowering the gift exclusion amounts, and/or property tax, but implementing that on all assets seems difficult.

Or scrapping all income/property taxes, and just having marginal sales taxes (the more you spend, the more tax you pay), but then that would require tracking every single transaction.

I'm not some sadist who likes watching anyone suffer, but there's no easy way out.

My earnings and earnings potential will likely forever be below someone who graduated from ivy league. My network is also much smaller and less affluent.

Now telling me I have to pay the tuition of folks that went to said schools, via taxes, is a giant slap in the face.

I've not seen this debate contextualized that way. Is it predominately ivy league grads calling to have their debt canceled? If so, I think that really ought to be highlighted.

I mentioned it because Yale specifically is one I passed on due to the loans I'd need to take.

That said, a quick Google says that 12% of student debt per year is taken by students at elite schools, despite it representing a tiny portion of borrowers. Link below.

https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/biden-is-right-a-lot-of-s...

When I click that link, I get redirected to https://www.brookings.edu/articles/no-aid-to-religion-charit.... The article is titled "No Aid to Religion?: Charitable Choice and the First Amendment". I read it, but it was written in 1999 and not relevant. I'm not sure what's going on there.

I did manage to find the article though. Thanks for sharing. Based on my own experience attending a private university, I had thought students at ivy league schools mostly used private loans. Unfortunately, the article doesn't break out which debt is government-backed and which isn't. This much debt in general is problematic for young professionals, but my understanding is that "cancel student loans" is about the government-backed debt. I'll have to see if I can find a breakdown somewhere.

If it applied to new people making new decisions, it's an improvement. But if it applies retroactively to bad decisions, that's different.

Any "free" money going forward would presumably come with some strings that at least attempt to keep things reasonable. But it just feels wrong to pay off someone's irresponsible private school loan from a few years ago.

Is it more irresponsible for an 18 year-old to take on six figures of debt or for the lending institution to so easily give it out?

From the standpoint of the lender, it's a little complicated. Financially, I'm sure it works out for them under the current rules or they wouldn't do it.

Socially, you could make an argument that they should be more careful. But to the borrower, any denial could be interpreted as taking away an opportunity, and could really backfire if not done very transparently and rigorously following an acceptable process. What if the process unintentionally has a disproportionate impact on one race, for instance?

For something seen as a ticket to the middle class, it's politically better to leave the decision up to the individual.

This analogy doesn't hold up. A cheap new cure doesn't help those who struggled in the past but they can still cut me a fat check for the money I paid back and I will benefit from it all the same.

Getting cancer isn't a decision though, and curing cancer isn't zero-sum. You can argue the schools were predatory, but someone who made the responsible decision to take a scholarship at a state school is footing the bill for someone who made the irresponsible decision to take loans to attend an expensive private school.

Same boat. I got into CalTech, and instead went to CalPoly SLO because I was afraid of the debt. Things worked out fine tbh.

What year? I went 05-09 and it wasn’t bad but it was getting steep towards the end.

I won’t share my class year, but the tuition definitely spiked towards the end.

Buy the worst house in the best neighborhood and your initial apprehension eventually becomes a valuable asset. I wonder if the same holds true for college. This was certainly my experience.

The most likely reason that these tuition costs go so high is because the government is basically willing to give as much money as is needed to get them there. Over the past 50 years, for every dollar given by the government in funding average tuition increased next year by $0.60 [1].

The trouble is, if you take away the student loans the cost of tuition will drop but a lot fewer people will be able to go.

1. https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year

Cancelling student debt would only be rewarding irresponsible behavior of the US government by relieving the pressure to change how loans are issued in the first place. The news/ press would mostly stop reporting about it once the initial loans are forgiven since there'd be no pressure anymore to fix the root of the problem which is issuing non-dischargeable unsecured loans in the 10s of to 100s of thousands of dollars. The US allowed those non-dischargeable loans to be issued in the first place with little to no way of knowing if the value provided by the student's desired educational program justified the price it was billing. Students may bare some responsibility here but expecting all 18 year olds who have gone through the traditional US education system to have any resemblance of financial literacy is asking a lot given there seems to be no focus on requiring income management, retirement savings, and debt awareness classes in any US High School tract.

What I'm trying to say ultimately is in my opinion most High School graduates are to naive to actually realize how bad of deal they may be getting themselves into and the US government is actively encouraging that reckless behavior by allowing these federal loans to be issued.

So many people are screwed by cutoffs and rules. My parents had assets on paper but were going through a messy divorce and bleeding cash; they refused to give me anything at the time I was in need of tuition money. I got two jobs, but that didn't cover it. Many, many visits were made to the financial aid and advising offices -- every time the answer was the same. The only way out of the requirements is to prove you're fully alienated from your parents, and that's really hard to prove.

But if you turn 24, poof, you magically no longer have parents and can get any loans / aid / whatever based on your own income.

I get why the rules exist but still kind of feel like I got scammed, just due to the endless brainwashing kids get that you must graduate from college at any cost. (I ended up taking some 20%+ interest rate loans.)

Damn, yeah I took a full ride instead of paying the 70k back when I was deciding for college…agree would feel a bit miffed if everyone suddenly was forgiven all debt

I never really understood this kind of jealousy because other people are given a break. It doesn't make your situation any worse and it makes theirs better.

Everbody's paying for it in the form of tax, I would rather not bail out universities/banks that prey on the financial illeteracy of high school graduates.

> illeteracy

Indeed!

But that aside: forgiving this debt is not about bailing out universities or banks, it is to help those individuals. That the banks get the money doesn't really matter in the longer term, the quality of life improvement for the individuals affected more than offsets that and if this didn't happen they would still have to pay the banks.

I think it would improve everyones quality of life if they suddenly didn't have to pay back their loans, however there is also the downside where the rest of society now has to pay for your mistakes.

Student loans are not always mistakes and quite a few people who are in trouble with debt are not in that situation due to things they themselves controlled (such as, but not limited to medical issues, divorces, natural disasters etc).

I am aware that there are people who succeeded despite their debt and now say that it wasn't a mistake. I am also aware that there are many reasons why someone can't pay off a debt. However, there are also reasons why the part of society who didn't fall for the college debt scam don't want to pay for the part of society who did fall for the college debt scam.

If other people get out of debt society as a whole improves, including you and everybody else. It's not a zero sum game.

> society as a whole improves, including you and everybody else

Massive assumption. People justify to themselves that something is good on a society-level when really it's just good on a selfish-level.

I believe that this can actually be bad on a society-level due to college debt being in the trillions.

The problem is not that people have college debt that they can't pay back. The problem is that there is such a thing as college debt to begin with. Education should be free. At all levels, to all takers.

I think the issue is even deeper.

I agree that education should be free, but not colleges. Colleges are involved in the business of credentialing and monopolising entry level jobs.

