Speaker 1: Welcome to How the Money. I'm Joel and I and
Speaker 1: Matt and today we're talking a college cost cutting roadmap
Speaker 1: with Ron Lieber. Yeah. Ron Lieber has been the Your
Speaker 1: Money columnist for The New York Times since two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight and is a three time winner of the
Speaker 1: Gerald Lobe Award, which is financial and business journalism's highest honor.
Speaker 1: He is the author of multiple books, including the recently
Speaker 1: released The Price You Pay for College, which is already
Speaker 1: a definitive guide to help parents and students think through
Speaker 1: important decisions when it comes to higher education. Uh. He
Speaker 1: lives in Brooklyn with his wife, who is also a
Speaker 1: New York Times journalist, and his two daughters. And Ron,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's so exciting to finally make my debut here. We
Speaker 1: we've been waiting for this, Ron, and you know, the
Speaker 1: publication this book was the perfect time to bring you
Speaker 1: on for sure. And uh yeah, the first question that
Speaker 1: we ask anybody who comes on the show though, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, Matt and I we like craft beer. That's
Speaker 1: one of the things we splurge on in here now
Speaker 1: while we're saving and investing for the future. But we
Speaker 1: want to know, like, what's your splurge, what's your craftier equivalent? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so beer hurts my belly turns out. Yeah, in my
Speaker 1: advancing age, it's it's not really agreeing with me, which
Speaker 1: is sort of unfortunate because right, yeah, I used to
Speaker 1: agree with it. So, you know, in general, and this
Speaker 1: is a non pandemic splurge. In general, I tend to
Speaker 1: splurge on live music experiences to the extent that it's possible.
Speaker 1: I do not really spare much expense or think much
Speaker 1: about what it costs. And well, I don't generally enjoy
Speaker 1: the process of embracing the you know, sort of ticket
Speaker 1: scalping economy. Gosh, ticketmasters. The word, um well ticketmaster, you know,
Speaker 1: on its own is a deeply problematic, problematic institution. Um,
Speaker 1: but you know, the markups on StubHub or whatever. You know,
Speaker 1: I would so much rather the artists get those, um
Speaker 1: extra dollars. But in any of it, right, Um, do
Speaker 1: you remember the last show you went to see before
Speaker 1: everything shut down? The last show I went to see
Speaker 1: Versus and then Versus the last splurge um that was required.
Speaker 1: You know, I think there was a whole steady show
Speaker 1: somewhere in there, close to the end. Um. I'm a
Speaker 1: huge fan of the whole study. Those tend not to
Speaker 1: be splurged tickets, you know. I I will splurge on Broadway,
Speaker 1: I will splurge on Springsteen. Those are generally the big splurges. Nice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I get runs there at like the three Nights on
Speaker 1: a Row kind a show. He's like third Row every night. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean back in the day when when touring was possible,
Speaker 1: you know, I would go to you know, three dead shows.
Speaker 1: I've dead shows, two fish shows, right, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm definitely a repeat customer for any rock and roll
Speaker 1: or related organization that does not repeat the set list
Speaker 1: from night. I love that. That's so good. Well, let's
Speaker 1: let's dive into your book. You know, we wanted to
Speaker 1: ask you, like what led you to write this book
Speaker 1: in the first place. You know, like you've written about money,
Speaker 1: but then specifically you know the price of college and
Speaker 1: student loans for years now. But you know, we were
Speaker 1: wondering as part of the you know, the impetus was
Speaker 1: having daughters and trying to figure this stuff out for yourself.
Speaker 1: Is that the case? Yeah, I'd say some of that's true.
Speaker 1: I mean, the art begins with the personal, but it
Speaker 1: sort of ends with the professional. Right. So I have
Speaker 1: my first kid in two thousand five. I've got two
Speaker 1: daughters now. One of them is fifteen high school freshman. Uh.
Speaker 1: The other one is five and and just started kindergarten,
Speaker 1: So you know, the ninth grader is kind of creeping
Speaker 1: up on this stuff. So when she was born in
Speaker 1: two thousand five, I was at the Wall Street Journal
Speaker 1: and began, naturally, as one does, to write a little
Speaker 1: bit more about how to save for college five nine plan.
Speaker 1: And they weren't so good at the time. There was
Speaker 1: a lot of mediocrity there, and so I spilled a
Speaker 1: little innk on that um two thousand and eight, two
Speaker 1: thousand nine, I've moved over to the New York Times.
Speaker 1: During that recession, a lot of people washed out of
Speaker 1: some pretty expensive undergraduate institutions with six figures of undergraduate
Speaker 1: student loan debt that they had not needed a cosigner
Speaker 1: for um. Things have changed a lot on the mechanics
Speaker 1: of how that happens or doesn't happen at this point, right,
Speaker 1: But there are a whole bunch of us who all
Speaker 1: of a sudden got radicalized around the you know, sort
Speaker 1: of ever growing um nationwide student loan balance. And for
Speaker 1: at least ten years now, I've written about student loans
Speaker 1: off and on, you know, to this day. But what
Speaker 1: happened to two thousand fifteen that really had nothing to
Speaker 1: do with me and everything to do with readers, is
Speaker 1: that my email inbox and my voicemail started to fill
Speaker 1: up an ever higher volume each spring with parents who
Speaker 1: are having three related problems. There were the parents who
Speaker 1: had just assumed they were going to get a bunch
Speaker 1: of financial aid or their kid and did not realize
Speaker 1: until the very end that they were not going to
Speaker 1: be eligible. And they had made a bunch of promises
Speaker 1: to their kids, um that they weren't sure they were
Speaker 1: gonna be able to keep anymore. So that was a problem.
Speaker 1: Second kind of parent, UM, they had been offered with
Speaker 1: their first or their only kid, this thing known as
Speaker 1: merit aid in the financial aid award letter, and they
Speaker 1: hadn't even realized they'd applied for this, didn't know what
Speaker 1: it was, college counselor hadn't explained it to them. And
Speaker 1: so they come to me and they're like, Ron, what
Speaker 1: what's this Merit aid stuff and can I get some
Speaker 1: more of it? Right? And you know, it's April twelve.
Speaker 1: I can't really do much for them at that point.
