generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

you'd be better off going to Maryland, buying a new Beemer each yeah, & impressing/recruiting/seducing GW students for your "social portfolio"

fuck I meant each year, obviously I didn't pay enough for college

gwu is an interesting case http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/the_prestige_racket.php

I basically agree w/ you but if, say, you want to work in dc and your local school is university of wyoming, there def would be a 'worth paying x amount of money' advantage to going to gwu. I don't think that x is $50k but the problem is that the x does exist. university of maryland not particularly cheap for out of state students.

yeah GW is specially fucked. I lived there for a summer on an internship (for which I actually got paid + free housing in the pretty nice dorms, so it wasn't a shitty 2000s-style internship) & it's amazing how close to "the action" you are, at least geographically, which turns out to matter, b/c it's easy to meet cabinet staff etc.

still, the faculty is really lame. can't you just move to College Park for a year & wait tables to establish residency, then start at Maryland on in-state the next year?

from Maryland's web page:

To qualify for in-state tuition, a student must demonstrate that, for at least twelve (12)consecutive months immediately prior to and including the last date available to register for courses in the semester/term for which the student seeks in-state tuition status, the student had the continuous intent to:

1. Make Maryland his or her permanent home; and
2. Abandon his or her former home state; and
3. Reside in Maryland indefinitely; and
4. Reside in Maryland primarily for a purpose other than that of attending an educational institution in Maryland.

Satisfying all of the requirements in Section II (and Section III, when applicable) of this policy demonstrates continuous intent and qualifies a student for in-state tuition. Students not entitled to in-state status under this policy shall be assigned out-of-state status for admission and tuition purposes.

---
so yeah

I wouldn't argue w/ someone employing that strategy, I think there is a crisis ahead because we have a system that is based on people not being particularly practical consumers

looks like it's one year for New York state also, so why not go to CUNY rather than NYU? CUNY kicks ass, at least at the grad level, & b/c it's in NYC lots of superb faculty end up there

right but that's why I think the crisis will be significantly worse for mediocre privates like NYU & GWU

cant stand mediocre privates

I'm not sure why you'd cut Florida from the union when its skullduggery is so entertaining. That's like cutting Florence adrift because of the Medicis.

lolled at that while writing it btw

re mediocre privates, at Florida too

haha yeah cuny faculty is basically comparable to an ivy league school in my gf's field.

but cuny currently has more than half a million (total) students. if you're gonna do something where you just need a degree sure, but for a lot of careers NYU just commands way more respect.

I'll take your word on that. in my fields CUNY is legendary, even at the undergrad level b/c they're teaching colleges, at least for senior faculty; lotta interesting things come out of it.

but does the high # of students mean much? I mean the U's of Paris have a helluva lotta students, & so does UNAM, but they also have gigantic faculties.

outside of maybe film/'the arts' i cant think of a field where nyu is going to be that big a deal?

anyway i was nonplussed by this article on stanford in the newyorker re: where (elite) colleges are going and how they provide value to students

alternately i have been interviewing for jobs the last two weeks and feel somewhat sanguine about things haha

NYU is a big deal right now in philo b/c they've been buying up "prestige" faculty with huge salaries & Manhattan apartments. I'm skeptical of their measure of "prestige", though.

I don't know that much about mexico, but the french university system isn't acclaimed for its teaching - on the university level they operate w/ an 'open admission but make it really, really hard to graduate' system so the drop-out rate is v. high and the degree signal comes from completion less than from what school you went to.

and then the grande ecole schools - where the ivy league prestige is - are quite small.

'more than from' rather

re Paris you're right but you can do well in French society graduating from even a provincial French uni

though maybe we're disagreeing about what "doing well" means? I know French uni faculty who didn't go to a grande ecole

oh I'm talking about undergrads and what would be comparable to nyu there

I'm talking about undergrad too

nothing is comparable to NYU in France though, b/c NYU is silly; grandes ecoles are like the Ivies for sure, though, but Ivies >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> NYU

well the big thing is you just can't compare the two because for the most part they don't discriminate by college degree in the same manner we do - the large majority of people go to a university and they don't really measure prestige a us news-esque way (w/ the exception of the grandes ecoles). it's like if we had nothing but public schools and the ivy league, and all the public schools were basically considered equally good.

that's true, but my point was just that the large # of students doesn't entail getting a shitty education

I've never suggested that! and also think everyone should go to massive public schools. but when half a million people are in cuny, a cuny degree has less signaling power in nyc.

