Best Savings on Colleges

It’s fall. Your children are going off to college or getting ready to, …and getting ready starts as early as grade school.

College is a big expense today so when you can save on educational costs, it’s always a welcomed savings. A new book out Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus examines how we can better protect the monies we spend on colleges for our kids and offers tips about how to save on colleges. Pennypinchinghints will share some of the book’s insights.

First, make sure that what you spend is worth it.

Check out how large the administration staff is. Why go to colleges that are putting their money into big salaries for people not dealing directly with your kids?

Make sure the student-faculty ratio is low and that less than 20% of classes are taught by graduate assistants. Too bad to pay for star professors that aren’t in the classroom or only teach one course of 300+.

Look at the campus. Are there lots of new buildings, and is there a large multi-million dollar student union? Is there a new rec center with state of the art workout equipment? The money you pay a college should be going into classrooms and labs, not into the bells and whistles that help campuses sell themselves.

Check out figures on graduates of this college. What percentage of the students is getting into graduate school or getting employed within a year of graduation? Why pay big bucks for a school that’s not delivering?

Check out the college’s commitment to revamping and updating its delivery of information and its teaching formats. Is there a well-recognized honors college on the campus, are grades and inter/intra communications computerized, is there more attention to teaching than research, is there team teaching, are there interdisciplinary programs? Why pay cutting-edge prices for less-than-cutting edge programming?

The book suggests looking at schools like the University of Colorado at Boulder, Notre Dame, Old Miss, Arizona State University, and Evergreen College as places that meet the criterion of Worth your Money.

Consider a community college or a two-year liberal arts college.

These colleges are smaller, with smaller classes, more one-on-one interaction, and an atmosphere where people know and help each other. The better of these colleges offer a very good start to college with extra personal attention to students. Because two-year colleges are not overwhelming, students, especially those who are considering a four-year college later on, don’t fall into the cracks and waste time and money as they adjust to college studies.

These colleges are about 10% of the cost of four-year private colleges and about 30% of the cost of four-year public colleges. If students do transfer into a four-year program, they have already saved on total tuition costs.

Know there are some colleges that offer tuition promises.

These schools guarantee that tuition and fees will not go up each year. Students who enter at one cost graduate at that cost, not with a bill $2,000 and $3,000 more each year over four years. Yes, that can happen!

Western Oregon University offers this promise.

There are even no-tuition colleges!

There is no replacement for thinking about a future without a large college debt. College can be free, even colleges that have specialties. For example, Cooper Union offers art and architecture students no-cost degrees.

Some schools offer no-tuition in exchange for students’ labor. Berea College asks students to commit to 10 hours of their time and labor each week for free degrees. Seems like a deal.

Collegebasics.com is a very good informational website that gets you started in thinking about taking advantage of various tips and strategies for paying for a college education. Its articles include articles on