Speaker 1: So that troubled me. But what really put me over
Speaker 1: the edge was that I started to get calls from
Speaker 1: slightly more sophisticated parents, right, parents who had figured out
Speaker 1: the system. They had, they had, you know, sort of
Speaker 1: understood it and and known to do the research, but
Speaker 1: they were having a different set of challenges. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: imagine a New York State resident. Uh, the kid gets
Speaker 1: into Binghamton, which is you know, arguably the best or
Speaker 1: the flagship state university. Uh, the kid gets into Kenyan
Speaker 1: College in Ohio or Occidental College in Los Angeles, and
Speaker 1: they're they're not being asked to pay the full price.
Speaker 1: They get a Meritate package and so the school is
Speaker 1: going to cost them two hundred thousand dollars over four years.
Speaker 1: And then the kid manages to get into Cornell. You know,
Speaker 1: it's got an Ivy League invitation, but no discount there.
Speaker 1: That family earns let's call it, two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: seven thousand dollars a year. Cry them a river, right,
Speaker 1: but they don't qualify for any need based state. So
Speaker 1: they said to me, Ron, your newspaper hasn't shut up
Speaker 1: about the fact that we live in the era of
Speaker 1: big data. Right, So where is the big data set
Speaker 1: that tells me how and why Cornell is a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars better than Kenyan and two hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 1: better than Binghamton. And I had no idea, because the
Speaker 1: big data set doesn't exist. There isn't even a small
Speaker 1: data set on this stuff. And what I realized was
Speaker 1: that these readers were asking questions about value and values ultimately,
Speaker 1: because values are you know, part and parcel of how
Speaker 1: we make the value decision. And so for all the
Speaker 1: ink that I had build over how to save and
Speaker 1: how to pay, I had not gotten gotten it through
Speaker 1: my thick skull in the space of ten years. Right,
Speaker 1: that the most important question of all was what to
Speaker 1: pay for college. That's what these people were trying to
Speaker 1: figure out. And I had failed them to that point.
Speaker 1: And I realized that there was gonna be no way
Speaker 1: to answer that question in a newspaper column or in
Speaker 1: five or in ten and it was going to require
Speaker 1: a book, yeah, something more like pages. Right. Uh, Hey, Ron,
Speaker 1: we've We've all seen the chart that shows how the
Speaker 1: cost of college has been soaring over the past forty years,
Speaker 1: you know, talking about value, and everyone has been bending
Speaker 1: over backwards to try to explain why. But in your
Speaker 1: book you actually discuss how that stat is a little misleading.
Speaker 1: The college costs haven't been rising at maybe the clip
Speaker 1: that we we thought they've been rising at. Can you
Speaker 1: kind of explain that? Sure? So, you know, it gets
Speaker 1: complicated for many of my customers, right, I mean the readers,
Speaker 1: but I also think of them as customers because they've
Speaker 1: pay to subscribe to The New York Times and they
Speaker 1: pay dollars at the list price for a hardcover nonfiction book. Um,
Speaker 1: the demographics of those folks, you know, tend to be
Speaker 1: upper middle class. And the farther you get into the
Speaker 1: upper middle class, um, the less likely it is that
Speaker 1: you're going to be offered any need based financial aid.
Speaker 1: So many of those folks are anchored to the list
Speaker 1: price of schools because they think that's what's they're what
Speaker 1: they're going to pay. Now that's quite often not the case,
Speaker 1: but right that that's sort of what people anchor to,
Speaker 1: at least in my customer base. So they're thinking, okay,
Speaker 1: you know fifty most selective schools in America. I want
Speaker 1: the best for my kid. That's gonna be three grand
Speaker 1: right at the private um level. And you know, my
Speaker 1: flagship state university probably gonna cost a hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 1: by the time it's all over. What they do not
Speaker 1: realize is that the average discount at private colleges is
Speaker 1: over fifty and moreover or so of families are not
Speaker 1: paying the full price. And that includes a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of rich kids who are getting discounts anyway. Right, So
Speaker 1: when you say that to people, they're like, huh, how
Speaker 1: did that happen? And then you've got to spend like
Speaker 1: a minimum of ten minutes slowly and deliberately peeling back
Speaker 1: the layers of the ending. I mean, essentially, it's kind
Speaker 1: of like the difference between the sticker price and the
Speaker 1: actual costs that they pay, you know, so like, what's
Speaker 1: going on with this? Essentially it's like a charade. You know,
Speaker 1: why don't college is just like lower the actual tuition costs? Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, in the in the price, you know, the
Speaker 1: cost of education. In a more straightforward manner, like like
Speaker 1: why is it that we have these you know this
Speaker 1: this inflation kind of builds into the price of the
Speaker 1: sticker price in the massive discount. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Well you sort of have to think about it like
Speaker 1: a business person, which we're not used to, you know,
Speaker 1: thinking of when we think of colleges, because we don't
Speaker 1: think of them as the viciously competitive institutions that they
Speaker 1: actually are. Right, there's a real competition to get the
Speaker 1: heads in the beds and to make sure you've got
Speaker 1: you know, the right net tuition revenue per per student
Speaker 1: to to to to make your numbers and and to
Speaker 1: make your budget. Um. So here's what's going on there.
Speaker 1: First of all, there is a perceived value question UM.
Speaker 1: That's kind of at the root of some of this. Um.
Speaker 1: It's referred to in the industry as the Chivists regal effect,
Speaker 1: and it goes like this, and this is a legend. Right.
Speaker 1: I was not able to confirm it with Chivists because
Speaker 1: they want to talk to me about it. But the
Speaker 1: way estrangely right, like any legend that has to do
Speaker 1: with a liquor, I'm I'm down for ye. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess they did not want to pierce the bubble of
Speaker 1: you know, whatever it was that they thought was over
Speaker 1: and around their brand. But as the legend goes, one day,
Speaker 1: many years ago, in a galaxy far far away, um,
Speaker 1: someone at chivist Regal decided to you know, double the
Speaker 1: price overnight to try and increase the brand sort of
Speaker 1: perceived value on on the liquor store shelf. And sure enough, um,
Speaker 1: the company's revenues you know, increased by like way more
Speaker 1: than they expected it to, because all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: people thought that Schivis Regal was better than it used
Speaker 1: to be, even though nothing changed inside the bottle. Right.
Speaker 1: And so the lesson that higher education professionals took from
Speaker 1: this is that if you have a high list price,
Speaker 1: people will think that you are worth something worth more. Right.
