Ivy League Prices Are Pushing $90k a Year

This is basically what health insurance companies do. They want higher billed rates from hospitals so that they can offer better "discounts." In reality, no one pays the billed rates.

Schools might as well raise tuition to $1 million per year. I guess I that case, the ruse would become more obvious.

>some colleges started raising tuition and then offering more financial aid and discount packages.

This isn't necessarily a nefarious thing. For example, Harvard is famous for its goal of tuition never being a blocker for someone attending. Therefore an increase in the sticker price doesn't affect many people outside high income and net worth individuals and families. This just shifts a higher percentage of the costs to the people who can actually afford it which is generally good. If you want me to be concerned about the tuition costs of these elite private schools, at least tell me the median tuition paid and not the amount paid by the ultra affluent.

See also: the housing market. Just another of life's necessities the usurers have got in on so that they can leech of the productive members of society by introducing limitless competitive expenditure, for their own gain.

Arguably a university like that is even worse than a state school. At least I've heard of University of Arizona or UT Austin (both decent state research schools).

I've literally never heard of Wake Forest.

Wake Forest is reasonably well-known and well-regarded in the Southeast, but not say at the level of Duke (another private NC university), and definitely not nationally.

For Ivy Leagues and similar top tier (Berkeley/Caltech/Duke/MIT/Stanford/), you can go there to study anything and the school name will carry you even if your particular program is not as well-regarded as its counterpart at large state universities.

But if your choice is between an expensive mid-tier private university or a state university, then your best strategy is figure out what you want to study and which option has the most well-regarded program for that course, both among academia and industry. But that takes some real due diligence and digging for a high schooler to figure out.

I'm not sure if a comparison to the ivy schools is relevant: yes, there are certainly more prestigious schools out there.

I suppose anything depends on the job you're hiring for, as well: they're better at finance than engineering. The us news rankings are partially based on how well-known a college is though. So, yes, there are plenty of people out there who would hire from that college over better known state schools.

Yes, I've heard of it, though honestly more in the context of ACC basketball. I did know a graduate long ago, and understand that she was quite good at her work.

Definitely agree with all the advantages you describe. There's no reason to not consider UToronto, McGill, Waterloo, UBC, etc except perhaps that they don't use common app (though if I recall the application process was supposed to be much easier).

>it's huge. 40k kids. And they are all the top kids. Canada builds big schools and just gets shit done

If you have a kid who wants more of a small school vibe I think that's also possible. I didn't go, but UToronto does residential colleges more like Oxbridge, I'd imagine that helps greatly w/ encouraging socializing.

According to their admissions website they have strict GPA minimums but there is no guarantee (which is how I interpreted the statement "Got top scores, you are in!")

Additionally they don't require the SATs at although prior to COVID they also had a minimum score for that.

I went to McGill as an American and I think it was a great choice. I mostly applied on a lark since, as you said, it was very easy to apply. Also as you said, tuition was a lot cheaper than comparable schools in America. Living in Montreal felt like I'd moved somewhere more like Europe, but it was still easy to visit family in Philadelphia.

“Lifestyle education”

Today every ivy has need based tuition discounts, so it's probably easier than ever before to afford for those of limited means

There is a fairly straightforward path for a poor working class person to get some experience in the skilled trades and then start their own contracting business. This will usually leave them better off than your ”poor middle class person". Enlisting in the military is also a straightforward path into the middle class, and outside of combat arms it's not even particularly dangerous.

With the current level of elite overproduction, a college degree is hardly a guarantee of entry into the professional-managerial class. It's just an opportunity to compete for entry, nothing more.

(Education does have other benefits beyond class mobility and career training.)

Maybe, but it's arguably easier to become a comfortable working class person in the US (plumber, electrician, etc.) than it is to become a comfortable professional/managerial class person if you're walking away from school a quarter million or $300k in debt and your first ~decade of work you're looking at making $50-60k/yr.

I did the analysis for Princeton once - the average out of pocket cost was $15,000 per year. That has remained constant even as sticker prices (and the cost per student) has escalated.

What people don't appreciate is how much expense per student has skyrocketed in the last 20 years. Princeton has about 100 more student sports staffers, and spends about $45,000 per year per student in student services. Library expenses have also escalated far faster than inflation.

> Financial aid, in the form of grants, scholarships, loans and work-study programs

Heavy on the _loans_, light on the grants and scholarships. My son graduated valedictorian and scored in the top 4% on the SAT (and had athletics, and had community service, and had national honor society, etc. etc.) was offered about $2000 _total_ (of the $50K/year price tag, so about 1% of the total cost) in scholarships. He didn't apply to Harvard, but I don't believe for a second they're throwing around any more money than Purdue or Michigan are. Edit: and those two scholarships came from his high school, not the colleges he was applying to.

Can you imagine any other product where when you ask the price, the answer is: "How much money do you have?"

Insane. Basically this traps people who are about $200k or so to spending HUGELY on their kids education. And what they also don't say is that if you have assets they expect to take 5% per year per kid in college as a minimum contribution.

Ivy League schools are not outliers though. Pick your random private college with an 80% acceptance rate, and it probably costs 70k+ a year

> we're increasingly at a point where an Ivy League diploma has little value save that of a status symbol

Maybe in some industries. I will be more convinced if entry class of big successful banks like Goldman Sachs isn't full of ivy grads.

I personally know people that have flunked phone screens and were given the benefit of the doubt because they went to prestigious schools.

