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Easy, those schools are offering programs where tuition is income based so , at Harvard, for example, if you make under $60K/year, you pay ZERO to go to Harvard. If you make between $60K-180K you pay 10% of your AGI, so up to $18K, which is the bill for our DS18's state school this year. We certainly plan to have our next two look into Harvard and some other schools offering programs like this. First, they have the grades and test scores to get in, second, it will save us a boatload of money if they do go there.
^ I was also thinking how many students nowsdays are applying to 15-20 schools just to see where they get in, hence applying to the "big ticket" schools too.
Anyone have any good reasons for such an increase?
Yes.
What you are observing is a manifestation of what is sometimes called the "Education Arms Race" or "Credential Inflation".
Basically, people are terrified that it is going to become increasingly difficult to maintain a middle class or even lower middle class existence in this country without obtaining higher education. This fear is probably well-founded (because it is becoming harder to do that with or without higher education). After all, over the past several decades our nation has shipped millions of formerly solid middle class jobs overseas and imported tens of millions of immigrants to displace Americans and to put downward pressure on wages for other jobs.
So, the populace does correctly perceive that it's difficult to keep from being working poor without a college education today, or at least without learning a skilled trade. The end result is that everyone and their brother and their brother's friend are falling all over themselves to go to college today in the hopes of escaping the rising tide of economic misery that is drowning the lower classes.
There's just one big problem. All of the college education in the world will not make solid middle class jobs magically materialize for everyone who graduates from college. In other words, given how our nation's economy has globalized and transformed, if our nation's economy can only support 20% of the populace as middle class it will still only support 20% of the populace as middle class even if 50% of the populace has college degrees! Thus, college education is no longer a guarantor of middle class or even lower middle class prosperity. Rather, it provides the opportunity to compete against hordes of other people for a middle class job (like having 6 people in a parking lot circling around looking for a parking space when only 2 spaces are available.)
The "Arms Race" aspect is that people will try to obtain more and higher educational credentials in the hopes of having more and better credentials than the competition. The number of college-education-requiring jobs and the amount of education needed to perform those jobs does not change. What does change is the massive amount of time and money people are investing in higher education in the hopes of outdoing other people.
Consequently, employers can also require that people have more and better credentials for jobs that don't make actual use of those credentials. This is what is sometimes called "credential inflation". For example, many jobs that were filled by high school graduates 80 years ago now require having a bachelors degree, not because doing the job actually requires having a college education, but because the possession of a college education can be used by employers as a proxy for discriminating against people on the basis of perceived IQ, work ethic, and sense of responsibility.
The end result? Our nation is becoming poorer and poorer as a mountain of student loan debt (which people cannot discharge in bankruptcy) piles up. Large amounts of human effort and time are being wasted on this educational arms race when it could instead be channeled to actual wealth creation.
As I see it, only 10-15% of all jobs that need to be done in our society make real use of higher education (doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, etc.). Look about you and you'll discover that the vast majority of jobs in the real world are blue collar labor and low wage service industry jobs. (For every doctor at the hospital there are probably ten low level hospital employees. For every store manager there are probably twenty low wage employees, etc.)
Aside from addressing our problem with Global Labor Arbitrage (foreign outsourcing, H-1B and L-1 visas, mass immigration) and population explosion (fewer resources and higher costs for resources per capita), we need to grow up and figure out how we can better distribute the wealth so that working people can afford a lower-middle class existence (safe housing, health care, a car, decent food, clothing, some inexpensive entertainment, etc.). The problem is that the majority of the wealth in this nation is being distributed to a small percentage of people.
Higher education will not fix any of that. However, our politicians (and the media and our intellectuals) have been selling higher education to the sheeple as a panacea to our nation's economic problems. Sadly, the sheeple have been lapping it up. It's a lot easier to say that we need to be smarter and more innovative than it is to address our real fundamental economic problems such as foreign outsourcing, H-1B and L-1 visas, mass immigration, and population explosion. Our politicians are trying to assuage a terrified populace. The dogma that higher education guarantees economic success is so heavily-ingrained in our culture that many of the politicians probably believe the touchy-feely bromides they are serving to the sheeple.