There is no use in education being free if there are credentialing businesses charging $320k (which I believe is going to increase as they teach more highschoolers why college debt is worth it) in order to use your skills in the job market.

Colleges who have a history of exploitative pricing have no place in the future of free education.

I agree with you on an individual level, and that it is unhealthy to care too much about someone around you getting a break that you didn't get yourself... But that breaks down really quickly on a societal level. Our society is organized around at least a semblance of fairness. So for example even if you pay your taxes and you probably wouldn't mind if your neighbor got away with not paying as much as you do... but you'd probably be pretty pissed if every other person you know just does not pay anything and gets away with it. It breaks down confidence in the system.

In morocco for example, that feeling of unfairness just leads to people doing everything to make their situation better when they get the occasion, because everyone does it. It got slowly but surely worse and worse, and we are now left with a population that is much more cynical and disillusioned than it was a few decades ago.

Just as an example, if your building permit is stuck in approval hell and the local official offers you to pay 1000dirhams to speed the process up, does it really hurt anyone? No, but it makes the entire process seem futile for everyone else, even if it maybe shouldn't.

I think that's a bit similar to the student loan debate, and if anything the loan forgiveness looks much much more shameless to me. Because at the end of the day, college graduates are statistically doing better than a lot of the people that are asked to foot the bill. The proposal is also completely self serving, with almost 0 benefits (a supposed cash injection to the economy isn't one) to anyone else. It's so contrary to everything that is being pushed for right now too, because it's just giving an already privileged population another privilege that is usually very rarely granted.

Yes, but that's the opposite problem: a dysfunctional bureaucracy will tend to become more dysfunctional over time until people have had enough of it and reverse the direction of the spiral usually by main force. Morocco could be a very nice country on all fronts but it would take an entirely different government including a significant part of the civil service to start realizing that potential.

France would not be the France that we know today without the French Revolution, which both remade France and put the rest of Europe's royals on notice that they were expendable in the most literal sense. Get rid of the parasites and suddenly you'll find there is budget for all kinds of improvements.

This is somewhat misleading as the initial part of their page says `BU meets 100% of demonstrated financial need for all admitted, first-year students who are US citizens or permanent residents.` — BU is part of a small number (in the dozens maybe) of private US colleges/universities that are "need blind", which can basically be thought of as "price discrimination" from microeconomics. Wealthier families would pay full price, while less-advantaged students pay a more reasonable amount of money. At these schools the total out of pocket cost ends up being roughly comparable (if not less) than going to a state university would be. I went to a similar school and the out of pocket cost was far less than going to my state university as an in-state student would have been, and I got a much better education.

Obviously $80k is still an obscene amount of money, but I don't really have an issue with kids of millionaires + billionaires having to pay that much to attend.

I think that what this means in the long-run is that this small number of very highly resourced private colleges (Ivies, a lot of the small New England liberal arts schools, Duke, MIT, etc.) will be able to sustain "normal" people going there on the need-blind aid, and lower-ranked private institutions (out of the top 50-100 schools) will probably close if they can't afford to offer that level of aid.

> I think that what this means in the long-run is that this small number of very highly resourced private colleges (Ivies, a lot of the small New England liberal arts schools, Duke, MIT, etc.) will be able to sustain "normal" people going there on the need-blind aid, and lower-ranked private institutions (out of the top 50-100 schools) will probably close if they can't afford to offer that level of aid.

The term here to look for is "tuition discount rate" which is how many students actually pay the full price. You are correct in suggesting that high discount rates mean that only the extremely well-resourced schools will be able to compete for students who aren't able to afford the full price of college. Here's IHE's summary of a study about 2020's numbers:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/05/20/private-colle...

> “Tuition discounting strategies come at a heavy cost for many colleges and universities, especially those that forgo a significant amount of tuition revenue to expand educational affordability for students and/or to meet enrollment goals,” the study said.

The “demonstrated need” is quite suspicious https://www.bu.edu/admissions/tuition-aid/scholarships-finan...

BU is notoriously stingy and you should take their claims of waiving fees with several healthy shakes of salt.

I was surprised to see they're need blind in the first place.

Can someone explain to me how any schools are in danger of going out of business? Their expenses aren't going up, they're not paying professors more, they're not leveraging themselves into debt. What are the huge cost increases they're bearing that force them to raise tuition? The one institute I'm familiar with appears to have hired an absolute shitload of useless administrators, but that is an expense of choice that could be trimmed at any time.

Any large organization with no competition ceases to understand what makes the money eventually. University administrators have been selling life experiences, liberal arts, sports, and research experiences to students for the last 2-3 decades. If you asked them which staff are necessary to keep students joining the school, they would likely have a vastly different answer than the one most people have.

This submission is likely an outlier amongst outliers. It's a crazy expensive private university. So I have no answer for you.

For public universities, the claim is that historically, tuition never covered expenses, and the difference was taken care of by the state and federal government. State support has dropped significantly in the last 40 years, and hence the significant increase in tuition.

About a decade ago I know one nearby public university would be open with their expenses and showed that their expenses per capita/student hadn't changed in decades (adjusted for inflation), and that it wasn't bloat that was causing tuition to go up.

This is beholden to BU's definition of need. Barring any transparency on what these definitions actually mean for the school, I'd assume it means the following.

1 - Students should pay the maximum that they and their family are able to, inclusive of student loans. If their parents have collateral in any form including home equity or retirement accounts, it should be assumed that this collateral can be used to secure loans or pay for the school.

AND/OR

2 - BU gives preferential admissions to students who are able to pay the maximum, while telling everyone else that they don't. This can be done through multiple methods including A) offer admission but don't offer significant aid, B) offer admission preferentially based on signs of high income including expensive club participation, high cost achievements, or Geographic considerations.

Schools have become adept at pretending to do something about the student loan crises, I don't see why we should take any non-quantified statement at face value. My Alma mater UMass Amherst, used to lead every tuition and fee increase with a statement on increased financial aid - Unfortunately a simple multiplication would always show that the magnitude of cost increase vastly outstripped the magnitude of the aid increase.

They don’t do number two, that is not need blind (blind means admissions doesn’t look at financial need, and this makes sense because the applications are due before financial aid is filled out). But here’s what they do do:

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/education/edlife/finaid-p...

B.U. may be need-blind in admissions, but like many colleges, it is not talent-blind in financial aid. When the admissions office accepts a student, the file gets a rating before going to the financial aid office. That rating, Dr. Pohl says, is based on a holistic read of the application: factors like leadership, talent, motivation and personal character are weighed as well as grades and test scores.

> based on a holistic read of the application: factors like leadership, talent, motivation and personal character are weighed as well as grades and test scores

This is another problem. Instead of primarily looking at things you can quantitatively measure, the arbitrary measures now have more weight, meaning they can now more easily discriminate against “boring” student applicants.

https://priceonomics.com/do-elite-colleges-discriminate-agai...

