Paying sticker on a college education is like paying above sticker on a car. The college I went to was a private institution and had a sticker price of $35k my freshman year and over $40k my senior year. Room and board and textbooks were additional.

I took loans for everything not covered by scholarships or grants and I owe barely $20k.

> The actual cost is much less

... often.

OTOH, If you don't fit the mold, you may be screwed...

I've known any number of students who actually were paying full price for tuition at top-tier private universities [to the tune of $50,000/year] despite being quite poor. Some took out massive loans, others did full-time work and attended as best they could.

What do you mean by "quite poor?" To my knowledge, if they're poor, they're poor. I don't know anyone who was legitimately poor that did not qualify for financial aid.

EDIT (reply to below): Your point about the estranged parent is valid; a wealthy parent refusing to pay is the only case in which a "poor" student does not get much financial aid. Foreign students are not entirely excluded from financial aid, though they get much less. Studying abroad is a luxury, and the case of a poor foreign student whose family lives in the US who chooses not to attend an affordable state/local college is very much an edge case.

By and large, if your family is poor, you qualify for financial aid.

Er, "no significant savings, income, or other resources to draw upon."

The "system" generally tries to support poor people, but there are an awful lot of rules in place to try and make sure people pay their "fair share" and prevent cheating. I think usually those rules have more or less the desired effect, but like any rules, they can be rather blunt instruments, and end up hurting people as well.

Some examples:

+ Foreign students are often ineligible for grants and aid (even those from the university itself), no matter how poor they and their parents are. [There are exceptions, e.g. Harvard (which has lots of money and extremely high admission standards), but my experience is that they are very rare.]

+ In many cases a parent's income is considered in calculating the student's resources, even if the student has no contact with or leverage over the parent and that parent is not willing to pay anything. The reason for such rules is obvious: to avoid parents pretending to be estranged in order to avoid paying their fair share. However it still can end up hurting students who really don't have any choice in the matter...

In my case I couldn't receive FAFSA and in turn many other forms of financial aid until I turned 23 (technically, the year where on January 1st I was 23) because I'm estranged from my parents and couldn't get their tax return info. I was making between 17K & 20K per year before 2011. This pretty much put a University education out the realm of possibility for a while.

In the end my (paid out of pocket) associates degree, some luck, and a few Hail-Mary career moves put me in roughly the situation I hoped to be in post university and I didn't have to graduate at 25/26 years old with student loans.

Another example: having tax-free purchasing power can count against you. Specifically, clergy may receive a tax-free payment on their home. That is counted by colleges as income, even if your home is entirely paid off, which can boost your "income" from 20k/yr to 50k/yr. I know one student who must pay about 15k/yr to a "full-need" college, despite her parent's annual income being 25k.

Your second + fits my situation exactly. My parents are divorced and neither would pay for college. I'm 24 and basically just starting college now that I can at least get enough loans from the government to afford community college tuition. I've had to work really shitty jobs for the last six years just to be able to pay for rent and food. (The rent they would have charged me to live at home was more expensive than my options for moving out.)

If I lived somewhere like europe I'd be graduated and quite happy by now instead of really bitter.

Wow, way to be a dick. I like how you also ignored the part where I said I had to wait six years for the aid WHICH I AM CURRENTLY NOW ON that you somehow think I'm still not familiar with due to laziness/stupidity.

Isn't financial assistance for the non-wealthy generally intended to counteract class boundaries to getting a quality education? If you have wealthy parents, almost always you grew up wealthy and well-educated, and various assistance programs are just not intended for you.

Yeah it sucks to accumulate $50,000 / year in debt to maintain your social class standing by attending prestigious universities, if your parents could care less, but why is it some rich kids birthright anyways to attend some wonderful school, when there are probably kids a lot more hardworking, driven, and coming up from adversity, that are more deserving?

The point is that there isn't a perfect correlation between "unable to pay" and "covered by aid", despite the best intentions, so some of those people not getting aid are not wealthy at all (and they may be downright poor).

People fall through the cracks, and that's a problem.

At Stanford, it's a policy that if your family makes less than $100,000/yr, they waive tuition. At Harvard and some other Ivies, they do it at $60,000/yr.

At Brown, that is the case as well (at 60k/yr). And yet, there are federal and school policies in place to prevent students from paying less than their fair share. I know students whose families earn about 25-30k/yr, who have siblings, and are still expected to pay ~15k/yr. My family's Expected Family Contribution last year was something like 20k (which is more than they were able to pay, so I still had to go into debt). However, due to the fact that I earned about 10k at an internship the previous summer, despite my parent's income remaining constant, our EFC increased to 28k. And, due to my unusually high income, I was eligible for about 4k less in subsidized federal loans (which I've had to max out). Meaning I've had to rely on private loans to make up the difference this year. While I'm forever grateful for the aid I have received, there are still waaay too many cracks students can fall through.

Yup, gotta love being punished for working hard. :/ It also especially sucks when you have a high EFC and your parents are only willing to contribute, uh, $0.

Unfortunately, a policy that is rarely actually followed. It's amazing how private colleges will bend over backwards to find you have an EFC that requires them to provide little to no financial assistance.

in the average case. sure, for every outlier on the high side it's likely there's an equally-outlying data point on the low side, etc.