Right now our nation has a large oversupply of people with college education. One recent study even suggests that 17 million people with college degrees are doing work that does not require having a college degree. We have unemployed and underemployed MBAs (6 years of college education), lawyers (7 years), and even science PhDs (9-10 years). Here's a link to that article:
And the economy sucks. Now is the time to study, not (try to) enter the workforce. Moreover, it does matter where you go. Harvard (and other select schools) have their reps for a reason, namely, you are learning from people who are experts in their fields.
And the economy sucks. Now is the time to study, not (try to) enter the workforce. Moreover, it does matter where you go. Harvard (and other select schools) have their reps for a reason, namely, you are learning from people who are experts in their fields.
Harvard grads are not valued because they learned from experts in the field. In fact, you have to wonder whether the students receive good instruction considering that such "esteemed" faculty is so distracted by everything else they do (teaching graduate students, hobnobbing with politicians and the wealthy elite, publishing papers, etc.)
The reason why Harvard (and Yale and MIT, etc.) grads are so valued is the perception that they have a high IQ and strong work ethic and/or potentially valuable family connections. The schools screen out applicants with merely above average IQ and/or poor study habits.
Harvard grads are not valued because they learned from experts in the field. In fact, you have to wonder whether the students receive good instruction considering that such "esteemed" faculty is so distracted by everything else they do (teaching graduate students, hobnobbing with politicians and the wealthy elite, publishing papers, etc.)
The reason why Harvard (and Yale and MIT, etc.) grads are so valued is the perception that they have a high IQ and strong work ethic and/or potentially valuable family connections. The schools screen out applicants with merely above average IQ and/or poor study habits.
Plus it helps that the ivy leagues have been around since the founding of the country, more or less. As a result, they've created a master brand for their school. The brand is everything.
Harvard grads are not valued because they learned from experts in the field. In fact, you have to wonder whether the students receive good instruction considering that such "esteemed" faculty is so distracted by everything else they do (teaching graduate students, hobnobbing with politicians and the wealthy elite, publishing papers, etc.)
The reason why Harvard (and Yale and MIT, etc.) grads are so valued is the perception that they have a high IQ and strong work ethic and/or potentially valuable family connections. The schools screen out applicants with merely above average IQ and/or poor study habits.
Whether they actually learned from experts in the field is not readily discernible. What is discernible is that they spent four years attending lectures from some of the brightest people in the country, which gives other people a lot of confidence that said student knows what he/she is doing. And, let's face it, if you have the opportunity to learn from people who really know what they are talking about, then you are going to choose that over something that is sub-par.
And I say that having gone to a big-name school and a relatively unknown school. At the latter, the profs were actually far worse and more distracted and, many times, had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. The funniest thing is that some of them had actually gone to some big name schools but, apparently for good reason, they weren't teaching there. The profs at the big-name school (noted for being a think-tank) always had time to talk to students, especially those who were very interested in the subject matter; they seemed more like the "true intellectuals" that people imagine profs to be. I never had a prof who was not 100% available during office hours at the big-name school, and I can't say the same for the other where, you knocked on a door to ask a question, and the prof spoke to you while continuing to work on whatever he/she was working on.
As I said, there's a reason why students are applying to the schools they are applying to, and I don't think it's just the name or the perception of the school. I actually do believe the name represents something of greater value and is not just an arbitrary and/or meaningless "brand" name. After all, we're not talking Frosted Flakes here.
However, I do agree that some people value Ivy grads for all of the wrong reasons. But that's not the reason why students are applying to those schools
Harvard grads are not valued because they learned from experts in the field. In fact, you have to wonder whether the students receive good instruction considering that such "esteemed" faculty is so distracted by everything else they do (teaching graduate students, hobnobbing with politicians and the wealthy elite, publishing papers, etc.)
The reason why Harvard (and Yale and MIT, etc.) grads are so valued is the perception that they have a high IQ and strong work ethic and/or potentially valuable family connections. The schools screen out applicants with merely above average IQ and/or poor study habits.
The reason why Harvard grads are so valued, is in large part because they are friends with other Harvard grads. It is not what you know it is who you know that counts, and generally speaking you tend to meet the right people at elite schools.
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