Speaker 1: And then when you give them a discount, particularly when
Speaker 1: they don't need the discount, right, particularly they can afford
Speaker 1: to pay the full price, that family will feel like
Speaker 1: they've gotten a bonus, maybe a gold star pat on
Speaker 1: the head for having raised a Yeah. Right, you know,
Speaker 1: this is marketing. This is marketing, and the other thing
Speaker 1: is um. At any given institution, particularly the more selective
Speaker 1: ones that still discount this way, they are always holding
Speaker 1: out hope that some percentage of people will will turn
Speaker 1: up each year who are in fact both willing and
Speaker 1: able to pay the full price and not just able. Right,
Speaker 1: And so what kind of family is that? Well, if
Speaker 1: you are a super affluent family and you have no
Speaker 1: idea that these discounts exist, and you don't really care
Speaker 1: all that much about money, and you're not careful, you'll
Speaker 1: just write the check, right, and you'll you'll never be
Speaker 1: the wiser. Right. So schools like to take advantage of
Speaker 1: families like that. Um, then there are the families who
Speaker 1: are like writing this check against the bank of thank god. Right,
Speaker 1: So you know, imagine yourself, Um, you know, just hoping
Speaker 1: against hope that your your your kid will go to
Speaker 1: two Lane University the same way that you did, right,
Speaker 1: And you know that the place is much more selective
Speaker 1: than it used to be. And maybe your kid has
Speaker 1: had a rough go of you know, freshman sophomore year
Speaker 1: in high school, but they've like totally turned it around.
Speaker 1: Junior year. They managed to get you know, a seat
Speaker 1: at an s a T test center and once you
Speaker 1: know it, they scored a fifteen twenty and to Lane says,
Speaker 1: you know what, we're going to take a shot on
Speaker 1: on your kid, and we're gonna give you the benefit
Speaker 1: of the the doubt. We believe in your family and you
Speaker 1: know in its tradition of coming to school here, but
Speaker 1: no discount for you. And you're like, wow, I can't
Speaker 1: believe we pulled this off. Um, the kid's gonna go
Speaker 1: to Tulane. We don't care what it costs, right, bank
Speaker 1: of thank God. And then they're all of these families
Speaker 1: from outside the United States, and you know, many of
Speaker 1: them are kazillionaires, and they don't care much about the
Speaker 1: price either. They just want a degree from a relatively
Speaker 1: brain brand name institution or you know, just one that
Speaker 1: says America on it. And if you can attract enough
Speaker 1: of those folks, particularly now that there is someone in
Speaker 1: the White House who is not as hostile um to
Speaker 1: people showing up here from outside of the United States
Speaker 1: in general, um, you have reason to hope. Right. So
Speaker 1: those are all the reasons you keep the list price high. Ron,
Speaker 1: Let's talk about college enrollment in COVID. Obviously we've seen
Speaker 1: college enrollment fall because of the pandemic, and you actually
Speaker 1: mentioned to study in your book that six professors and
Speaker 1: administrators have said that their courses are worse in virtual era.
Speaker 1: So how how do you think that college, Um, the
Speaker 1: college value proposition has changed because of COVID. Well, so,
Speaker 1: you know, we should stop and think about how we
Speaker 1: define decline, right, because in different tiers of undergraduate education,
Speaker 1: there's been different levels of decline. And at the you know,
Speaker 1: let's call it two D most selective colleges and institutions
Speaker 1: in America, the you know, the ones that have stayed
Speaker 1: open more or less, um, you know, have not seen
Speaker 1: huge declines, you know, sort of devastating revenue declines. And
Speaker 1: the thing that's interesting about it is that you know,
Speaker 1: people are showing up to pay the same price as
Speaker 1: they paid last year for the most part. You know,
Speaker 1: there's been a few discounts here and there, but but
Speaker 1: not many. Right, And so I guess here's what I
Speaker 1: have to say about that. Right, Um, what happened in
Speaker 1: the spring of is that everybody got sent home and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, you know, the three main reasons
Speaker 1: for going to college, right, the education, the kinship you know,
Speaker 1: the friends you make in, the mentors you require, and
Speaker 1: the credential. Two of those things were stripped away. As
Speaker 1: you mentioned in the question, right, education got a lot worse.
Speaker 1: Everybody acknowledges that kinship is like blown to smithereens because
Speaker 1: you're not near your friends or your mentors anymore. Only
Speaker 1: the credential is left. And you know it's some question, uh,
Speaker 1: you know how much the credential matters? Right if you
Speaker 1: are a food and beverage major at Cornell University, right
Speaker 1: you're majoring in hotel management, you know, at Arizona State
Speaker 1: or something like, how much is that credential going to
Speaker 1: be worth right now? When those industries have been cut
Speaker 1: to ribbons? So you know, the the value is not
Speaker 1: what it once was, which makes it somewhat surprising, right
Speaker 1: that all of these people came running back to campus
Speaker 1: um in in August and September against all you know,
Speaker 1: sort of public health reason, and you know thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands of them got sick, right, So why
Speaker 1: did they do this? Well, you know, because the education
Speaker 1: had gotten worse, because the kinship was gone, and you know,
Speaker 1: people were desperate to continue to persist with this experience. Now,
Speaker 1: if I'm writing to check up to eighty thousand dollars
Speaker 1: a year, I ain't doing it. It doesn't doesn't make
Speaker 1: any sense to me right that this is this is
Speaker 1: not a normal college experience. This is not what I
Speaker 1: signed up for for my kids. And as somebody who
Speaker 1: wrote a book about gap years back in, I already
Speaker 1: think the college is wasted on most eighteen year old
Speaker 1: So you know, my kid is my kid is sitting
Speaker 1: this one out and and going to do something different
Speaker 1: for a while. Ron. This has been a great start
Speaker 1: to our conversation. We've got so much more when we
Speaker 1: talk about with you. I mean, we want to talk
Speaker 1: next about financial aid, you know, like how it is
Speaker 1: that parents and students can get that fifty discount like you,
Speaker 1: like you mentioned there earlier, And we're gonna get to
Speaker 1: all of that right after the break. All right, we're back.
