Oops; misread something.
That doesn’t sound right to me at all.
Here’s a report (it’s a pdf) on tuition at Virginia public schools from 2005/2006. A chart of the historical rise of mandatory tuition+fees, for all schools, is on page 5. The costs have risen from $687 in 1980/82 to $3812 in 2005/06 (I infer these are per-semester costs, but it doesn’t seem to say), an increase of about 5-1/2 times. From your cite, it appear VT’s tuition+fees increased another 35% from 2005/2006 to the current year (using chart 3 from the above document as a baseline).
That’s a total tuition+fee increase of around 7.5 times, far more than “almost doubled.” As a side-note, Virginia mandated a reduction in college tuition during the late 90s that reduced the overall percentage increase over the last 30 years; likely other states would have seen a larger increase than the 7.5 number.
The OP’s kid isn’t a National Merit Finalist.
This isn’t exactly news though. My Dad graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1966. Tuition was about $600 a year and he worked his way through at a pizza joint making $1.25 an hour (minimum wage). I went to the Uof M in 1984-1988. Tuition was about $4000 a year and I made $3.35 (minimum wage - although I had a better paying job at the end). The U of M is now $11,000 a year, and minimum wage is $7.25. Or in the mid 1960s, it was 480 labor hours at minimum wage, by the late 1980s it was 1200 labor hours, and its now about 1500 labor hours. And it doesn’t exactly take an Ivy League degree to look at the current state of state and federal budgets and figure that if your kid is still in high school now, college is going to be more expensive with less money available. As Frank points out, that money is getting cut.
As a kid whose parents didn’t plan and weren’t aware of this, this sucks. You are eighteen years old and cast on the wind - and it is going to be a struggle. You are going to be making compromises and taking a long time to finish school. And when you finish, you might have loans.
But as a parent, you had to have your head in the sand not to realize that tuition outpaces inflation - as it has for the entirety of my life, and that student aid money is almost all in the form of loans - unless you can take advantage of something like the Hope Scholarship monstro mentioned (several states have this, but its for instate students at state schools - not for what Surrounded wants for her daughter, an out of state college), and that scholarship money is highly competitive.
As I said in my first post, realizing when your kid is a high school Senior that college is expensive and financial aid insufficient is like reaching 65 and discovering your Social Security is only $1200 a month.
The free market works!
Well, I am a professor at a large research university. In the past year we’ve had our pension cut and have paid more for health care out of pocket every year like everybody else.
In my time here the number of teaching faculty has not gone up too much, maybe 10%, but the non-teaching administration has doubled. That is the primary problem at most colleges and universities - attempting to support mushrooming middle management employees. It’s not a simple problem, however, because most of those employees have been hired due to the increased burden placed on universities by outside agencies.
At least there’s a chance that I can write the grant that pays my salary, and the salaries of some others who work for me. Never going to happen with the associate director of the human subjects committee or the head of the university police force.
The OP’s complaint was that her kid was being denied educational funding despite being the best and the brightest. If the OP’s kid is not a National Merit Finalist, on what basis (other than parental pride) is the kid so described?
And what of it, anyway? Your claim was that what I did was the result of the time, and it couldn’t be duplicated today. Now you’re switching to the argument that this particular kid can’t do it today.
Yes, thayt’s probably true. But if the OP’s kid had been my age, she STILL wouldn’t have been a National Merit Finalist, and I still would have been. So how does that change anything?
Well, this is completely untrue. Just in the 15 years between 1990 and 2005, VT tuition had doubled. That doesn’t count the 10 year period between 1980 and 1990 (because I can’t find it) and the six year period between 2005 and now.
And that’s as if tuition was the whole story when many schools throw in a lot of random fees to make it appear as if tuition had remained low.
About a 10% increase in one year.
Oops, they did it again. Cost will be $17,365 next year.
For those of you keeping track, that means that Bricker’s hypothetical minimum-wage earning student will have to put in another 377 hours of fryolater cleaning just to cover the increase in costs between 2009 and 2011. Here’s the minimum wage history over that period for Virginia.
BTW, VT is still a lot cheaper than the state schools up here – UMass and UConn are both around $22-23K year, not counting books and assorted odds and ends.
Is being a National Merit Finalist a big deal anymore? I really don’t know, I’m asking.
I missed being a National Merit Finalist because although I qualified when I took the PSAT, I was disqualified because I’d previously taken the SAT for a different scholarship. Not that it affected any future scholarships I applied for…
From your cite, Table 1A, Full-Time In-State Undergraduate Tuition and Mandatory E&G Fees, shows that in 1981, the unadjusted cost was $687; the cost in 2006 dollars was $1,527.
Don’t compare my original cite to that chart – I have no idea if the two include the same things.
Meanwhile, we have a minimum wage of $3.15 in 1981, and although I used that number before, the truth is that for reasons not clear to me at the time, Virgina Tech was allowed to pay me a smaller wage; I earned $2.85 per hour.
