A lot of the parents attending my
current online class on how to cut the cost of college are affluent and highly educated.
Quite a few of these moms and dads attending my course have indicated to me that they would like to see their children attend elite schools.
Not surprisingly, these parents have expressed concern about the cost of these highly prestigious schools. What many of these institutions are charging for a bachelor’s degree EXCEEDS a quarter-million dollars for those who don’t qualify for need-based financial aid. And for parents with two or more children, the costs are beyond staggering – even for those with comfortable six-figure incomes.
One of the things these parents are learning is this: the schools with the very shiniest brand names don’t
have to bother giving merit scholarships to highly accomplished students from high-income families. Why? Because there are plenty of wealthy parents who will pay ANY amount to get their children into one of
U.S. News & World Report’s darlings. A school like Harvard or Stanford could charge $1 million or $2 million for a bachelor’s degree and they’d still reject many teenagers.
Once this reality sinks in, these parents sometimes begin wondering if they should plunder their retirements accounts and/or take on debt to underwrite a degree at one of these elite schools that seem (notice the emphasis on seem) to have a monopoly on dispensing golden tickets.
Yale vs. Northeastern University
I got an email last week from a mom struggling with this very issue. Her son got into Yale with barely any financial aid and
also got a full-tuition scholarship to
Northeastern University. The parents, who are in their 60s, would have to borrow six-figures to make Yale financially possible.
To me this is an absolute no-brainer decision. Here was my advice, “Go to Northeastern!!!!”
This case also illustrates something else that’s common – a high-income teenager who gets nothing from an Ivy League school can routinely snag big, fat merit scholarships from countless other schools.
I’ve heard from so many moms and dads focused on underwriting an elite-school education through my course (there is still time to
register if you’re interested), in my talks and through my blog, that I felt compelled to write a post pointing out some key things these parents need to know.
You don’t have to go to an elite school to succeed!
This seems incredibly obvious to me, but it isn’t to many parents in wealthy communities that seem to view
getting into prestigious colleges as some kind of trophy sport. For some parents, it becomes an obsession while their kids are still in diapers.
A Princeton admission rep once told someone I know that parents with preschoolers ask her what private schools their children should attend to boost their ultimate chances of a Princeton admission. Wow!
Even if I was to concede (and I’m definitely not!) that all the best jobs in the entire country go exclusively to the graduates of the most highly ranked colleges and universities, that would leave about 99.5% of jobs left to the rest of us.
If you don’t believe me, take a few minutes some day and look at your LinkedIn contacts. I bet most, if not all, of
the most successful contacts you have did not attend a trophy school!
I made the LinkedIn suggestion recently when I was giving a talk at a financial conference in Las Vegas that attracted some extremely successful, fee-only financial advisors from across the country. When someone asked about the elite school advantage (he assumed there was one), I reacted by instructing anyone who had attended an Ivy League school to raise his/her hand. No one in the room did.
There have been some excellent and highly touted studies on whether an Ivy League bachelor’s degree conveys a professional advantage for students. The main conclusion of these papers was this: students who attend Ivy League institutions and equally bright students who apply but get rejected from Ivy League schools end up making the same amount of money in their careers. These are bright and motivated students, after all, who can succeed wherever they go to school.
There was an exception to the research finding. Minority and first-generation students who don’t enjoy the same advantages as the students whom the Ivy League schools specialize in educating – wealthy students – did gain an advantage from attending these schools.
This Should Make You Feel Better
What should make parents feel better is this conclusion from Alan Krueger, the famous Princeton economist and coauthor of the studies:
He pointed out that the average SAT score at the most selective college that students apply to is a better predictor of their future earnings than the average SAT score at the college they attended. Read that again and let that sink in!
Here are excellent summaries from The New York Times and the Brookings Institute on what the famous Ivy League studies uncovered:
It’s What You Do in College That Counts!
A Gallup survey conducted with Purdue University last year provided further evid
ence that people should really stop fixating on the elite schools.
The
survey results indicated that the type of institution that college graduates attend matters less to their future happiness at home and work than the experiences they have at whatever college that they end up at. In fact, the survey concluded that whether respondents attended an elite school, a public flagship, a private college or a regional state school didn’t matter at all.
I wrote the following blog post about this survey and used my daughter Caitlin (see photo), a
Juniata College graduate, to illustrate how you can be incredibly successful at a college that most people have never heard of:
Striving for elite schools can cripple teenagers mentally
Finally, I’ve left the most important factor in the college-admission rat race for last. What mental-health price are teenagers paying who are aiming for these elite schools?
I had a mom in my class wonder last week if the burnout her daughter, a junior, is experiencing is normal. The girl is taking four AP classes and a honors class on top of all her extracurricular activities. The mom is worried how her daughter is going to do when she’ll face this crushing load while visiting colleges, applying to schools and taking her standardized tests.
I encounter this issue a lot when I talk at schools in high-income areas with ambitious parents. What I tell them is that their children do not have to be super human. There are many schools that would love high-achieving students whether they take four AP classes a semester or two or one and will reward them with merit scholarships.
I see a lot of panic at these schools where parents worry that other students are pulling ahead academically so they pile on more AP classes. At the high school where my husband attended, the premiere public school in Denver, some students are starting Calculus as freshmen to try to gain an edge. It’s nuts!
This academic escalation can have tragic consequences.
I’ll be giving a talk at Gunn High School in Palo Alto this spring (I’ve given several talks at Silicon Valley high schools) that has experienced eight student suicides in roughly the past five years.
Here is a guest post from my blog recently that synthesizes Levine’s message that is definitely worth reading:
Bottom Line:
There are amazing colleges and universities in this country, many of which are under the radar, that offer excellent opportunities for their students.
It’s important to know that nationally around 75% of students get into their first-choice school. At most colleges and universities, it’s actually a buyer’s market not a seller’s market. Students have many, many choices if they are savvy enough to not just look at the same old three or four dozens schools that smart, high-income students tend to focus on.