Speaker 1: We're talking with Ron Lieber about how to get a
Speaker 1: better deal when you're going to college. And uh, you know, Ron,
Speaker 1: one of the things actually that that recently changed, um
Speaker 1: it was surrounded financial aid was the expected family contribution
Speaker 1: when you fill out the facts. Sadly that happened after
Speaker 1: the publication of your book, but you wrote about it
Speaker 1: in the New York Times. Um, since then, So what
Speaker 1: effect is that change in the fast they're gonna have
Speaker 1: on families? Sure. So let's start by, you know, framing
Speaker 1: what we're talking about here. We are talking about the
Speaker 1: need based financial aid system the facts that does not
Speaker 1: have much of anything to do with merit aid. Um,
Speaker 1: whole different way that meritate and those discounts are awarded. Right,
Speaker 1: So what we're talking about here is need based aid
Speaker 1: in order to get aid from the federal government. So
Speaker 1: in order to you know, access the PEL grant or
Speaker 1: the Federal student loan program or Federal Works Study funds
Speaker 1: for jobs on campus, or a parent plus loan, you've
Speaker 1: got to fill out one of these fafts of things.
Speaker 1: And people hate the facts. The FAFTSA is arguably more
Speaker 1: complicated than the ten forty income tax form, and you know,
Speaker 1: the kid gets involved and the parents are involved. Some
Speaker 1: parents refused to do it, and if you're a kid
Speaker 1: who's strange from your parents or a parent, it gets
Speaker 1: very complicated, you know, super super messy stuff. So, you
Speaker 1: know the most important thing that's happened is that the
Speaker 1: FAFTS is going to be simplified, which is a good thing. Right,
Speaker 1: It's gonna be easier to fill this thing out. A
Speaker 1: couple other things they are happening. Um, it's gonna be
Speaker 1: easier for more people to get pell grants, and the
Speaker 1: pell grants are going to get a little bit larger, right,
Speaker 1: so people with lower incomes gonna have an easier time. Now,
Speaker 1: there's some other things that are changing that have caused
Speaker 1: you know, people in the you know, middle class and
Speaker 1: upper middle class to wring their hands. One of the
Speaker 1: provisions has to do with the fact that at if
Speaker 1: you've got two kids in college at once, you're no
Speaker 1: longer going to get the same break that you used to.
Speaker 1: Now that's according to you know, the legislation, and the
Speaker 1: federal law doesn't mean that private colleges are necessarily going
Speaker 1: to do the same thing with their financial aid formulas.
Speaker 1: So if you're thinking about applying to a school that
Speaker 1: only relives on the fasts, you know, then you may
Speaker 1: need to be thinking about that if you've got two
Speaker 1: kids in their close in age. So much remains to
Speaker 1: be seen and you know sort of exactly how that's
Speaker 1: going to be interpreted, And there are a lot of
Speaker 1: people already trying to petition, you know, the federal government
Speaker 1: to uh to change that somehow, right, whether through legislation
Speaker 1: or some other form. So um, you know, remains to
Speaker 1: be seen. I think exactly how that one's going to
Speaker 1: play out, but it's definitely one to watch. Doesn't go
Speaker 1: into effect for another year and a half. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: certainly a work in progress. It's kind of a moving target.
Speaker 1: I guess as you have kids, you know, approaching college age. Uh,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, you're you're talking about need based aid
Speaker 1: here and then earlier, you know, you detailed how the
Speaker 1: financial aid system has changed in recent years, and you know,
Speaker 1: let's talk about merit aid. Uh. So you know that
Speaker 1: is kind of the it seems that that's the predominant
Speaker 1: form of financial assistance these days. And so what is
Speaker 1: it that led to that change? And how com parents
Speaker 1: and students uh navigate getting more merit aid money? Sure? So, um,
Speaker 1: you know, I like that you phrase that question by
Speaker 1: pointing out the history because it gives an opportunity to
Speaker 1: sort of tell the story of um, not how it
Speaker 1: started exactly, but but how it spread and became so complicated.
Speaker 1: So imagine yourself in the state of Ohio in the
Speaker 1: early nineties, and there's a whole bunch of really good,
Speaker 1: you know, small liberal arts colleges, so many in fact,
Speaker 1: that they're really you know, beating the smithereens out of
Speaker 1: one another. Uh, you know too in the competition for students,
Speaker 1: and also a great public university system there. Right, So
Speaker 1: imagine being you know, kind of near the bottom of
Speaker 1: that food chain. You know, imagine being oh i oh
Speaker 1: Wesleyan University. You've developed a well earned reputation for um,
Speaker 1: you know, being a serious party school that is not
Speaker 1: particularly serious about other things. Uh. You want to increase
Speaker 1: your prestige because a lot of families just won't go
Speaker 1: near you, um because you know they think their kids
Speaker 1: will end up being alcoholics. Right, So you've got to
Speaker 1: do something about this situation. Um, So what you do is,
Speaker 1: you know, after this year's crop of kids take the
Speaker 1: p s a t s. You start going out and
Speaker 1: you buy the names of the kids who have better
Speaker 1: p s a t scores and the kids you normally
Speaker 1: attract into your applicant of pool, and you send them
Speaker 1: a note saying, hey, we've got we've got our eye
Speaker 1: on you. We know you're special. If you apply here,
Speaker 1: and we'll let you apply here for free with no
Speaker 1: application fee. If you apply over here, we'll give you
Speaker 1: ten thousand dollars if you come off off the off
Speaker 1: the list price. Right, no matter how much money your
Speaker 1: family has, no matter how much money your family needs. Right,
Speaker 1: So somebody starts going and throwing around, um, five figures
Speaker 1: of money when nobody else is doing that, that's going
Speaker 1: to have an impact. Right. It worked. It works so
Speaker 1: well that competitors had to respond in kind because Dennison
Speaker 1: did not like Ohio Wesley and stealing more than its
Speaker 1: fair share of students, and Kenyan didn't like Dennison stealing kids,
Speaker 1: and um, you know, Kenyan didn't like College of Worcester
Speaker 1: doing the same thing either, And then Oberlin got really
Speaker 1: annoyed that Kenyan started to do it, and pretty soon
Speaker 1: everybody in the state of Ohio is doing this, and
Speaker 1: it spreads not quickly but over time. So, right, you
Speaker 1: flash forward twenty years or so, and all but the
Speaker 1: fifty or sixty most selective colleges and universities, both public
Speaker 1: and private. That works a little differently, public and private,
Speaker 1: All but the fifty or sixty most selectives in the
Speaker 1: country are offering at least some meritid Right, So you
Speaker 1: take that enormous list of schools that are doing this,
Speaker 1: and those two divide up into segments right, there are
Speaker 1: the schools that only offer merit aid to a couple
Speaker 1: of dozen people a year. Then their schools that only
Speaker 1: offer it to a couple hundred of you know, new
Speaker 1: entrants a year. Then it's you know, schools that offer
Speaker 1: it to maybe half of the new people who come
Speaker 1: in each year. And then there are schools now where
Speaker 1: everybody gets a pony, right, where everybody gets a pat
Speaker 1: on the head. And the challenge for families is to
Speaker 1: figure out ahead of time which kind of school you're
Speaker 1: dealing with, what sort of reasonable expectation they ought to have,
Speaker 1: you know, for a discount offer, and how to sort
Speaker 1: that out. And it is not easy. It's another five
Speaker 1: or ten minutes of you know, verbiage to kind of
Speaker 1: even begin to explain to people how to sort it out,
Speaker 1: all right, So it does kind of beg the question,
Speaker 1: how how can people find out what sort of merit
Speaker 1: aid they're likely to receive from a college are interested in.