None of this is central to my argument, though, since the bulk of my tuition was covered by a merit-based scholarship, which was a one-time cash award by the National Merit people and a four-year deal from the university. Today, a National Merit Finalist is eligible for essentially that same deal – indeed, I posted a list of schools that offer a full ride for a NM finalist.
When I made the more general claim that perhaps it can no longer be done, I was referring to the majority of students. I was not aware that you were a particularly high academic achiever (no offense); I would say it kind of stands to reason that the top 1% can go to school pretty cheaply.
The whole point of this thread, though, is that maybe we should be a bit more inclusive than “the top 1%”.
On the other hand, the OP seems to be whining for no good reason because she doesn’t want Princess to go to gasp a state university, and I’ve got no sympathy for that complaint.
Yes, I posted a list of schools that give a full ride for being a finalist.
I don’t understand how you lost your qualification for being a finalist. Here are the requirements for finalist, and I don’t see anything that rings any bells as being different from my time (admittedly a long time ago, though).
In particular, I don’t why the mere act of taking the SAT would disqualify you. Can you explain?
This reminds me that I should start looking into some financing plans. Let’s see, if my kids will graduate high school around 2027 and 2029 how much should I be saving? Hope I remember scientific notation . . .
Now that I think about that again, it’s possible that I was only disqualified for the scholarship portion. But I was certainly told that by my guidance counselor.
Of course, this is the same guidance counselor who discouraged me from taking computer science as a major because “by the time (I’m) out of college computers will program themselves,” so take that with a grain of salt.
OK.
Although your claim was not “general” when you said:
MY tale would certainly be possible today. I grant that someone else’s tale may have been possible in 1980 but not now.
That’s a separate subject, and I’m not sure I agree. Every year, we seem to add more things on to the list of things that “of course” society should pay for.
The OP’s kid is apparently in no more than the top 25th percentile. I don’t agree that this is the measure of a potential that society must pay to nuture.
Wow.
You should find that guidance counselor and kick him in the teeth. If your PSAT score would have ultimately qualified you for finalist, it’s almost criminal that he stopped your from following through on the process.
My usual narrative on these things is “I pulled myself up out of poverty my my efforts alone,” but I have to say that my high school had a guidance counselor who knew her stuff and guided (ha!) me through the whole process. I doubt I would have managed things faced with the obstacle you describe.
Wow.
That… wow.
I have always rejected the idea that luck played a huge role for me, but I may have to change that a bit, since I had the luck to not hit a stone like that.
Wow.
Since the NMS program appears to be largely based on PSAT scores, and you ascribe much of your success to your National Merit Finalist qualification, it should be obvious that luck played a huge role for you. You don’t think you earned that IQ through hard work, do you?
Well, he’s gone now (maybe I could kick his grave). But TBH he wasn’t the cause of my crash-and-burn as an undergrad; I went to a school that didn’t give out too many merit scholarships, and I got one of the only major kind they did give out. My real problem was not being able to decide what I wanted to do in life–probably not a surprise since I graduated from high school at age 15–and figured that, well, if my dad was an engineering student and turned out well, maybe I could do that too. Awful decision on my part, but as you say maybe a bit of guidance too would have helped.
As for “I did it on my own,” well, working in university fundraising has disabused me of that notion. Scholarships come from somewhere, usually from someone who’s been helped before. Or universities raise tuition so they can grant a discount rate for better students. Every day I’m working harder so students here don’t leave university broke. And outside of this job I’m volunteering my time to raise funds for scholarships for high school students, and I’m glad to boast that this week I was named chairman of the scholarship committee of our local school district.
Nobody does it alone. I hated my undergrad experience, but I got one great thing out of it: I got to meet the couple who donated the money to pay for my scholarship. They don’t know it, but they’re two of my heroes.
Yep. Its burdensome.
Several years ago on another board we were having a similar discussion. Someone who was a guidance counselor or maybe did financial aid for colleges posted something along the following…when the government looks for the “expected family contribution” they expected you to have started saving when your kids were little. It isn’t that they think you can come up with $10,000 a year all at once on your $60k a year household income, they figured that on your income you’ve been putting $2,500 a year away every year since your kid was a baby. That you haven’t driven a car older than five years old for twenty years, but haven’t saved for your kids college is not the governments problem.
By that definition of luck, anything that happens to anyone is luck. It becomes utterly meaningless.
“Tiger Woods is lucky to have his athletic ability!”
“No, others have similar ability; he augmented his ability through hours of disciplined practice every day.”
“Yes, well, he was lucky to be born with the disposition that allowed him to have that discipline!”
:rolleyes:
That’s not luck in the sense these conversations mean. Of course everyone is “lucky” to even have life – what if that other sperm won the race and “you” were never born?
Luck, in these conversations, should refer to external fortuitous circumstances. What you are, your internal skills, abilities, discipline… if those are luck, then everything we see, hear, and do is “luck,” and the word loses all meaning.
And the PSAT relies on IQ, yes – but also on the ability to stay focused in class and study and learn, because merely a high IQ does not guarantee success on these tests – you have to have learned things that you’re taught.