Say what you want about UC, they may be a shitty school in a shitty part of Cincinnati, but they had a vision of what they wanted to be, and took steps to reach that goal. Hats off to em’…
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Think about this…for someone making $175,000/yr in say, Illinois, between federal, state and local taxes(guess at 2%) they’re bringing home about $118,000 of it.
Miami’s official “cost to attend” is at $56,317 (probably a bit higher in reality) That puts cost to attend at about 48% of their total income. That’s a big bite for one child. Pity the folks with couple kids in school at same time. Can you say “parental and student loans!”?
Another way to maybe look at it. If your’re paying 32% of your income to taxes (federall state, local) does it take in gross income to have $56k left over to pay for your kids bills? If my old accounting 101 is correct you’re going to make about $82,800 before taxes to pay the bills.
In the HawkTalk sports realm, that full ride scholarship their out of state sports kiddie is getting is woth about $82,000 to them. If you consider it a “part time” job for their student in Oxford it’s not a bad gig. More than half the families in this country have an average household imcome of less than $75,000. i.e, their scholarship is worth MORE than what half the families in America make! And athletes are getting additional stipends for things like washing their clothes, pizza and cell phones. And the whole thing is tax free to the kids. I’d consider it a pretty good deal. But in the age of NIL guess it’s not enough.
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I wouldn’t sell Ohio short. It has Miami and OSU for publics and Case, Kenyon and Oberlin for elite privates, plus a number of well respected privates a step down from those three. I’d say that’s a lot wider range than most states. The one thing it lacks is a super elite Ivy+ school like Duke.
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Yeah. NC has the Land Grant option here, too, in NC State. They have some incredible STEM and engineering programs. Ohio doesn’t have the larger elites like Davidson and Wake - and increasingly Elon. And as you pointed out, no Duke equivalent. And NC’s instate tuition prices are very reasonable.
Ohio does have small elites like Kenyon, Oberlin, and Case Western Reserve plus Denison, another excellent small elite. It also has a couple of decent Catholic university options in Dayton and Xavier that North Carolina doesn’t have. Those two are pricey.
I forgot about the Catholics. Case isn’t terribly small. It’s about the same size and selectivity as Notre Dame, though it skews 50-50 undergrad to grad whereas Notre Dame is about 75-25.
Something to consider is what happens if OSU decides to use some of that endowment and really get serious about selectivity and cut their freshman classes from 7K to 6K or under? The site that I linked for UC has OSU at 53% acceptance rate and an average ACT/SAT of 30/1400. Cutting the bottom fifth of that of that would mean a lot of decently qualified kids who might head to Miami allowing Miami to increase their yield and then tighten up its admissions. That being said, I don’t know the impact that would have on OSU’s finances, and it probably wouldn’t be a very smart move politically right now. Still, it wouldn’t be a bad thing for the rest of the system if some type of cap were put on their obscenely large freshman classes.
The way Ohio funds education across all levels is Medieval.
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Quoting President Crawford: “Miami is a private university 6.5 days in any week.” Quoting Provost Mullenix’s response to that: “But the government is our biggest donor.”
There are some private universities that receive considerably more money than Miami from the government when one considers grants from agencies like NSF, NIH, etc. I know it is apples and oranges here as I am conflating research grants and budget/operations money as well as federal VS state money, but yeah, some public universities and schools in Ohio are suffering. Just look at what is happening with Talawanda…
How much of that is an overbuilt system that spreads resources too thin? You can pretty much throw a rock anywhere in the state and hit a public 4 year campus. Then you have both a community college system and redundant branch campus system where the four year schools are operating their own in-house community colleges. Now, add a system that’s grossly overbuilt its graduate programs and professional schools–Ohio has the same number of public law schools as California.
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In my experience, the boat shoe cohort was largely paying full price while everyone else was on some form of scholarship. I was an out of state student, but my scholarship pushed the actual cost well below the sticker price of the in state universities where I was living at the time.
In one of my German classes we did a video chat with an English class from a German university and the cost of American colleges came up. Someone mentioned that even though the listed price was shocking, they weren’t paying anything near that because of their scholarship. The Germans asked how common scholarships were and over 3/4 of the people in the room raised their hands to say they were on scholarship.
This was a almost a decade ago, so no idea how much it’s changed since then (I believe sticker price has already increased $10-20k just in that time).
Miami does discount heavily from the sticker price. At the end of the day they have to make sure they put kids in the dorms to pay off the renovation and building debt.
There was a stat floating around that Miami’s total income from tuition in 2022 was equal to what it was in 2002.
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Dave excellent post. Especially the first two paragraphs. The only good thing about Miami tuition room and board is it is locked in for the next 4 years.
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So, it turns out that Miami (and all colleges) have to offer a net price calculator that provides an estimate based on what recent incoming students have been paying. Putting in your scenario as best I can with the limited number of variables produces $20,210 in grants/scholarships and an estimated net price of $36,902 (includes room and board, etc…)
They also say “In 2021-22, 72% of our full-time students enrolling for college for the first time received grant/scholarship aid”
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Here’s an in-state net cost of attendance comparison for Miami, UC and OSU.
Miami:
- <$30k $14,029/ year
- $30-48k $16,432/ year
- $49-75k $22,742/ year
- $76-110k $25,772/ year
- $110k+ $28,471/ year
UC:
- <$30k $14,344/ year
- $30-48k $16,397/ year
- $49-75k $19,980/ year
- $76-110k $24,209/ year
- $110k+ $25,019/ year
OSU:
- <$30k $7,759/ year
- $30-48k $8,932/ year
- $49-75k $14,619/ year
- $76-110k $22,494/ year
- $110k+ $26,051/ year
Given the spread is only about $3,500 between UC and Miami at the higher income level, the fact you might need 5-6 years to graduate at UC and the huge size of OSU, I’d pick Miami any day. The collegiate experience is better in Oxford and it’s probably cheaper to be a student there than in downtown Cincinnati or Columbus.
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Miami has its own appeal but is not for everyone. Neither is UC,OSU,etc.
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Someone may have made this point up thread, but a lot of UC students do co-op programs that require 5 years to graduate because you’re working full time for part of them.
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More schools need to embrace the CO-OP programs.
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We’ve known kids that had to really scrounge to find a co,op job. Were told to find them them self.It’s not like UC has a 55,000 open jobs directory. Working a telemarketing gig for low $ isn’t nirvana.for an engineering major!
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Does a school ever really run out of people to accept? I mean, maybe a super selective school like MIT or Harvard, but for schools like Miami and UC, it really comes down to how much they want to accept…
I disagree, there are many parts of the US with declining/aging populations where plenty of small directional public universities or tiny private colleges are struggling to attract students and keep doors open. That’s not even considering a negative PR incident that causes applications/acceptances to nosedive, like Mizzou a few years ago after the bad press they received (my brother was a freshman there when it happened, the next school year they had to close his dorm and three neighboring ones due to low enrollment) or admin scandals. If you’re a selective school you can loosen your acceptance standards to make up for it, but you’ll likely take a hit in USNWR and other college rankings if your incoming student GPA/test scores go down a lot in one year.