[DreadY2K]

I'm a current college student, and my school costs about $80k per year, counting tuition, room & board, supplies, etc., before financial aid. That would be $320k for 4 years, well over a quarter of a million.

I'm personally getting a significant amount of financial aid, so that it will end up costing much less than that for me, but I know people who are paying full price.

EDIT: I'm an undergrad at a 4-year university.

[chrisseaton]

Obviously I believe you if you're saying that, but I've heard that nobody really pays these full sticker-prices and everyone's really getting some kind of aid unless they're literally a billionaire - is that not the case?

[drfuchs]

Typically, in the Ivy League / Stanford, a one-child family with annual income of over $150k to $200k (depending on the school) will pay full tuition. Really. And incomes of less than $65k-ish get you a free ride. Details vary.

[mlthoughts2018]

This happened with my family. It was especially bad because earning $150k total for a household near an expensive urban area leads to purchasing power basically the same as a family with $65k household income in suburbia or small towns. Without adjusting parents income for cost of living (factors the kids in question have no control over), it’s totally unfair.

This has a lot to do with “last place aversion” - the people making $150k near SF having to pay full price for their kid (who probably worked their ass off) to barely scrape into Stanford are (rightly or wrongly) going to be totally NIMBY / selfish in terms of voting and policy when it comes to the $65k families from far away whose kids can pay much less than half for Stanford, say.

[mikem170]

I usually think of the opposite affect, someone making double money in San Fransisco pays the same price for what they order on amazon as someone working and living in a cheaper market. Also cars, airline tickets, vacations, etc. Cuts both ways, I guess.

My two cents: I'd blame San Fransisco, they are the ones with the weird housing market and shouldn't make others subsidize things around their propped up property prices.

[mlthoughts2018]

I don’t think you’re right about that. Groceries, supplies, movie tickets, restaurants, fuel, transit, medical & dental resources, rent, and so on are all much more expensive in the city. The fraction of things you get on Amazon or through other means that allows paying a low competitive nationwide price is pretty tiny and doesn’t really offer any meaningful advantage to city dwellers.

But on the flipside, state and federal taxes collected from city dwellers do heavily subsidize much more expensive infrastructure and operations costs in suburban and rural areas.

So rural residents get safe roads, remote snow removal, remote power lines, heavy freight supply shipping, equal prices for US mail shipping, school systems and so on, despite not having their own tax base capable of actually sustaining all the costs.

Basically, middle class and upper middle class urban workers subsidize pretty much everybody else. Any richer and you have access to tax avoidance resources and lobbying, and poorer and you consume much more in government resources than you pay in, especially in rural areas.

[snazz]

> I don’t think you’re right about that. Groceries, supplies, movie tickets, restaurants, fuel, transit, medical & dental resources, rent, and so on are all much more expensive in the city. The fraction of things you get on Amazon or through other means that allows paying a low competitive nationwide price is pretty tiny and doesn’t really offer any meaningful advantage to city dwellers.

It's primarily the discretionary, high-tech, and expensive items that are cheaper in a high-cost-of-living place. Want to buy an iPhone or a Tesla or an expensive camera or something like that? Those are all less expensive relative to your income in high-CoL places. Plus, interest rates from savings accounts and many retirement accounts are the same nationwide, meaning that having more total money is advantageous.

[scarface74]

Maybe go to a cheaper school?

[mlthoughts2018]

Whether it’s right or not, prestige and notoriety of a college count for a huge amount in employment and earnings. Why should my family not get that chance if they worked just as hard to earn it?

[scarface74]

Not really. Most studies show that what college you go to only matters for a few professions.

Way back when I graduated, 3 years in, I was making just as much as people that went to prestigious schools for my same area (computer science) and I paid less for one year of college than they paid for four - and no debt.

If I were graduating today and wanted to work in Big Tech, I would spend six months to a year preparing for white board interviews.

Especially in tech. What college you go to only makes a slight difference and that’s only for your first job. Being able to do algorithms and data structures is the great equalizer for Big Tech.

https://www.collegechoice.net/will-what-college-i-attend-mat...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-elite-colleges-lead-to-highe...

[jbullock35]

It's not the case. It would be true to say that no one pays full price unless they have a lot of money. Harvard, not unrepresentative of other top U.S. schools in this regard, says that 55% of their students receive financial aid [1]. I infer that 45% are paying the full price of around $80,000 per year [2]. (Some of these 45% are doubtless funded partly by non-Harvard scholarships.)

Playing with Harvard's "Net Price Calculator" [3] makes clear that non-millionaires, let alone non-billionaires, may be asked to pay full price. A lot depends on the number of children, the number in college, and accumulated wealth (excluding retirement accounts and home equity).

Harvard students who receive federal financial aid pay (or their families pay) around $15,500 per year on average [4], which suggests that the distribution of payments may be bimodal: a lot of families pay $80,000 per year, and a lot pay a lot less.

[1] https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid

[2] https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-works

[3] https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculat...

[4] https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?166027-Harvard-Unive...

[jacobolus]

> non-millionaires, let alone non-billionaires, may be asked to pay full price.

People with under $1 million in net worth are very unlikely to pay full price at the wealthiest US colleges. Unless they have huge income but no savings. By “millionaire” do you mean people who earn a million dollars of income per year?

To take the Harvard example you linked to, a family with $500,000 in assets (not including equity in their primary home; for many families home equity is a majority of their net worth) and $120,000/year income will get about 2/3 of college costs paid by financial aid.

A family with $1 million in non-primary-home-equity assets and a $150,000/year income will still get 1/4 of college costs from financial aid.

[HaloZero]

I don't think so? I did a lot of tax work for VITA and met a lot of parents. Mostly low income and low-middle income got full scholarships and grants but if you're middle class it highly depends on the institution. The larger schools with huge private endowment do cover a lot but a public school like any in the UC system? Nah. It's basically all loans which have to be paid back.

*My knowledge is limited to California in the United States. I know there exists programs in Georgia and other places that do cover full rides but I think they are anomalous and not the rule.

[tester756]

What do they teach there for 320k?

Seriously, I do pay like 4.5K USD after conversion for 7 semesters of CS at weekends - 4 days / month and I cannot imagine that

[kungato]

My whole country pays 0 while the price if you repeat a year is 1200€

[greenyoda]

Those universities need a lot of money: professors don't work for free and buildings don't maintain themselves. You can be sure that you'll be paying for your college education out of your taxes for the rest of your working life.

It would be interesting to analyze what free colleges cost the average taxpayer, and to compare that with what non-free colleges cost in the U.S. Do countries that offer free college education offer the public a way to find out the itemized expenses of publicly funded universities?

[noir_lord]

But an educated population is a net benefit for a society so you’d have to factor the societal benefits as well.

In the US the professors appear to often work a lot closer to free than the administrators do anyway.

[kungato]

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp some nice numbers here

[perl4ever]

The place I went, quite a few years ago, now estimates undergraduate total costs (per year) of $25K, 60% of which is room and meals. That is, total tuition and fees is around $10K.

I don't really see the point of pointing to total costs and saying "look how expensive college is". You need food and shelter anyway.