Speaker 1: I don't, I don't want to, you know, make you
Speaker 1: drawn on for ten minutes necessarily, but that is the
Speaker 1: question that people are going to ask, Like, if I'm
Speaker 1: interested in particular college, how do I know what sort
Speaker 1: of you know, aid to expect. Yeah, so there are
Speaker 1: a couple of things that people should know. UM. First
Speaker 1: of all, the Net Price Calculator, which all schools are
Speaker 1: required to have on their websites somewhere, is a way
Speaker 1: to predict what kind, if any, of need based financial
Speaker 1: aid you will be offered, so totally worth filling those out.
Speaker 1: In some instances, the schools will allow you to input
Speaker 1: your g p A and your test scores and will
Speaker 1: attempt to predict what kind of merit aid offer you
Speaker 1: might get as well. So it's worth checking the Net
Speaker 1: Price Calculator to see if it is in fact a
Speaker 1: merit aid prediction engine. In most instances it is not,
Speaker 1: but sometimes it is, so you know, worth a shot.
Speaker 1: So that's number one. Number two, by all means, check
Speaker 1: the college's website UM to see if they say, you know,
Speaker 1: what percentage of people got merit aid last year, what
Speaker 1: sort of characteristics did they have? At some of the
Speaker 1: more hard up schools, um Wabash College in Indiana, Lake
Speaker 1: Forest in Illinois, the University of Alabama does this as well.
Speaker 1: They just tell you straight up in like a grid chard,
Speaker 1: you know, if you got a thirty four on your
Speaker 1: A C. T. And a three point nine g p A. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, this is how much of a discount you'll
Speaker 1: be offered. And so that causes a lot of people
Speaker 1: who really want to, you know, go to the University
Speaker 1: of Alabama to take their S A T S six
Speaker 1: times to you know, sort of try to get their
Speaker 1: score high enough to get the better deal is you know,
Speaker 1: so it has some unintended effects. Uh. Next step, and
Speaker 1: this is not the last step, because why should this
Speaker 1: be simple work at all? Um? The next step involves
Speaker 1: looking for something called the Common Data Set, which most
Speaker 1: but not all schools make available. The Common Data Set
Speaker 1: contains all of the information that these schools pass on
Speaker 1: to ranking organizations like US News and World Report. Um,
Speaker 1: it's worth reading the entire Common Data Set if you
Speaker 1: are even at all interested in any institution, no matter
Speaker 1: how much you are able or willing to pay, because
Speaker 1: there's all sorts of terrific data in there. But in
Speaker 1: section H two A, H yes, yes, yeah right, it's like, um,
Speaker 1: you just like go right to H two A, and
Speaker 1: that will give you some information about how much meritide
Speaker 1: is being offered to families who have no financial need whatsoever.
Speaker 1: So that's a pretty good indicator of what's going on,
Speaker 1: you know, is the school offering meridiate to everybody who
Speaker 1: has no need or just like you know, ten percent
Speaker 1: of the people who have no need? And what are
Speaker 1: the characteristics of the people in the class in every
Speaker 1: entering class who are are in the top um, you know,
Speaker 1: what's their g p A, what's their test scores? That
Speaker 1: is information you can get from the common data set.
Speaker 1: And so from there you can begin to sort of guess, right,
Speaker 1: what is going to happen. This is not the end.
Speaker 1: There's at least two more steps, shall we yea, let's
Speaker 1: do alright? Two more steps? All right? Um, because this
Speaker 1: is so confusing because I have had to prattle on
Speaker 1: for so long, not one, not to not three, but
Speaker 1: four that I know of for profit entities have started
Speaker 1: up just in the last couple of years to try
Speaker 1: to provide some predictability um or match making around this.
Speaker 1: Uh tuition fit dot com. That was the one that
Speaker 1: seemed the most like the coolest idea from from what
Speaker 1: I read in your book, like tuition fit seems awesome. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the big idea is like you send in your
Speaker 1: you know, award letter to tuition fit it anonymizes everything,
Speaker 1: puts it into a database, and then all of a sudden, Um,
Speaker 1: you've got some context. Right, So you know, Dennison College
Speaker 1: Dennison University in Ohio offers you, uh, you know, twenty
Speaker 1: one dollars off and you've got a you know, thirty
Speaker 1: two on your on your a C T. Uh. You
Speaker 1: can go in there and see, oh, look there's a
Speaker 1: there's a student with statistics like mine and and she
Speaker 1: got twenty five thousand dollars off. And uh, I'm a boy, right,
Speaker 1: so should I be more valuable because Dennison's like female
Speaker 1: or like what's going on here? Right? You know the
Speaker 1: fact that I play an oboe and and maybe she
Speaker 1: doesn't like Z can a matter? It couldn't matter, right,
Speaker 1: you know, you know it gives you a little bit
Speaker 1: of anecdotal context. You know, it's not like scientifically, but
Speaker 1: get yeah, you get to hear from people. It's sort
Speaker 1: of like glass door, but for colleges. That's a really
Speaker 1: good comparison. It's about like that. And then um, there's
Speaker 1: a company called edmund E d M I T. There's
Speaker 1: a new one called merit More. And Debbie Schwartz, who
Speaker 1: runs the Pain for college one oh one Facebook group,
Speaker 1: which is indispensable to my mind for anybody who wants
Speaker 1: to geek out on this um. She's got her own
Speaker 1: um hustle there where she u has some merit aid
Speaker 1: prediction figures that she generates using common data sets and
Speaker 1: other tools. Right, so there's like four startups in the area.