The article is pay-walled, but barring a publicly disclosed admissions criteria - I am dubious of this claim. Consider how adding the following leadership/club activities as "desirable" in the admissions process would affect how much need the student body would need.

- "Polo"

- "Cross-Country skiing"

- "Ski team"

- "International volunteer work"

It's pretty easy to skew admissions criteria in favor of affluence without overtly checking financials. The university could just as easily de-select items such as.

- "Shift manager for Dunkin Donuts"

- "Barrista at Starbucks"

- "Valet"

> of the application: factors like leadership, talent, motivation and personal character are weighed as well as grades and test scores.

Yes? So they have a catch all justification for discrimination against and for whoever they like. Remember, holistic admissions was invented to keep out the Jews. Now it’s used to keep out Asians.

I’m not disputing that. They claim to be need-blind, and explicitly acknowledge they have a bunch of other fuzzy criteria.

While they could discriminate against poor people who put crappy jobs in their applications, it goes against their diversity goals. Whether or not you agree with said goals, (liberal arts) colleges and universities want a diverse population (and yes, to the detriment of Asians).

Visible diversity is far more important to them than social class diversity. There are large boosts to admissions for non-Asian minorities, much smaller boosts for poor visible minorities and penalties for being both white and poor.

> Espenshade and Radford also take up very thoroughly the question of “class based preferences” and what they find clearly shows a general disregard for improving the admission chances of poor and otherwise disadvantaged whites. Other studies, including a 2005 analysis of nineteen highly selective public and private universities by William Bowen, Martin Kurzweil, and Eugene Tobin, in their 2003 book, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, found very little if any advantage in the admissions process accorded to whites from economically or educationally disadvantaged families compared to whites from wealthier or better educated homes. Espenshade and Radford cite this study and summarize it as follows: “These researchers find that, for non-minority [i.e., white] applicants with the same SAT scores, there is no perceptible difference in admission chances between applicants from families in the bottom income quartile, applicants who would be the first in their families to attend college, and all other (non-minority) applicants from families at higher levels of socioeconomic status. When controls are added for other student and institutional characteristics, these authors find that “on an other-things-equal basis, [white] applicants from low-SES backgrounds, whether defined by family income or parental education, get essentially no break in the admissions process; they fare neither better nor worse than other [white] applicants.”

> Distressing as many might consider this to be–since the same institutions that give no special consideration to poor white applicants boast about their commitment to “diversity” and give enormous admissions breaks to blacks, even to those from relatively affluent homes–Espenshade and Radford in their survey found the actual situation to be much more troubling. At the private institutions in their study whites from lower-class backgrounds incurred a huge admissions disadvantage not only in comparison to lower-class minority students, but compared to whites from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds as well. The lower-class whites proved to be all-around losers. When equally matched for background factors (including SAT scores and high school GPAs), the better-off whites were more than three times as likely to be accepted as the poorest whites (.28 vs. .08 admissions probability). Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant’s admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it. The opposite class trend was seen among non-whites, where the poorer the applicant the greater the probability of acceptance when all other factors are taken into account. Class-based affirmative action does exist within the three non-white ethno-racial groupings, but among the whites the groups advanced are those with money.

https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2010/07/12/how_diversity_pu...

> Students should pay the maximum that they and their family are able to, inclusive of student loans. If their parents have collateral in any form including home equity or retirement accounts, it should be assumed that this collateral can be used to secure loans or pay for the school.

This rings true for me at least when I was in college (early to mid 2010s). My parents happened to buy a house in the late 80s in a community where real estate values ended up rising enormously by the time I was applying for financial aid, and my dad happened to work for a private company where only employees were allowed to hold stock for the vast majority of his career (he coincidentally started there around when they bought the house), so his stock was basically part of his savings for retirement. I ended up not getting a huge amount of financial aid in terms of either grants or student loans, so the options were for my parents to refinance their mortgage they weren't done paying off, spend a huge portion of their retirement money on my education, or have me take out private loans with them as cosigners with the idea that I would hopefully be able to pay them back on my own. We opted for choice 3, so I ended up graduating with around $100k in debt with fairly high interest rates due do having had no credit or income at the time we applied for the loans. Overall, it's worked out due to some luck in terms of the job I was able to get out of college, but it still feels like that shouldn't have been required in the first place. On the other hand, I completely agree with the assessment that I was not anywhere close to a priority to receive financial aid. One of my best friends in college had one parent who only was able to get part time work and another parent who was disabled and couldn't work; between the grants and low interest loans he was given as financial aid, he essentially was able to attend for free, which I wish was available to everyone like him who needed it much more than I did.

BU has a couple of cost calculators online here [1] that let you enter data on you and your parent's income and assets and on how many other siblings you have and their ages and tells you how you would likely be expected to meet the costs.

[1] https://www.bu.edu/finaid/aid-basics/cost-of-attendance/net-...

Is it safe to characterize those who would pay full price as only the children of millionaires and billionaires? I filled out the FAFSA just to see and my EFC (when I first started college) was 91,000. I doubt my parents were millionaires; even an overestimate of assets (some of which weren’t really liquid as they were preparing to buy a house) would’ve been just barely over 1 million. It’s hard to see paying that as affordable.

How were they not millionaires if their net worth was over $1M?

Well, I couched it saying it was an overestimate. Besides, having $1,000,001 technically makes you a millionaire but I don’t think that’s what people are referring to when they’re talking about “millionaires and billionaires”. 4 years of $80,000 tuition is $320,000 - are we trying to say that 32% of a “millionaire’s” total assets is a cost of college we’re ok with as it only affects millionaires and billionaires?

In addition, given an Expected Family Contribution (EFC) of $91k a year for assets == 1 million (plus other variables of course), there seems to be a decent amount of room to reduce the total assets <1 million and still pay the full price of $80k a year. Then even by strict definition, not only millionaires and billionaires are going to be paying full price.

Yeah, its especially awkward now that people are having kids later in life. Being a millionaire at, say, 45 is way different than being a millionaire at 55 or 60. Heck, I have a friend who had a kid in her 50s - they won't be in college until she's in her 70s!

> Obviously $80k is still an obscene amount of money, but I don't really have an issue with kids of millionaires + billionaires having to pay that much to attend.

There is a huge gap in between, that isn't addressed in your comment. 80k/year is still expensive to someone whose parents make 100k.

I think it’s pretty easy to demonstrate you need financial support when your after tax pay for the whole family is less than the annual tuition cost.

Depends on BUs decision, they might be one of those universities who believe parents should've been saving up for their childs education for 18 years and would still happily charge you the full amount.

That's not how and of the "100% financial need meet" institutions work. It's all based on what they calculate your family can pay based off of current income and assets.

View my calculator results in the parent comment

The "and assets" part of the equation is the bad part. If you have $100k annual income and a $1 million house plus $100k in a college savings plan, they're giving you the full sticker price. Never mind that you're several hundred thousand short, you have assets.