I mean I'm arguing that there are reasons why going to nyu actually can 'be worth it' for certain situations, it's still an objectively evil institution

yeah & I'm just questioning the value of that signaling power, when a beemer, AS WELL YOU KNOW being a Beemer owner yourself, has significant signaling power as well

yeah I basically agree on this, I think I just go further in that there are a lot of NYUs out there

w/o the celebrity faculty or downtown manhattan

Tell me more about NYU. I thought it had a pretty top-notch reputation (although I just looked at their music faculty list and it was significantly less impressive than I expected.) This makes it sound like it's pretty highly ranked: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_University#Rankings . It placed in the top 50 on the Times Higher Education list.

How would you rate it next to SUNY Buffalo? (When I was there, I had the sense that people thought we were no NYU.)

well it's sorta the same story as GWU in that above article...on the faculty level as euler said, sorta bought itself into prominence in a lot of fields. it has very good professional schools.

it is in nyc so lots of people want to go. it also has the highest total quantity of student debt for a non-profit school, like a billion dollars iirc, because it has v. shitty financial aid.

in most senses it is 'a better school' but there are lots of people who should probably go to suny buffalo

yeah upthread a while back there was some discussion of NYU and I looked up some numbers and its average % of demonstrated student financial need met by financial aid (grants + work-study + subsidized loan approvals) was 70%. Compared to 90-100% of demonstrated need met for all the other places I looked up (so like some pseudorandom sampling of SLACs, flagship publics, and private unis).

which is to say a student from a family that can exactly afford their FAFSA-calculated EFC every year, including maxed subsidized loans, attending NYU could easily find themselves taking on $10,000 or more in private debt over four years that they'd avoid at NYU's putative peer institutions. The situation is more dramatic for students financing a private college education almost entirely through private debt.

(that is in addition to the roughly $24,000 max subsidized student loans over four years)

It occurs to me that during the endless college-application counseling and preparation I was provided with during high school, the topic of debt probably never got brought up.

It sort of seems like there is this hole that middle-class families can fall into in the financial aid landscape where if you are from a family that has a high-ish annual income but your parents haven't been saving for your education or aren't interested in paying for it, the EFC can way overshoot what your family is actually able and willing to pay. Whereas if your parents' household income is closer to 35 than 95 (eyeballing here), plenty of private institutions will be able to cover like 75%+ of your tuition in grants, and if it's like in the 200+ range then you are a full pay student and likely nobody involved is blinking an eye.

I recall there was some publicity attached to Harvard announcing some years ago up front that families making up to I think $60,000 would get a full grant aid package from Harvard. Just as another angle on the weirdness of the market.

xp - yeah when i was applying to colleges the actual cost of attending was never, ever discussed by anyone. like you went to the 'best' school that you got into end of story.

I went to the least prestigious school that I got into and it was awesome.

everything silby's said otm

another quirk: a lot of the reason my efc was super low was that my parents were divorced

I'm curious if my high school just had zero college counseling (despite being loaded with AP classes and now a IB school - I graduated with 21 possible AP credits IIRC and was nowhere close to having the most) or if I just missed out on it via fucking off a lot.
kinda lucked out - I got into a private liberal arts college planning to get a poli sci degree, but had zero idea how to navigate financial aid so I probably saved myself $100k in debt for what would have turned into a history degree

It sort of seems like there is this hole that middle-class families can fall into in the financial aid landscape where if you are from a family that has a high-ish annual income but your parents haven't been saving for your education or aren't interested in paying for it, the EFC can way overshoot what your family is actually able and willing to pay.

a lot of families in the 95 zone could ~game the system~ by getting divorced, no joke xp

EFC also pounds working students in the ass, if you can't jump through the hoops to prove absolute independence 50% of your income is expected to go toward school IIRC (until you're 24-25)

http://media.mmgdailies.topscms.com/images/5b/3f/9999f14e43b58037de3c1fa6668d.jpg

The university belongs to us, those who teach, learn, research, council, clean, and create community. Together we can and do make the university work.

But today this university is in crisis. The neoliberal restructuring of post-secondary education seeks to further embed market logic and corporate-style management into the academy, killing consultation, autonomy and collective decision-making. The salaries of university presidents and the ranks of administrators swell, but the people the university is supposed to serve — students — are offered assembly-line education as class sizes grow, faculty is over-worked, and teaching positions become increasingly precarious. International students and scholars seeking post-secondary or graduate education are treated as cash cows rather than as people who might contribute to both research and society. Debt-burdened students are seen as captive markets by administrators, while faculty is encouraged to leverage public funds for private research on behalf of corporate sponsors.

http://torontoedufactory.wordpress.com/

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-19/bubble-u-dot-high-point-university

Jesus.

this is the most depressing thread on ilx

I was curious so I looked to see what Harvard's tuition is now, and HOLY FUCK