Speaker 1: And then finally right, I want all of my readers
Speaker 1: to act and behave as if we exist in the
Speaker 1: world that we wanted to be, and not the world
Speaker 1: as it is. So I'm encouraging everybody. I'm trying to
Speaker 1: raise an army. Essentially. I think everybody should innocently, but
Speaker 1: not so innocently, call these schools each September and say, hey,
Speaker 1: I don't have any real way to predict what kind
Speaker 1: of merit aid my kid might be offered here, And
Speaker 1: you seem to think that I should be willing to
Speaker 1: apply without having any idea what the price is. And
Speaker 1: that doesn't really make a lot of sense to me.
Speaker 1: Doesn't make sense to you, No, I didn't think it
Speaker 1: made any sense. Can you give me just a you know,
Speaker 1: non binding merit aid preread given my kids you know,
Speaker 1: activities and s A T S and g p A
Speaker 1: and if they won't do it, if they refused to,
Speaker 1: then you might say, oh, that's so interesting because College
Speaker 1: of Worcester has been doing that for years and Whitman
Speaker 1: College just started doing it a year ago, and you
Speaker 1: don't want to do that? Huh? Why? I love I
Speaker 1: love that tip, Ron, because it's really it's taken things
Speaker 1: into your own hands and saying and kind of asking
Speaker 1: for the information when it's not readily available. I think
Speaker 1: I think that's like wonderful advice. I mean, exactly, tell
Speaker 1: them I sent you and if they won't um, and
Speaker 1: if they won't cough up the information, come and tell
Speaker 1: me at Ron Liebert dot com and I'll call them up.
Speaker 1: I'll call them. I love that. The fifth point here
Speaker 1: is is the Ron lieberway, which is this is uh
Speaker 1: calling for more transparency when it comes to meritate and marketologies.
Speaker 1: I love it. Uh. Well, you know, let's let's talk
Speaker 1: about real quickly here, like getting what you pay for.
Speaker 1: You know, you spend a lot of time in your
Speaker 1: book writing about value. We're all about getting you know,
Speaker 1: the most bang for your buck when it comes to
Speaker 1: higher education. So like, what should students and parents be
Speaker 1: looking for? In a college. And I know you cover
Speaker 1: a lot of this in your book, so if you
Speaker 1: want to pages dedicated to it, but if you wanted
Speaker 1: to pict like a few of your favorites here, I'm
Speaker 1: curious to to hear your thoughts here. Well, it starts
Speaker 1: with the framing question. Right, Um, you can't have that
Speaker 1: conversation before you have defined what college means to you.
Speaker 1: And this is not some like existential philosophy one on
Speaker 1: one exercise. It's actually a real non rhetorical question because
Speaker 1: what I found repeatedly as I ran laps of the
Speaker 1: country was that there were a whole bunch of people
Speaker 1: out there or you know, flinging hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: dollars around, that hadn't really stopped to ask themselves like
Speaker 1: what is the definition of success here? And how much
Speaker 1: is enough? Right? What is college for? Anyway? And it
Speaker 1: turns out the colleges for three things we name checked
Speaker 1: him before. Right, college is about the intellectual roller coaster ride,
Speaker 1: It's about the learning. It's about having your brain broken
Speaker 1: apart and then reassembled by an expert practitioner into like
Speaker 1: a bigger, better version of what it used to be. Right, So,
Speaker 1: college is about the education. Number one. Number two, College
Speaker 1: is about the kinship. It's about finding the people you
Speaker 1: never could have imagined existing in the world and making
Speaker 1: them your best friends who will pick you up on
Speaker 1: their shoulders and carry you through life. And it's about
Speaker 1: finding the mentors um who will do the same thing.
Speaker 1: But maybe they're like dragging you by the neck, you know,
Speaker 1: into a bigger and better version of yourself. Right, So
Speaker 1: that's number two. Number three is the credential. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: a baseline credential that allows you to you know, grasp
Speaker 1: hold of the middle class in a way that your
Speaker 1: family has not been able to before. Or maybe you're
Speaker 1: reaching way up high for like the super name brand
Speaker 1: institution where the degree will mean something in an industry
Speaker 1: that your family or your community has absolutely no hope
Speaker 1: of ever accessing without that degree. Right, So you've got
Speaker 1: to know what you're coming for and and once you do,
Speaker 1: you can shop for that right Because if you could
Speaker 1: care less about learning anything, then it doesn't matter whether
Speaker 1: there are graduate students teaching all of the introductory level courses,
Speaker 1: because that's not what you're there for. Right, Like, imagine
Speaker 1: yourself as the you know, third generation child of a
Speaker 1: casket owning manufacturer in Southern Indiana, right, and you're gonna
Speaker 1: go to the right So you're gonna go Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you're gonna go to the Did you know the Southern
Speaker 1: Indianas like the world capital of casket manager. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: no way, no way. Back when I was at Fast
Speaker 1: Company Magazine in the nineties, I went to visit one
Speaker 1: of the casket companies. It was awesome. Um, you can
Speaker 1: put that story in the show notes of you will
Speaker 1: so right. So, so, you're going to the Kelly School
Speaker 1: of Business, flagship State School, Indiana University undergraduate and you
Speaker 1: really care about the learning because you're gonna learn what
Speaker 1: you need to know on the job right from your parents,
Speaker 1: from your grandparents. Right, They're gonna teach you everything that
Speaker 1: you need to know. What you really want out of
Speaker 1: the Kelly School Business is not the credential, because the
Speaker 1: credential doesn't mean much. You just want to build the
Speaker 1: best possible network, right. You want a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: people who are gonna know you, remember you, and when
Speaker 1: they die or their parents die, they're gonna get your casket.
Speaker 1: They're gonna call you up. You're going to offer them
Speaker 1: the friends and family discount code, and your Family Casket
Speaker 1: Company is going to be known because you were in
Speaker 1: the most social sorority. You were in the most business
Speaker 1: oriented fraternity. You are at the Kelly School of Business
Speaker 1: for the kinship and the kinship alone. Right, So that's
Speaker 1: a way to shop and I totally approve of that.