I tried this in BU's quick cost estimator: 2 parent 1 child household, $100k income, $1 million house with no mortgage, $100k in savings.

Results: $44700 need-based scholarship, $29400 parent/student contribution, $3500 student loan, $2000 student work-study.

Going back and changing it to not have a house changes the need-based scholarship to $54600 and drops the parent/student contribution to $19500, leaving the rest unchanged.

Restoring the million dollar house but taking away the $100k savings makes the scholarship $49600 and the parent/student contribution $24500.

Finally, getting rid of both house and savings, leaving just the $100k income makes the scholarship $59500 and the parent/student contribution $14600.

So...it looks like having $100k in savings adds about $5000 to your expected contribution, and having a $1 million mortgage free house adds about $10k to your expected contribution.

I also tried it with $100k in a retirement account, and that changed nothing. $100k in non-retirement account investments was the same as $100k in savings.

It looks like you are going to have to have a lot more in income and/or non-retirement assets to actually get anywhere near full sticker price.

I have around 200k in investments and 50k in cheque account, resulting in 70k per year fee. Even though that would completely wipe out my savings without paying the full amount...

Two things:

* If you have a net worth of $250k and they calculate you can pay $70k for the first year, estimating full payment as $70k * 4 ($280k) isn't right. Your net worth will be lower next year, and they'll consider that.

* Their goal is to charge you the most you are able to pay, and someone with $250k in savings is able to pay $70k.

I think this is all a bad system, for the same reason that a 100% marginal tax rate is a bad idea, but it's not quite as nuts as you're suggesting.

>Your net worth will be lower next year, and they'll consider that

I was just giving an example to demonstrate how bad their calculator pricing was (280k fees < 250k savings without selling house) if you wanted to make it more realistic I would also take into account that my investments grow too.

>Their goal is to charge you the most you are able to pay, and someone with $250k in savings is able to pay $70k.

Seems pretty bad to me. Wouldn't pay 7k/year for BU, much less 70k.

> without selling house

Sorry, are you saying the net worth you put into the calculator was more than $250k? Then $70k is even less surprising!

(If colleges ignored home values you could put your $250k into repaying your mortgage faster and report having no savings. They'd charge you $0. And if you needed money later you could borrow against the value of the house.)

Ah yes, I should've considered selling my house for BU, thanks for the advice...

It's completely reasonable for you to decide that "everything I have" is not a reasonable price to pay for college. What I'm getting at, is that these colleges are very careful not to charge you more than it is possible for you to pay. They are extremely good at price discrimination.

>What I'm getting at, is that these colleges are very careful not to charge you more than it is possible for you to pay.

Never said it was impossible for me to pay, just said it was still expensive.

You can try it out yourself, in my case the tuition dropped from $79k to $70k. Which is still expensive for a family that makes $100k.

https://npc.collegeboard.org/app/bu?sessionId=N5uYUvK7OuteM4...

Seems off. I used a higher income with sibling and it estimated $13k family contribution via IM formula. That was close to BU’s own calculator, which suggested a $17k combination of loans and family contributions, forgiving roughly $60k via needs.

FM estimated twice IM which I take to mean BU uses IM.

What is IM formula? I am using BUs own calculator.

Your link asks if you want Federal or Institutional Method when calculating expected family contribution (FM vs IM) or to run both methods. I don’t know why a school would choose one or the other, just noting the similar result from IM.

Boston seems to have two calculators going. This is the one I found in Tuition & Aid, that provides institution-specific results. https://app.myintuitionapp.org/institution/2fc48230-f626-4d2...

Oh right, thanks.

> There is a huge gap in between, that isn't addressed in your comment. 80k/year is still expensive to someone whose parents make 100k.

If someone's parents make $100K/year then they aren't going to pay anywhere near that $80K/year figure.

The average annual expenses (tuition + living expenses) at Boston University is closer to $30K ( https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?164988-Boston-Univer... ).

US college tuition pricing is extremely weird because very few people actually pay full price. They put a big number on it so they can justify charging high amounts to wealthy parents (hence the millionaires and billionaires comment above) but then give everyone else "discounts" to bring it back toward lower numbers.

Note that their $30K/year is still a whopping 50% higher than the national average.

>If someone's parents make $100K/year then they aren't going to pay anywhere near that $80K/year figure.

In my case, using the calculator estimate dropped it from $79k to $70k. And this is just an estimate, I doubt I would even receive 9k from the needs based scholarship. https://npc.collegeboard.org/app/bu?sessionId=N5uYUvK7OuteM4

> I think that what this means in the long-run is that this small number of very highly resourced private colleges ... will be able to sustain "normal" people going there on the need-blind aid

The issue with this is that prospective students need to know this is how it works. When I was in school (in a similar caliber school), most lower income students applied on a whim not knowing the school would handle aid.

(Also I'm told the school did a bad job at handling aid, essentially giving people golden handcuffs to control additional factors of their life like housing).

> Obviously $80k is still an obscene amount of money, but I don't really have an issue with kids of millionaires

Lets assume person is a milionaire.

Having to pay 8% of your networth (including retirement and the value of your home [is that correct?]) so that one of your kids can go to uni (what if you have 2?) is silly.

8% times 4 years.

Per kid.

With 2 kids = 640k cash.

And that is only tuition!

And what is the definition of net worth? If you own an ordinary single family home in an ordinary city, it may be worth $1 million which makes you a millionaire.

Will you sell your home to pay tuition for 2 kids?

Your kid is perfectly capable of taking out their own loans. One of the big problems with US schooling is that schools just expect parents to pay for their kids' schooling. They're adults. They can fund their own educations.

At 320k a pop? Talk about being a debt slave.

But my main point was, if the millionaires can't reasonably afford it, something is wrong.

Why do you think BU costs 80K a year? It's not because the school costs that much to run. It's because private schools are a way for the rich to segregate their kids from the rank and file. The cost of attendance is a FEATURE.

Also, people keep on tossing "millionaire" around as if that term has meaning anymore. Nowadays it means you're a homeowner with some retirement saved up. And while some mere millionaires are desperate for their kids to reach some sort of faux prestige by sending them to a second tier private school, most aren't going to do that. Again, that's the point of BU's tuition being so high in the first place. They don't want the mere upper middle class unless they are exceptional students. They want the rich kids for that sweet endowment money.

Income is more important than retirement accounts and your home. For example using the quick cost calculator [1] for a family with 1 child, $36k of income, a $1 million home that is fully paid for, and $1 million in retirement accounts the results are a parent/student contribution of $3200 and $2000 of student work-study.

[1] https://www.bu.edu/finaid/aid-basics/cost-of-attendance/net-...

https://www.google.com/search?q=harvard+attendance+cost

Harvard attendance cost: $15k on avg after financial aid. But $60k on paper.

