A 4-year still matters a lot. The issue is that a 4-year from a state school has almost as much value as a 4-year from an Ivy League. A prestigious university on your resume will open a few extra doors, but in most disciplines it’s just not worth the extra cost. The University of Washington is $5.5k/semester (resident tuition). If you’re spending 20k/semester, you better be getting a degree from somewhere very prestigious and you better have a plan to leverage the network you build there. Otherwise you’re just wasting ~90k on your 4-year degree.
And of course the less in demand your degree is, the more the math favors cheaper schools.
The place where people get killed is when they go to a private school that is expensive and not particularly an academic standout (of course there's many more mediocre private schools than elite private schools).
> For people where the $15K difference matters a great deal, the tuition at the elite school is increasingly likely to be greatly reduced or free.
This isn’t entirely true. Tuition aid for most students is based on the parents’ income. My parents are (and were when I went to school) upper middle class on paper. They have never been great with money, though, so they couldn’t cover tuition out of picket and hadn’t set aside funding in advance. They definitely helped with living costs but tuition was covered by loans (and scholarships partially). So I left with loans to cover virtually all of my tuition.
If your parents are middle class and can’t cover your tuition, you’re probably in a similar situation. Combined with a low-demand degree, this could easily result in crippling debt.
> The place where people get killed is when they go to a private school that is expensive and not particularly an academic standout
My sister did this. A couple of years at a private religious school before she transferred to a public school. The student loans from those couple of years are absurd and dwarf the rest of her loans. She’s still paying them off a decade later.
Exactly the same experience here -- my mother got a bachelor's right before my brothers and I went to college, which just ended up penalizing us because it looked like we should have a lot more savings than we really had. I think there's a very very small portion of the population who gets their tuition reduced enough to be comfortable. Loans end up covering the rest, so yeah, your average student really does pay close to $20k a semester at most schools if you account for room & board + tuition.
The real issue is that we want "means testing" for tuition but almost no students have significant "means". So you either make (at least public) universities free, or you make the rather strange assumption that a bunch of adults will be handed tens of thousands of dollars from their parents. In pretty much no other case do determine social program eligibility of an adult by means testing different adults.
This is a new thing (not the means testing but the idea behind it) AFAICT.
It was just assumed that if your parents were above the "means" they would help out any way they could because that's what was expected of them as parents.
College was also seen as an enabler and not an expectation for my generation.
Or...if your parents spent all the college fund sending your sister to UCLA you could join the army and emerge as an "adult" so your parents' income wasn't taken into account and get grants and loans on top of the G.I. Bill.
Of course when college was a stretch but not median-income-barely-covers-tuition expensive, the assumption that parents would cover it were more reasonable. And it was less of an issue if they didn’t since the debt load wasn’t insane.
I don't think my parents could've afforded to send my sister to Stanford back then which is roughly the equivalent to your average state school today (completely guessing here). They probably would've found a way though.
My point still stands though, means testing was intended to get the best and brightest into college even if they're poor, couldn't even imagine Reagan/Bush entertaining the idea of giving middle-class kids a free ride -- in fact I can even picture Reagan on the TV saying "Uncle Sam ain't your baby daddy!"
> Or we could do loans with repayment based on post-education income
The US already does this for federal loans, though it's not the default option, and the servicer (Navient) has been accused of actively steering borrowers away from the option, because it hurts the value of the loan-backed securities that Navient sells.
And of course the less in demand your degree is, the more the math favors cheaper schools.