DAILY FINANCE: Here’s a higher education shocker: Thanks to tuition hikes at California’s state universities on the one hand, and the generous financial aid policies of Harvard on the other, attending the Ivy League university is actually a better deal for middle-class students from the Golden State, the San Jose Mercury News reports…
Public universities, with their shrinking support from state governments, still provide significant tuition breaks to the poor. But they can only do so much. Top private universities, by contrast, have massive endowments to support their educational mission and the wherewithal to spend that money on students who are higher up on the economic ladder…
The cost of bringing up children has become exorbitant — even before factoring in the price of educating them for the modern workforce. The Department of Agriculture, which has a calculator for estimating the expenses of raising kids, predicts that a Midwestern family with an annual household income in the $57,400 to $99,390 range, and a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old, will spend $578,050 on both by the time the first one is college-age… (more)