> I don't think that they've ever had less to offer.

I think you're wrong about that.

Working in SV startup space, you can see that there's a lot of social value placed on an Ivy pedigree.

I'd make the case that an Ivy is less important for the higher education than it is for the network and social value gained.

Work at a F/G (not just “faang” because some companies like Amazon are not picky about pedigree at all) or in “hot” startups and you might disagree. A lot of people come from Ivy League schools and similar schools.

The value has never been about the actual teaching, it’s about the signaling. While many higher “ranked” schools are able to have more difficult courses due to being able to ask more of their students, it’s not so much that which adds value. Really companies just want the traits we associate with having gone to these schools: being well socialized, able to jump through hoops, having connections, a solid education and likely to be generally intelligent.

Of course you can have most of those traits without having ever heard of Dartmouth or Pickelball but the density of those traits coming out of Ivy leagues is high, and it’s reflected in industry (especially in finance, consulting, and academia). Just not so much generic SWE right now since even companies like F/G cannot meet hiring goals by limiting their candidate pool to these schools.

I don't understand this take. Surely, institutions are the place where the most cutting edge pure research is taking place? Why do people think institutions are where conformity is king?

You go there to make connections for the rest of your life - that's still in high demand.

The status symbol aspect helps your resume stick out. Not all hiring is 100% merit based.

Anecdotally I can confirm that "financial aid" mostly just means loans. There are no full rides, at least not to any of the schools that can afford to be "picky".

The biggest issue is selection bias. Most people that go to Harvard are smart and hard working. And most of their success is due to this as opposed to due to getting into Harvard.

But I would love to see a value add model looking at the salaries of people who barely got into Harvard vs those who barely didn't and compare that to the cost of tuition.

Years to get paid back, total return, return vs S&P 500.

It's a way to select for class. P/E doesn't matter much when the E's impact is low.

> state schools charging $40K a year for out of state tuition

To be fair, they're often offering much cheaper rates to in-state students. Their parents and the students themselves are presumably paying taxes. They also hope the students continue to live in the state and pay taxes.

If the out of state student becomes a resident, they get in-state rates.

Out of state students aren't subsidized by taxes and might leave.

Also, if you establish residency in the state for a year, you get in-state tuition prices, at least in the state I went to school. Effectively that $40K is just for the first year.

I'm paying more for my kid to go to a middling out-of-state university for 1 year than the total value of my own 4-year out-of-state full scholarship with stipend 29 years ago.

My family was caught in the middle "too poor to pay for it; too high income to attend for free". (Both my parents were public school teachers; we were not worried about putting food on the table but were hardly rolling in it...)

This might be true for the Ivy leagues, but from what limited research I had done 20ish years ago, many private colleges talked a whole lot about the aid they offered and didn't deliver if you had even a moderately middle class family.

I don't know if either that's actually true, or just how poor you have to be to be considered middle or low income, but I'm on the college application treadmill and the schools seem to consider you "high income" if you bring in enough income to pay for the cost of college, whether or not there's anything left over afterward.

Not sure how true this is. Perhaps it doesn't count for internationals? But at least one person I know paid pretty much full price despite coming from a humble background.

Only if you get accepted to Harvard. Everything below the top Ivies you're gonna have to pay for.

There’s this gap between ~$150k HH income (where the good aid disappears) and whatever you think it takes to afford $90k/year and still support the rest of your nuclear family. That gap covers a lot of the HN population so I think you can see why people here are salty when the upper end of the gap is receding so fast there’s a red-shift.

do you think it affected your life outcomes to not go to an ivy league school ?

It is not admin staff - overheads have generally been constant as a % of other expenses. The biggest components of cost escalation are MUCH higher spending on student services (3x at Princeton in the last 20 years), library expenses, and staff benefits cost escalation.

This is missing the point about where AI is about to take us.

Having a world class education in higher level intellectual pursuits is going to be worthless in the not too distant future. It's the upper echelon of education, work, and class that's rapidly going to be replaced by AI, and much later, the lower blue collar and technician jobs. Law, medicine, engineering, government policy, management, etc, are all on the chopping block.

No one will care that you have a degree of any kind from Harvard, not because Harvard is producing less quality than it used to, but because it primarily produces brains that know things, and the years and decades it takes to produce that in a human is simply not worth the effort when you can just ask ChatGPT 13.0 for a better answer than any human who ever lived could give on just about every subject.

ChatGPT is a massive threat to your doctor's job, not your nurse's job.

You can already get a world-class education for free, all you need to do is to walk into your local library, check out the books that are on the reading list for the courses that constitute a 4-year undergraduate degree. Then, read each chapter three times. Then, solve the problems at the end of the chapter.

This will cost you roughly $0.

What you can't get is world-class instruction for free.

To whatever extent that AI reduces the cost of providing a serviceable college education, I think that will further separate the reputation of the Ivy League and top 10 non-Ivy colleges from what is likely to be increasingly viewed as the AI-augmented utility college diploma mills.

How does AI replace the fact that you have to actually learn something? Sure I can ask a mythical AI to explain fourier transforms or bessel functions. But that doesn't mean I actually know it. A degree implies that you know at least a majority of a set of knowledge, you have learned to articulate your ideas, you have learned to stick it through the tough parts. AI does not replace that. We already have millions of courses on youtube, millions of tutorials online, what does AI offer that they don't? At minimum, a university provides the deadline to actually finish reading that book by monday, AND you must understand it enough to write that essay. AI can't offer that.