A Certain Kind of Reader

In the manner of New York Times columns about higher education, Ron Lieber’s new book, The Price You Pay for College, assumes and reflects a certain kind of reader. If that reader is you, then yes, I can easily recommend it; the book is blessedly readable, full of news you can use and realistic about what it doesn’t (and can’t) cover. If you aren’t that kind of reader, you may find it maddening in its omissions.

First and foremost, it’s a consumer guide for parents who assume that they’ll be sending their children to selective and expensive colleges. As a consumer guide, it takes the existing system (if that’s the word for it) as given, and it acknowledges systemic critiques only in passing. Instead, it’s aimed at helping upper-middle-class, educated readers navigate the system as it exists now. For instance, it devotes an entire chapter to finding a good college counselor who is also a financial adviser, and another to the limitations of going abroad for college as a cost-saving measure. It devotes no comparable attention to financial strategies for working parents who are trying to balance full-time work with childcare and community college. It assumes that students are fresh out of high school -- it repeatedly refers to them as “kids” -- and that they’re supported by their parents. If you’re looking for a more inclusive picture, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

(Some enterprising class on higher education could do a compare-and-contrast assignment between Lieber’s book and the similarly titled Paying the Price, by Sara Goldrick-Rab. The lack of overlap is striking. Between the two, you get a pretty vivid picture of life in a K-shaped economy.)

All of that said, it’s a bit unfair to judge a book for its choice of genre. If you accept its premise, it has value.

For example, Lieber does a good job of demystifying what gets called “merit” aid. “Merit” aid would better be called something like “discretionary discount.” It’s a discount (typically packaged as a “scholarship”) offered by a college to entice a student to enroll there, as opposed to someplace else. The college is trying to maximize tuition revenue by offering just enough merit aid to get the most money out of students that it can. That entails some pretty sophisticated “enrollment management” algorithms to determine the typical breaking points for given students. If they offer too little merit aid, as opposed to their competitors, then their entering classes fall short, with devastating financial implications for the college for years to come. If they offer too much, they both leave money on the table and make it that much more likely that its competitors will ratchet up their offers the following year; it’s hard to go backward. At this point, it’s not unusual for colleges to average a discount rate of over half.

Lieber’s advice for parents, in this case, strikes me as both sound and consistent with what I’ve heard elsewhere: if aid matters, don’t apply early decision. Early-decision applications come with a promise that if accepted, the student will attend. That reduces the student’s bargaining power if the aid package comes up short. By waiting until you have multiple aid offers from which to choose, it’s possible to play them off against each other and try to get a better deal. Or, if the top-choice school won’t budge, you can go to the second-choice school.

What such competitive bidding has to do with merit is left to the reader.

Community college, when mentioned at all, is relegated to a section titled -- and I am not making this up -- “Money-Saving Hacks That Will Tempt You.” Beware the siren song of temptation! (It sits alongside such other apparently disreputable measures as honors colleges, study abroad and military service. Again, keep in mind the intended reader.) Lieber repeatedly cites John Fink of the CCRC, whom he correctly identifies as a “community college expert at Columbia,” though he devotes only part of one paragraph to interviewing someone who actually works at a community college.

Lieber’s class assumptions come through loud and clear here. In contrasting lab sciences at a research university with those at a liberal arts college, he notes approvingly that while the science conducted at the liberal arts college might receive less research funding and happen more slowly, that’s OK because “it’s all about the learning.” He fails to carry over that insight to community colleges, though. I’ll help. When I was a TA at Rutgers, I covered a few recitation sections for the Intro to Political Science class there. The main part of the class had 300 students and met in a lecture hall; very few students had any meaningful interaction with the professor at all. They had some with me, but my clout as a writer of letters of recommendation at that point would have been nil. Meanwhile, at the community college about 10 miles away, students taking the same class met in sections of 25 or 30 with full professors who were hired for their teaching ability and who were permanent enough to be resources for letters of recommendation. At the community college, it’s all about the learning. But you wouldn’t know that from Lieber’s book.

This is where the limitations of the consumer guide mission really matter. If you assume as a matter of course that the only options worth pursuing are expensive four-year colleges, then yes, other avenues might look like dangerous distractions. But if you assume that, you’ve already lost. Adjusting for inflation, what Williams College charged (with room and board) when I went there in the late ’80s is roughly what Rutgers University charges (with room and board) for in-state students now. And Rutgers is public. Decades of dawdling on addressing the big picture have allowed the dilemmas facing parents and students to get progressively worse. Although he never uses the term “Baumol’s cost disease,” Lieber alludes to it on page 21, only to turn attention away. No matter; a good fiduciary financial adviser, along with a strategy of applying to a couple dozen four-year schools, might just suffice. At least, if you’re the type of reader for whom the book was written.