The NYTimes took a look at the financial fallout of Harvard’s recent announcement to make an undergraduate education more affordable for the middle-to-upper-middle class familes that routinely bypass Harvard because of sticker shock.
…for families earning $120,000 to $180,000 a year, costs will now be limited to about 10 percent of income, meaning that students from such families will pay a maximum of $18,000, a deep discount from the university’s full annual cost of more than $45,600.
Universities around the country now face a price war, with parents seeking the same treatment at other, less endowed universities. The pressure is on for private institutions to make their programs more affordable and further drive diversity.
I can certainly appreciate Harvard’s well meaning efforts, given that I went to UPenn, and my parents managed to just eek out on top of the ceiling for grants/aid direct from the university. My college education sucked up a third of my parents’ income after taxes for 4 years; I have no doubt there were dozens of other ways they’d have preferred to spend that money.
Ultimately, picking a school can be much like shopping for clothes. Sure I’d love to be wearing La Perla lingerie underneath my clothes every day, but Hanes does the job well too. College is about taking advantage of all opportunities presented to you, regardless of the initial sticker price. In college, I learned how to think critically. . . critical thinking is what the History & Sociology of Science major is know for. I probably could have learned how to think just as well at a smaller school that fell a bit further down the rankings.
Researchers at Princeton were able to show that ambition, not college choice, is the ultimate predictor of financial success. After tracking students for roughly 25 years,
In both data sets, Krueger and Dale, like other researchers, find that students who attended more selective colleges tend to earn higher salaries later on than those who attend less selective colleges. However, the researchers not only looked at the schools that students attended but also where they were accepted and rejected. They found that where a student applies is a more powerful predictor of future earnings success than where he or she attends.
Says Krueger, Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University: “It appears that student ambition, as reflected in the quality of the school to which he or she applies, is a better predictor of earning success than what college they ultimately choose or which college chooses them.”
Whether Harvard or your local State University, keeping your eye on the prize is more important than the name on your sweatshirt.
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