Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
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Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#2Colleges should have more price stratification than they do. At present the price difference between MIT and Umass Amherst out of state is only 41%. Both will leave a student heavily in debt to the tune of 150-300k, the difference likely doesn't materially matter to the student as they are looking at is as a ticket to a better life.
Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#3Makes sense to me - if you’re mostly buying prestige that gets concentrated in the top institutions.
If you’re trying to buy education the others are overpriced.
Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#4Colleges should have more price stratification than they do. At present the price difference between MIT and Umass Amherst out of state is only 41%. Both will leave a student heavily in debt to the tune of 150-300k, the difference likely doesn't materially matter to the student as they are looking at is as a ticket to a better life.
The top colleges have very complicated pricing schemes and are basically free to middle and lower income students, for example a student to MIT only pays if their family earns more than $90k a year which is above the median household income of $68k.
Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#5Colleges should have more price stratification than they do. At present the price difference between MIT and Umass Amherst out of state is only 41%. Both will leave a student heavily in debt to the tune of 150-300k, the difference likely doesn't materially matter to the student as they are looking at is as a ticket to a better life.
> Both will leave a student heavily in debt to the tune of 150-300k
unless you have a very weird financial situation, no US student is going into anything like that much debt to go to either of those two schools. it looks like you got those numbers by just taking the tuition and multiplying it by four. both schools offer substantial aid packages for eligible families. the average yearly tuition contribution for MIT is something like $17k, not far off from in-state tuition at most public universities.
Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#6Colleges should have more price stratification than they do. At present the price difference between MIT and Umass Amherst out of state is only 41%. Both will leave a student heavily in debt to the tune of 150-300k, the difference likely doesn't materially matter to the student as they are looking at is as a ticket to a better life.
The top colleges have very complicated pricing schemes and are basically free to middle and lower income students, for example a student to MIT only pays if their family earns more than $90k a year which is above the median household income of $68k.
When I was there, less than 8% of the students were paying full tuition (of which a good chunk were international students).
At a certain point, the colleges start to look like perfectly price discriminating monopolists: rather than charging the highest price to each customer, they set a maximum price ceiling and then subsidize the gap to the customer's marginal ability to pay.
Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#7I think this is generally a good thing. I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college - either you get a name-brand degree that opens doors and gets your resume looked at, or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree). Obviously in some cases it'll be both.
The reality is it's really tough to make any case that a humanities degree from a lower or even mid-tier college is a worthwhile investment of money and time. Now obviously there are scholarships and students who come from wealth for whom this is less of an issue, but to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for a degree in classics from third tier U is just an objectively bad choice for most people.
Hopefully this is the market working - people are learning how to value educational degrees based on what they'll actually yield financially and making decisions accordingly. Those schools that are providing substantial negative value to their students ought to go under, and the students who would attend them and end up in huge debt with minimal job prospects will make a better investment, like working for four years, going to a trade school, etc.
Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#8Maybe if they charged reasonable prices they'd have more applicants. The university I went to let you go for free if you kept a 4.0 GPA and had high SAT scores.
Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#9Makes sense to me - if you’re mostly buying prestige that gets concentrated in the top institutions. If you’re trying to buy education the others are overpriced.
This is what is frustrating about higher education, the wide gulf between chasing after a credential and chasing after an education.
Re: Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
#10> Even before the pandemic, Dr. Baldridge said, “the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting more and more challenged, in terms of institutions.”
Framing this as “rich” vs. “poor” is ridiculous. These “poor” institutions were charging 6 figure sums for a piece of paper. There is nothing beneficial to society by having a lot of unwanted institutions who charge insane amounts that no one wants to go to voluntarily anymore. High Ed needed a shakeout and I’m happy it’s finally happening.