Speaker 1: Do whatever you want, right, but don't go into the
Speaker 1: process without having asked the fundamental question and answered it
Speaker 1: about what college is for. I love that. All right, Hey, Ron,
Speaker 1: we got a few more super practical questions about uh,
Speaker 1: cutting college costs, and we'll get to those right after
Speaker 1: this break. All Right, we are back. We're talking with
Speaker 1: Ron Lieber and his most recent book, The Price You
Speaker 1: Pay for College, And you know, Ron, before the break,
Speaker 1: we're talking about financial aid, and now we're going to
Speaker 1: kind of dive into some more practical advice to maybe
Speaker 1: potentially get the price down on college and real quick.
Speaker 1: You know, you mentioned in the first section there the
Speaker 1: gap year. You said you mentioned you wrote a book
Speaker 1: back in about the gap year. Do you feel that
Speaker 1: that's a good idea? Is is a gap here a
Speaker 1: good idea for folks to potentially save some money, to
Speaker 1: not burn, not waste that first year in college and
Speaker 1: then specifically to UH and you're like, now with COVID,
Speaker 1: does it make even more sense you know, due to
Speaker 1: the pandemic. Yes, yes, one thousand times yes. And if
Speaker 1: we're gonna limit it just to you know, kind of
Speaker 1: pushing that the answer through a financial prism, like, let
Speaker 1: me try and do it that way. So you know,
Speaker 1: first the obvious, right, if you can stay in your
Speaker 1: house if it's safe to do so, you know, psychologically
Speaker 1: and physically, and it's not for every every kid and
Speaker 1: every family. Um, if your parents or parents are willing
Speaker 1: to let you live there, hopefully rent free, maybe even
Speaker 1: continue to provide the food. Right, you can go work
Speaker 1: for twelve months and make twenty grand and you know,
Speaker 1: put it away and that that's that's one five of
Speaker 1: of the cost of college. You know, most flagship state universities.
Speaker 1: That's a big deal, right, go do that if you
Speaker 1: need the money. Um, you can work for nine months
Speaker 1: and you know, save half the money and take the
Speaker 1: other half and go have an adventure someplace. Um, these
Speaker 1: are things that you can do, and so you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's worthwhile for all all sorts of develop developmental
Speaker 1: reasons which will leave aside for now. Um, but if
Speaker 1: you believe in extracting the most value that you possibly
Speaker 1: can from the classroom in particular, people who take gap
Speaker 1: years get better grades than those who don't. This has
Speaker 1: not been proven with like real PhDs connecting science on
Speaker 1: the matter. Right, So, um, you know, if you want
Speaker 1: to extract more value from the education, take a gap year,
Speaker 1: go to college when you're nineteen, not when you're eighteen. Uh,
Speaker 1: there still seems to be the possibility that, you know,
Speaker 1: the private colleges and universities in particular will give you
Speaker 1: a better deal on financial aid if they don't follow
Speaker 1: the you know, the new federal formula if you have
Speaker 1: um overlap. Right, So, if you've got a sibling and
Speaker 1: you are three years older than your sibling, if you
Speaker 1: take a gap year, you're essentially adding one more year
Speaker 1: to the potential years of overlap where the two of
Speaker 1: your in college. If your sibling does not take a
Speaker 1: gap here, Um, so you want to think about that too,
Speaker 1: you could literally, you know, create another five figure is
Speaker 1: worth of need based aid eligibility for some families if
Speaker 1: the privates continue to run their aid formulas the same way. So,
Speaker 1: that's a lot of ifs, right, So they're assuming that
Speaker 1: we're thinking about it, your younger brother or sister might
Speaker 1: also go to the same school, and that's why they're
Speaker 1: gonna offer you more money. So just in general, the
Speaker 1: way the formula works now, um, and this is what
Speaker 1: the facts that proposes to change. But the you know,
Speaker 1: private universities may not follow it is that you know,
Speaker 1: logic would dictate if you've got two kids in college
Speaker 1: at once, you can afford to pay less than if
Speaker 1: you only have one kid in college at once. Right,
Speaker 1: So if you increase the number of years of overlap,
Speaker 1: that increases the number of years that you have those
Speaker 1: extra discounts, assuming both colleges are kind of operating with
Speaker 1: similar formulas. Gotcha. Yeah, so Ron community college at least
Speaker 1: for a couple of years of your college education has
Speaker 1: always been a popular suggestion as a way for people
Speaker 1: to save money. But you actually say that going that
Speaker 1: route could cost you more than it saves. Why is that.
Speaker 1: I am not trying to discourage people from going to
Speaker 1: community college. I am only trying to make sure that
Speaker 1: people are realistic about what actually happens. Right. So the
Speaker 1: fact of the matter is that it's a pretty small
Speaker 1: percentage of people who started community college with the intent
Speaker 1: of getting to for year school, um, you know, and
Speaker 1: and graduated a reasonable period of time. It's a small
Speaker 1: pretendage to people who actually pull it off. So if
Speaker 1: you're doing this as a hack right, as a way
Speaker 1: to save money, I'm all for it. But you need
Speaker 1: to go in with eyes wide open. And here's what
Speaker 1: that means, right. You've got to show up with a
Speaker 1: full head esteem. You've got to have an intended destination
Speaker 1: in mind, preferably a a you know, major at that school. UM.
Speaker 1: You've got to know at the very beginning what classes
Speaker 1: you're going to need at the community college. You need
Speaker 1: to be first in line to make sure you get
Speaker 1: those classes. If you're going to be working for money
Speaker 1: on the side, you need to have a job that
Speaker 1: you know allows you to to put your your classes,
Speaker 1: you know, priority one, right, So you get all your
Speaker 1: classes and you're constantly in touch with an advisor at
Speaker 1: the community college to make absolutely sure that these classes
Speaker 1: are going to transfer to your intended destination. You have
Speaker 1: a different advisor at the destination UM in the admissions office,
Speaker 1: checking in with you three times a term. To make
Speaker 1: sure that nothing's changed, everything's on track, you're gonna get
Speaker 1: your credit um and then if you know that you
Speaker 1: want to be a computer science major at the intended destination,
Speaker 1: you've got to be certain that the chair of that
Speaker 1: comp side department is absolutely positively going to improve it,
Speaker 1: going to approve your prerequisites, because if you've got to
Speaker 1: retake a bunch of stuff, then it takes longer, you're
Speaker 1: spending more money and the savings is decreased. So you know,
Speaker 1: it's not always simple. That's so smart. Yeah, it kind
Speaker 1: of goes back to knowing your why. Like as long
Speaker 1: as you can keep in mind what like why it
Speaker 1: is that you are going to the community college, and
Speaker 1: you keep that forefront of your mind, then yeah, it
Speaker 1: could be a great hack. Like you said, uh right,
Speaker 1: Is is there a good rule of thumb like for
Speaker 1: how many school that families should visit or apply to
Speaker 1: in order to make sure that you know they're getting
Speaker 1: the getting the best price possible. Yeah, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: struggling with this some personally because my daughters in ninth grade.
