Navigating the Maze of Paying for College
Ron Lieber talks about “The Price You Pay for College,” and Michael J. Stephen discusses “Breath Taking: The Power, Fragility, and Future of Our Extraordinary Lungs.”Hosted by Pamela Paul
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Ron Lieber’s new book, “The Price You Pay for College,” aims at helping families with, as the book’s subtitle puts it, the biggest financial decision they will ever make. Lieber, a personal finance columnist for The Times, visits the podcast this week to discuss it. Among other subjects, he addresses all the ways in which the price to attend a particular college can vary from student to student, similar to how the cost of seats on one airplane flight can vary.
The stated cost of attendance has become almost irrelevant
Like airline ticketing, the cost of a seat varies based on a number of different factors including how many times the airline detects you ve checked the price on a browser. Similarly, some people don t pay for the ticket at all, booking the ticket with points from a credit card. Still others buy main cabin tickets and get an upgrade to first class, seemingly on luck alone.
In some ways, Lieber posits, college tuition is similar.
As Paul Tough reports for The New York Times Magazine, 89% of students receive some form of financial aid, meaning that almost no one is paying full price.
University tuition is one of the top planning priorities of financial advisors’ clients, and a new book wants to help guide readers on how to pay for it.
I do not think that
New York Times personal finance columnist Ron Lieber intends for his article, “High School Grades Could Be Worth $100,000. Time to Tell Your Child?” to be an indictment of a truly dysfunctional and damaging system, but that’s how I read it.
The article is an excerpt from Lieber’s new book,
The Price You Pay for College: An Entirely New Road Map for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make.
The book is targeted to the audience of middle-class (primarily white) folks for whom college is viewed as a necessity and a right, but who have been increasingly squeezed by a system that has made college more and more costly, aka, readers of
Looking for help navigating the college maze? Read this book!
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A college degree is a valuable asset, a necessary although not sufficient condition for getting the kind of job and career that offers intriguing opportunities as well as decent pay and benefits.
That said, the word college is fraught with controversy these days (even before the pandemic forced so many colleges to shift to online classes). The spiraling price tag of attending college has spawned a cottage industry of critics arguing that the diploma isn t worth the time and cost. Parents are confused and frustrated by the convoluted financial aid system and price discounting by (mostly) private liberal arts colleges. A majority of students graduate with on average more than $30,000 in student loans.