Up north last weekend, I had a number of casual conversations with people about the cost of sending kids to college. It's rough up there where the flagship state universities are basically pretty middling. Rutgers, UMass Amherst, SUNYs Stonybrook and Binghamton, UConn, they're all OK, but they pale beside the flagships of CA, MI, NC, VA, etc., however ignominious the athletic scandals we may bring upon ourselves.
I recall talking to one guy a few years back who lives in CT, has four boys and makes $300k=$350k a year as a partner in a small consulting firm. He is well and truly fucked. He's not gonna get much if any need-based financial aid unless three of them are in college at the same time, or if he goes to a Yale-Harvard-Princeton that has very deep pockets and discretion in awarding aid. But that's a total crap shoot. So he has to send his kids to Storrs or go into debt, not great options.
And all of this is on top of the fact that he is paying pretty high state income tax rates and definitely high property tax rates and is also in a high federal bracket.
One wonders why the flagship state universities in the NE have never had strong enough leadership to figure out how to improve themselves and get into the top tier of public institutions. Probably because the gentry all wants to send its spawn to the Ivies and, failing that, ship them out to one of the phalanx of nice-looking small colleges eager for the revenue or to NC, MI, VA,, etc. Michigan in particular uses out of state students (over half the student body) as a cash cow.
Probably worth paying up for university leadership and faculty. It would be a whole lot cheaper to raise up the schools than to ship the students out or federate it to the private sector.
1 comment:
Or we do not have much to show for the enormous amounts of capital we give to our government relative to most other developed countries.
Post a Comment