I'm a counter-example to that. My parents paid full-price tuition for me 4 years of university (CMU class of 2010) and 4 years of private high school (which has the same "need blind" admission policy). But, they were not millionaires, rather they had just enough saved.

My mother is a "family doctor" in a small town, and my father was a stay-at-home dad, total pre-tax income around $120k-$150k at the time. House was around $250k, still paying the mortgage while I was in school. We actually knew of families that made more, and paid less, at the same schools. I have one younger sister, in her last couple of years at university she did finally get financial aid - the system/calculations did result in my parents paying off their mortgage but having zero savings left at the end. A couple years later I had some software engineer money, and helped my father buy a car when his old one broke down.

We're all doing fine, we understood the system, we made good lives for ourselves, my parents do have retirement savings, I'm not complaining about that. But this narrative you push here, about only millionaires and billionaires paying the absurd sticker price for university so it's fine, it's wrong. The statistics don't make it right. Even though "the average american" lives paycheck to paycheck regardless of income level (even at our middle to upper-middle level of income), that doesn't make this system fair to the hard-working and fiscally responsible people out there. There were some big family fights each year when it was time to fill out the FAFSA like all the other middle-class families, my dad hated it, it was such a charade and a waste of time.

Unbankruptable student loans should have a hard cap proportional to the median expected earnings for a given major.

I know that the purpose of college degree isn't just to make a lot of money, but if you can't make a lot of money, you shouldn't be able to take out 100k+ in loans that's legally protected from being removed in bankruptcy.

Of course, the real solution here should just be free public college + clampdowns on cost overruns so that it's practical to fund. Less money on nice dorms and endless administrators and whichever sports lose money. We used to have cheap college, and it's possible to get back there. Find what changed over the decades and cut back.

I actually think the real solution is that student loans should be dischargeable in bankruptcy. I think it is a much better, easier and fairer fix than just cancelling some student loans.

Since student loans aren't dischargeable, it means that lenders have no incentive to do any due diligence. On the contrary, their incentive is to load students up with as much debt as possible.

Yes, making student loans dischargeable would mean fewer students would get loans, but that's the point. Lenders shouldn't be giving out hundreds of thousands of dollars to students whose career options would then put them in indentured servitude for decades.

Why throwaway? This is a good take.

> Yes, making student loans dischargeable would mean fewer students would get loans

That pretty much defeats the point of the system, to give loans to poor people to give them a chance.

> it means that lenders have no incentive to do any due diligence.

That's hard to do because young students haven't had time to build credit history, you can't extrapolate creditworthiness from SAT/ACT scores without hurting students from poorly-funded education systems, and most importantly by rejecting to offer loans, you are preventing a student from a shot at their dream school which could pull a whole family out of poverty in a decade.

The problem isn't how the loans should be disbursed, managed, repaid, or forgiven. The problem is that the base tuition is so high that students need loans. Loans should be for housing, gym memberships, extra-curriculars. I am absolutely ok with my Federal, state, and local taxes funding actual education, not college stadiums. This would also incentivize schools to reduce costs for the basic education and charge people who can afford to pay for the full "college experience."

But over the years state governments keep cutting funding for colleges and universities and students keep having to take out loans. And since loans are easy to get and cannot be discharged, everyone is incentivized to do anything to get more students who will pay a higher tuition. It is a terrible cycle that I hope either gets obsoleted by virtual education, trade schools, or some miracle.

> Lenders shouldn't be giving out hundreds of thousands of dollars to students whose career options would then put them in indentured servitude for decades.

That was all part of California's master plan for higher education at the end of the 60s. Unfortunately the anti-government folks got Prop 13 passed and put an end to tuition free college and university.

That could work, but without cost/price changes the result of fewer/smaller loans would make it much harder for poorer kids to attend college.

Before federal student loans, corporations and the universities themselves would lend the money. They very often wouldn’t do so until the second year, when the student had demonstrated that they were capable.

Something like that could happen again, even with federal dollars - universities would make the first year cheap, and based upon high school transcripts + SAT / ACT + first year grades, then make a real loan.

> Lenders shouldn't be giving out hundreds of thousands of dollars to students whose career options would then put them in indentured servitude for decades.

That is a terrible metric. There are plenty of objectively important professions that require advanced degrees and don't pay well. Teachers, nurses, and yeah doctors. Take a look at how much residents or general practitioners get paid. Sure you could make millions hawking voodoo to Peter Thiel but we've also got a shortage of GPs in the United States.

Profit is the wrong motive for (public) education. I'm sure you were aiming more at the underwater basketweaving crowd but even art plays an important role in society.

It's not a terrible metric, in fact I think it should really be the only metric when it comes to loans. We're not talking about grants, nor are we talking about the value different professions bring to society.

Those teachers and nurses you are referring to should absolutely not be saddled with loans they will never be able to repay, and the situation now, where many of these people will be making large student loan payments into retirement or near death, is unconscionable.

There are much better ways to support people who want to go into these professions than signing them up, many at the age of 17 or 18, for a lifetime of crushing debt.

What you're suggesting means we should have more grants or just lower costs/prices at schools. Which I mean, yeah, I totally agree with that.

Loans are debt. They have to be paid back. So yeah, of course how much someone will make after school is relevant here. If doctors in the US didn't make bongo bucks, med school costing 250k+ would be absolutely insane (rather than just moderately insane).

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-general-practitioner-s...

Glassdoor (ugh) estimates base pay at about $160k annually for a general practitioner. You're not getting rich off of that salary, especially not in a HCOLA.

> Unbankruptable student loans

Ought not to exist. Full stop.

> Less money on nice dorms and endless administrators

This is a fantasy. Whatever feedback mechanisms existed in our society in the past to keep things from getting out of hand, are gone---whether in academia, medicine, or any part of government.

How about hard caps on who get's admitted to any school that accepts government aid.

Reserve 1/2 of the spots to kids from low income families if they can get in, and charge 1/8 of what they charge kids from wealthy families.

If the school has the nerve to charge a wealthy kid $100,000/yr. fine.

The poor kid is charged $20,000. (Financial aid is guaranteed, and automatically discharged in upon graduation. If they don't graduate they will have to pay it back.)

The wealthy parents might be questioning the luxury dorms, luxury amenities, at these fancy colleges, along with the high paid teachers whom don't even teach, but do research.

The administrators would have to figure out how to keep costs down, because the wealthy parents will only pay so much for Biff's, or Becky's, education.

The very small percentage of kids whom daddies don't pay for everything up to 30 years of age will be honestly Means Tested to be included with the lower price poor kids pay.

> Of course, the real solution here should just be free public college + clampdowns on cost overruns so that it's practical to fund. Less money on nice dorms and endless administrators and whichever sports lose money. We used to have cheap college, and it's possible to get back there. Find what changed over the decades and cut back.

Agree in theory, but then we should really be sure that the "clampdowns on cost overruns" will be effective before giving the government carte blanche to spend our tax money on this. The government is not even able to build rail without huge cost overruns and delays. I don't trust it to run universities.

