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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.

> 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.

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.

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"

> 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...

> 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...

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-...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

> 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.

> 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.

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-...

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.

> 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).

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.

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.

> 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

View my calculator results in the parent comment