We will go back to cheap college when that is what students and their families choose cheap schools over expensive ones. Hint: They don’t. They won’t.

Community colleges have seen the largest enrollment drops, followed by public 4 year. Private colleges that lower their tuition, counterintuitively, almost always see a drop in applicants the following year.

For those who aren't familiar, BU was pretty well known (at least a couple decades ago) for being a "rich kids" school. That is, it had a reputation as a quality school, but tuition was always high there (considerably higher than what you'd pay at an Ivy) and so it seemed to attract wealthy kids. I'd put other colleges like USC in LA or Emory University in Atlanta as having similar reputations: good (but not great) private universities with sky high tuitions.

Just pointing this out because the fact that one US university has super high base tuition rates (before any financial aid) doesn't mean it's necessarily representative of much more.

The problem is that USC and Emory have really upped their endowments and research game as well while places like Tulane have sort of chugged along.

Yup I have a relative who attended BU, and I remember hearing stories of some insanely rich kids from overseas. Like children of Russian oligarchs and the Saudi royal family levels of wealthy. I have no problem if they want to spend $80k/yr to educate their kids in Boston.

The solution is and always has been to cut the fluff from the academies. For context, go add up the salaries the 'student services' area of the expensive school of your choice.

Having worked for one such office for ~15 years, the most appalling part was that they are largely antagonistic toward the faculty and mission of the schools. The waste is dizzying.

Was there ever a layoff/pay cut in those 15 years?

But who would cut it unless there is financial discipline from the lack of funds? You need to turn off the spigot first.

Turning off this spigot should be our biggest national security concern, in my opinion.

The iron law of bureaucracy in action.

> Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":

> First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

> Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

> The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

> What Is the Cost of Attendance?

> Probably less than you think.

> ...

> Total Cost of Attendance $82,760

How in the world can someone write this copy with a straight face?

This answer describes what they're referring to there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31309948

"total", per year or for all 4 years

Per year

A decade or so ago most families paid full price at most colleges/universities in the US. That is not the case today.

You see a lot of opinion pieces talking about how high tuition prices are at colleges and how the pricing is out of control, but what isn't talked about is that most of these schools are now discounting their tuition increasingly every year. Typically it is on a sliding scale based on need. For some of the Ivy league schools tuition is free if you are anything below upper middle income. Universities do this by pulling a small percentage from their endowments each year (think of a retiree pulling 2% of investments each year while still growing the retirement nest egg by 4%). That is exactly what colleges are doing.

Bigger endowments = bigger discount rate = better quality of students attending = better (hopefully) students = better reputation. At least that is how the thinking goes.

Google "Boston University." On the right of it will tell you the tuition and average cost of attendance, including cost by income bracket.

Cost Before Aid: $77,662 After Aid:$30,259

Total cost not that long ago (aid or not) was lower than the after-aid cost in your last sentence.

What you're suggesting is to go the way of medical billing, total lack of billing transparency and fake chargemaster numbers disconnected from supply and demand just so that it can be negotiated down (if you have enough leverage).

Tuition costs were lower a decade ago but so was overhead. What the tuition cost is telling you is how much it costs the University to educate a single person and create the BU experience, whatever you may think for that.

That dollar amount is not made up. And that money is coming from somewhere. It is either coming directly from the students or endowment.

And it is based on your family’s income. It is not a negotiation. It is automatic and based on a standard chart. The less you make the less you pay. Pretty straightforward.

It doesn't matter what it costs the University to educate a person. The market dictates that the BU experience should cost exactly as much as it makes the BU experience just barely worthwhile, and almost not, for the increase in human capital in the enrollee.

The piece of paper that says BU is apparently worth about $320k, which isn't entirely unbelievable. I bet it costs BU a lot less, but since the market pays that much, it can spend it on whatever and call it overhead, because why the heck not.

Assuming no overhead:

If professors are making 250K / year, and the average course load per student is 4 courses, the class size is twenty, and each professor teaches two class sections per semester, student tuition would be $25K.

Professors make much less, course sizes are much larger, and tuition is at least double my estimate.

My conclusion? Professors with teaching positions should unionize or just found separate, low overhead universities that are optimized to provide higher education.

I'm a prof, and I would take a pay cut to work at a such a place. The waste at my institution is sickening.

Students aren't going to BU for the professors and the administration knows that. Most are just their to get the piece of paper from a prestigious institution.

Personal example, I almost did an MD/PhD at BU. Almost every MD/PhD is fully-funded due to the time commitment and presumed loss of 4-5 years of attending-level salary. BU's MD/PhD program is not fully funded...you have to pay for your living expenses all throughout the MD years, not an easy price to stomach in Boston (see: https://www.bumc.bu.edu/mdphd/admissions/funding/).

As I look back on ugrad school, I conclude "Don't pay a lot for ugrad school." I can think of maybe three exceptions -- Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, and not for the education but for who you meet.

For the education, basically DIY -- do it yourself. Blunt truth: For a really good education, 'bout have to DIY anyway.

How to do that? Mostly books. Now supplemented with the Internet. Maybe some help from a few profs.

For the books, etc. find what looks like the best courses in all of the US and use those to build your own reading list. For a good education, need to do that anyway: Blunt truth, ugrad school is a busy time and won't get as much as you want. So, will leave with a diploma but also with a nice collection of materials have not carefully studied yet.

Another blunt fact: Say, 3 courses each semester, two semesters per year, 4 years -- 24 courses. If you have as many as 4 of those really good, you are lucky. Usually the teaching really isn't very good, guys.

Another blunt fact: ASAP, already by 8th grade, via parents, uncles, friends, whatever, try to get into, connected with, know about what is going on outside high school and college and relevant to your career options and, thus, also relevant to what you study in college. If a college can help get you connected with some promising real career directions, great, but don't count on it.

Blunt fact: You have a good shot at getting about the best ugrad education possible by doing a lot of DIY, making your own investigations and connections, and going to a rather cheap state university and living cheap at home.

The Internet has a lot of video clips of lectures in courses from famous universities, profs, etc. These clips expose the truth: There is a lot of poor teaching out there, and really good material is rare.

In short, the person best to manage, direct, design your ugrad education is you. Don't just passively lean back and take what is given -- instead as here, be active, DIY, etc.

This is all spot on from my experience, and possibly summarized by Will Huntings quote “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”

Also many of the top companies (Tesla, Google, etc.) no longer require degrees to apply and get hired

>"What Is the Cost of Attendance?"

>"Probably less than you think."

No, it was not less than I thought, BU..

As others have pointed out, and as a few media outlets have increasingly covered, there's a big difference between sticker price and net price. A minority of students at private universities pay full sticker price, and if I had to guess, I'd say most are wealthy foreign students (who are effectively subsidizing domestic students' education).

Colleges—as well as sites like US News—should figure out a way to more effectively communicate average cost, or a typical cost range, after non-loan student aid.

Student loans are another issue entirely. I agree with other commenters that universal student loan forgiveness isn't a long term solution to the student debt problem, and I think we should focus on expanding and simplifying programs like PSLF (Public Service Loan Forgiveness). That said, I don't find the rational-choice argument ("I ran the numbers and determined X, and did Y") persuasive. Few 18-year-olds have an expansive enough understanding of the world to accurately assess student loan burden against potential future earnings.

Finally, we forgive and renegotiate all kinds of debt all the time. Why can't we do the same for student loans? Why are student loan interest rates set a decade in advance by Congress? The system makes no sense.

It's okay, this isn't a bubble.

Possible title change to clarify: this is $80k / year!

For reference (because we know titles are often changed): it's currently "Boston University Undergraduate Costs Reach $80k".

University of Chicago is projected to be the first $100k/year tuition.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21442807

Other countries make government funding of universities and government funding of student loans for those same institutions conditional on price controls.

What’s wrong with saying the US government gives no research money, no funding dollars and no student loans to students attending Harvard unless Harvard agrees to keep tuitions below a certain number?

There are lots of European universities with great English bachelor programs.

My university, Eindhoven University of Technology, has a bachelor program for €11,600 a year. You have to be on time with signup and be lucky with the lottery (also check out Delft and other EU universities). A room would be around 500 to 700 euro's per month.

BU is an undergraduate diploma mill; always has been. Back in the 80's and 90's Silber (who was basically a late 1900's puritan) cared more with keeping students from fucking each other in the dorms than he did the curriculum.

Around a decade ago I dated someone who worked as an assistant professor and she was told in no uncertain terms to give passing grades to the NCAA hockey players taking her class. None of them had attended a single lecture or turned in a single assignment.

These days BU is where ultra-wealthy Chinese send their kids who aren't smart enough to for Harvard or MIT. You can spot them a mile away in wintertime if they're out walking; every single one of them owns a $1000 Canada Goose parka. You won't find them on public transit, because they're driving top-end luxury/hyper cars.

Spot on with the foreign money thing... I live downtown and they're all living in the new Theater District and North Station buildings.

I've got some friends in one of the newer condo buildings downtown and they have been really annoyed by how much the building is like a dorm. Foreign money buys up million dollar units and lets their kids stay in them while they are in school. Kids in turn throw noisy parties and do generally stupid 18-21 year old crap that pisses off the regular residents.

Related: [Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31309748)

I'm wondering how many students actually pay list price? (I mean, their parents.)

With financial aid, this is probably more along the lines of "tell us how much you make and we'll tell you the price."

Tell me how much of a loan you qualify for and we'll tell you the price.

It would be great if that information was published.

I received a full tuition scholarship to BU.

The Department of Education's College Scorecard for BU[1] suggests relatively few given the reported $30,395 average annual cost figure, which is described as:

> The average annual net price that a student who receives federal financial aid pays to cover expenses (e.g., tuition, living expenses) to attend a school. Net price is the school's cost of attendance minus any grants and scholarships received. For public schools, this is only the average cost for in-state students.

In comparison, Stanford's reported average annual cost[2] is $12,894. This makes sense given its student responsibility[3].

[1] https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?164988-Boston-Univer...

[2] https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?243744-Stanford-Univ...

[3] https://financialaid.stanford.edu/undergrad/how/student.html

State school was a great decision. Still working for top tech now. Pretty much everyone I know who went to a state school is doing fine

Or another option that I've heard of in several states is to do two years at community college, and then transfer to a state college. Some of the benefits of these programs are that acceptance to a state college is guaranteed provided the student maintains a certain GPA, and there are also some pretty generous financial aid benefits. [1]

I think this is something that should be encouraged much more often for students graduating from high school - especially for kids who don't really know what they want to do yet. Maybe take a year or two off, experience the real world and grow up a bit, and then do an associate's degree followed by a bachelor's degree. Or else maybe learn a trade. Or join the military.

I've known a lot of people who took big loans and went straight into college after high school, and ended up dropping out. Maybe they weren't ready yet, or maybe college just wasn't right for them. And the costs - both financial and developmental - can be pretty devastating.

[1] https://www.mass.edu/masstransfer/macomcom/home.asp

Just to clarify, when they say "100%" of need, is that exclusively grants/scholarships or does that also include loans?

Anyone from the northeast have any thoughts on the relative quality of a UMass education (any campus) compared to BU?

Main value of urban campuses is they provide a leg up in the local job market, so UMass Boston could be good. Amherst I think has more research, but not much of a job market.

UMass Amherst is significantly more prestigious than BU - or at least it was ~20 years ago when I was applying to colleges. But Amherst is the one "good" UMass campus

Are you confusing UMass Amherst with Amherst College (generally considered an A-tier school)? I've never heard anyone say UMass Amherst is _significantly_ more prestigious than BU... they've always been fairly comparable other than BU having the urban Boston campus benefit.

Nope, I'm not. Amherst college is another tier or two above UMass Amherst, yeah

I went to the best HS in the Northeast in the 90s and no one seriously considered BU, but UMass Amherst was a non-shameful safety. But I am out of the loop - things could have changed in 20+ years

I went to BU for undergraduate and master’s degrees ~12 years ago. Was only (!!) $50k then but was still very expensive.

The education is high quality and there are so many majors that they keep grading standards high as anyone can switch out to something easier (i.e. communications).

That said BU is full of very rich foreigners, and fairly rich US students who couldn’t get into Ivy league schools for whatever reason. Some of the dorms and buildings are new and cutting edge, others are really old and shitty. Living in the newer dorms is significantly more money than the older ones, so the prices quoted at the link are for the shitty old buildings.

I would not encourage anyone to go to BU who needed loans. I would recommend a merit scholarship or have rich parents. The price isn’t worth the degree or the experience.

UMass schools are all pretty good. UMass Lowell is a pretty well regarded engineering school, UMass Amherst is consistently ranked highly nationally, Bridgewater State is a nice liberal arts college, etc. The majority of students in high school had UMass Amherst as their main choice - there probably is some amount of advantage to BU over state school, but it is a very large price difference especially if you are in-state.

Prospective student from the area here —- here are my two cents, but keep in mind these are the opinion of someone who doesn’t know what he is talking about.

From an educational quality standpoint, they are comparable. I personally like the rural feeling of UMass Amherst a lot more than the city surroundings of Boston University.

Educational quality also stems from the quality of your classmates. In that regard, UMass Amherst is a bit worse than Boston University, which has better rankings and attracts students whose families are more affluent. Finding a job with a BU degree is going to be easier than with an Amherst degree from what I understand.

Personally, I’d choose UMass Amherst because it’s cheaper and some of my smart friends go there (due to affirmative action going to another level this past year blocking out Ivies for a bunch of Asians).

I didn't attend UMass, but have had friends that went there and they seem fine a decade and some change after graduating. I think UMass education AND networking is on par with private schools that rank in the 50-100 tier (I went to one of those, I don't think I am any better because of it).

College these days is mostly about getting a useful degree and building up a network... as long as the school gives your opportunities and has a decent alumni network it doesn't seem to matter much beyond that.

I'd attend BU and hire from BU before UMass Flagship, and certainly before non-flagship. That said, I wouldn't think poorly of someone with a UMass degree. I assume BU has a better professional network and more business connections to get a job.

The volume of top-tier schools in the north east means that there is a subtle student brain-drain from state schools not found in other parts of country - this obviously applies only to students who can afford it of course, and smart people certainly attend UMass.

I love the phony “anyone with need” and “first year students will have needs met” lipstick they put on the pig.

My alma mater, University of Chicago, is currently clocking in at a staggering $85k.

https://financialaid.uchicago.edu/undergraduate/costs

That said, they offer free tuition for families making less than $125k.

Major colleges are an absolute ripoff. If I asked you to give me $250K so that I could give you an $80K salary to start, which isn't a given, would you take that investment?

Community and state schools (and even state schools are too high) are the better way to go. Something has to give...

Expect them to increase more if the government tries to waive off student loans. The universities have no incentive to reduce tuition if they know that the taxpayer will pick up the tab in a few years once the student is unable to pay back his loans.

The federal government could fix this instantly if they capped the tuition that could be charged as a condition of receiving federal grant money. That is an unbelievable lever for research institutions at least.

Expat here, $80K*4 = $320K for college education? how is this sustainable.

Very few people actually pay that amount. It's meant to be a high ceiling for the most wealthy people.

The average price is still very high at around $30K/year, which is 50% higher than the national average of $20K/year ( https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?164988-Boston-Univer... )

But the average student definitely isn't paying $80K/year to go to Boston University.

I am so thankful I went to college 15ish years ago and my parents were able to do it without loans... our future is so fucked with the way we are burying our young under ridiculous amounts of debt.

And why not? They can borrow money for it and the government will forgive it.

I'd bet if the Government stopped backing student loans, tuitions will drop like a rock.

Is this another hedge fund masquerading as a university?

Even an Ivy isn't worth that - not these days, anyway. Maybe before the internet it might have been worth it

More than double the price of some entire degrees in Canada

Is that $80k per year!? What. The. Fuck. Batman.

thought this was total...it's for 1 year...insane...

In Australia, the fees for a four year engineering degree is around $30k AUD, and that's with very humane packback rules. $80k a _year_ is mindblowing. Rich folk and scholarship students I get, but why would anyone else go there?

It's a private research university. Private schools might have more financial aid available, but they cost much more, and they are a research institution, which adds (mostly) pointless prestige to undergraduate degrees.

That said, the growth of college tuitions is why you will find so many Americans skeptical of the value of college. The actual experience is nice, the things you learn might be useful, but the net value varies a lot depending on what you graduate with and when you do it.

I very nearly went into legal studies, but there were a number of lawsuits against schools from former law students claiming the schools vastly overstated the number of graduates getting relevant jobs (the market got flooded, basically).

Nowadays, it is fashionable to poke fun at gender studies and sports news and whatever other "fluff" degrees are out there, but it can happen to any degree really. When you're looking at a quarter of a million dollars or more of debt, you really need to think long and hard about what you plan to do about it.

It's also why free college and federal student debt relief are such hard sells here. Unless the actual problem of the cost of tuition is resolved, it hardly makes sense to throw more money at the problem- it just encourages more of the same bloat caused by federally backed, easy access loans have caused in the first place

I lived at home and went to a state school around 15 years ago. At the time, in-state tuition was something like $10k/year. I got around $10k in scholarships, so my education cost roughly $30k or $41k in today's money. This means one year at BU is two times the total cost of my education, time adjusted.

Insane.

I'm gonna come out and say that this is too much money to pay vis a vis the starting salary of a developer.

I would highly suggest just getting any cheap degree from anywhere because every recruiter I talk to doesn't care where you went.

Doesn’t hurt the bottom line of universities if they raise tuition. Students just take out bigger loans. The price hikes won’t stop until it hurts their bottom line.

This annual tuition cost isn't real. It almost never is. It's the same thing as listing the total cost for medical bills: It goes to health insurance, not you.

That's not true at all. This article says 45% of students receive need-based aid, meaning 55% don't: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/boston-university-2130/...

Yes, other students may be receiving merit-based aid, but a large percentage of their student body is paying the full cost.

More like 65k if you don’t live on campus and find something cheaper but also that is an insane amount to be paying.

In comparison, some schools in Canada over 4 years don’t even cost that much

Living off campus in Boston within commuting distance of BU… going to be at least $1k per month assuming you have 5 roommates.

Eh, there are some pretty cheap places in Allston and Brighton. Last spring I had a place for $700 (although it was a whole house rented w some of my classmates)

Is that $700 per person or for the whole house? Trying to determine what you mean by cheap.

Almost certainly per-person. There is nothing in Boston that can be rented for $700 short of a broom closet and that might still fetch $1000.

You mean there are some sketchy places with rats living with you and addicts next door.

61.5k for tuition is just insane! It just doesn't make sense in any way. What are they teaching that deserves such insane tuition rates?

Billed expenses for the 2022/2023 academic year* Tuition $61,050

Room (depending on type of accommodation) $11,260 Board (most dining plans) $6,140 Fees $1,310 TOTAL ESTIMATED BILLED EXPENSES $79,760 + Other expenses Books and Supplies $1,000 Personal Expenses $1,370 Local Transportation (average) $630 TOTAL OTHER EXPENSES $3,000 = Total Cost of Attendance $82,760

In comparison:

Virginia Tech (a great school) out of state tuition is half of that:

In-state tuition 13,749 USD, Out-of-state tuition 32,893 USD

Radford University (the school I went to in Virginia) is even cheaper, 1/3rd of that:

In-state tuition 11,416 USD, Out-of-state tuition 23,498 USD

I am sorry, but if you choose to go on debt to a school like BU, it is your own fault for being so reckless. Can't complain later about 'school debt'. I think federal loans, should not be available to inefficient school systems/universities. At this point they are just helping the bloated administration salaries and the deans becoming rich, and thats it.

They make up for it with financial aid. If you can only afford Radford, chances are BU offers an aid package to you that makes it comparable.

So do Radford and V. Tech. They give generous aid packages as well.

But this way, for those who can afford the full tuition, BU and others can now get $80k from them and these other schools can only get $27k or whatever their max tuition is. There's definitely a huge benefit to being able to get all the cash you can from your rich students. Every college I've been to has a subset of kids driving lamborghinis and other luxury cars like that, but if that kid is in state they might only be paying $14k or whatever it is same as you. Seems like with it set up like this its you subsidizing them and not the other way around.

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