Speaker 1: I don't take much stock in this notion that you're
Speaker 1: gonna do damage to your children by talking to them
Speaker 1: about college, you know, before their junior year, that it's
Speaker 1: like too much, too soon, too much pressure. I mean,
Speaker 1: these kids live in the world. They already understand that, um,
Speaker 1: you know, college exists, and they're thinking about it and
Speaker 1: excited about it. And so you know, I might take
Speaker 1: our daughter to you know, see her first school sort
Speaker 1: of informally in a couple of weeks actually, um, you know,
Speaker 1: in the second half of her first year in high school.
Speaker 1: So like yeah, right, Well, it's just you know, it's
Speaker 1: it literally pays to to tour these places carefully and
Speaker 1: not rush around on a tour in an information session
Speaker 1: and in and out in three hours, right, And so
Speaker 1: that takes time. Right, It takes money, and it takes
Speaker 1: resources too if you're doing it in person, but it
Speaker 1: certainly takes time. I'm to like really do the homework
Speaker 1: on you know, a couple of dozen places to begin
Speaker 1: to think like, huh, you know, big versus small. Maybe
Speaker 1: I should go see some places, right, urban versus rural, right,
Speaker 1: single sex, non single sex right, small lebal arts you know,
Speaker 1: large enormous university, right, So you know, we can take
Speaker 1: a year or two to kind of narrow that down
Speaker 1: or begin to think about it, and then right, particularly
Speaker 1: this year and last year to this was the case.
Speaker 1: You know, there there there's a higher probability of like
Speaker 1: outsize surprises financially because all the algorithms that the school's
Speaker 1: normally use to you know, offer up discounts and you know,
Speaker 1: sort people out. Um, they're having trouble predicting how people
Speaker 1: are going to behave in the middle of a global pandemic.
Speaker 1: No surprise there, right, And so schools that come up
Speaker 1: real short in March and able to start to get worried,
Speaker 1: you know, they're gonna throw a lot of money around
Speaker 1: and they just might throw it at you. And so
Speaker 1: you know, the more schools you've apply to, the better
Speaker 1: chance you have of having some kind of awesome financial surprise. Nice. Uh,
Speaker 1: and all, we got one more question for you, Iron
Speaker 1: you talk about independent college counselors Towards the end of
Speaker 1: the book, When does it make sense for a family
Speaker 1: to hire someone to help them make these big decisions
Speaker 1: because obviously your book is like pages long, um, and
Speaker 1: it feels like one of these things for a lot
Speaker 1: of families that's overwhelming. So yeah, should they be hiring
Speaker 1: someone who's in their corner who knows more than they do.
Speaker 1: I'm a big believer in pain for professional services UM
Speaker 1: when the stakes are high, and the stakes are high. Here,
Speaker 1: the thing that I have not solved for that pained
Speaker 1: me greatly in the writing of the Price you Pay
Speaker 1: for college is that it still doesn't feel to me
Speaker 1: like there is a fail safe way to go looking
Speaker 1: for an independent college counselor and know for sure just
Speaker 1: how smart they are on UM need based ay and
Speaker 1: merit aid. Because let's face it, right, you know, if
Speaker 1: you're going to hang a shingle as an independent college counselor,
Speaker 1: what you want to do is, you know, charges as
Speaker 1: much money as you possibly can. But the people who
Speaker 1: need financial aid or the people who you know feel
Speaker 1: like they need merit aid, they can't afford to pay
Speaker 1: you a ten retainer, right, And so it doesn't make
Speaker 1: a lot of financial sense for an independent counselor to
Speaker 1: focus much on that part of the market. And so
Speaker 1: the question that becomes, well, how do I find the
Speaker 1: practitioner who is an expert on a family like mind
Speaker 1: that earns a hundred seventy two dollars a year is
Speaker 1: going to have, you know, some financial need maybe a
Speaker 1: private universities, but probably not a ton um but is
Speaker 1: super interested in merit aid, Like where is my expert
Speaker 1: that really understands that part of the market. And you
Speaker 1: know the answer to that question is there aren't actually
Speaker 1: all that many of them. Um, I wish there were more.
Speaker 1: It's almost like there needs to be a tuition fit
Speaker 1: for advisors, like like you know, I mean if there's
Speaker 1: some sort of database or something like that where folks
Speaker 1: could kind of give their feedback on, you know, with
Speaker 1: their profiles as to how much money that they were
Speaker 1: able to retain. Yes, exactly right, and so um, there
Speaker 1: are four or five associations of independent college counselors, and
Speaker 1: one of them has a subgroup of people who are
Speaker 1: really interested in this stuff. But I can't even get
Speaker 1: that association to make the names of those members public
Speaker 1: anywhere on their you know, consumer search page. I tried, Right,
Speaker 1: you would think that that like that would be a
Speaker 1: resource worth making available and shining a light on, but
Speaker 1: but it hasn't worked yet to my great frustration. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: if people want to email me, Um, you know, I
Speaker 1: I know a handful of people who who I know
Speaker 1: are good and I don't mind throwing some names out.
Speaker 1: So you know, I met Ron Lieber dot com. I'm
Speaker 1: easy to find, Ron, You're the best. And obviously people
Speaker 1: can find you at Ron Lieber dot com. They can
Speaker 1: find you in the New York Times, you know, on
Speaker 1: on a weekly basis, and they can find your new book,
Speaker 1: the price you pay for college, anything else you wanna
Speaker 1: tell folks, tell our listeners about you. No, just that
Speaker 1: I'm you know, glad to have this out there. I
Speaker 1: am here to help. And um my feeling about this
Speaker 1: after it was all said and done was hope more
Speaker 1: than anything else. You know. I went to a lot
Speaker 1: of schools, and I could imagine my daughter. I'm happy
Speaker 1: and thriving. It's just about all of them. That's awesome. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm glad to hear that that even through all of this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you were able to land on hope at the end
Speaker 1: of it. So Ron, you rock. Thank you so much
Speaker 1: for this, uh this conversation, and we appreciate it. Man,
Speaker 1: I was great to be here. Thank you, all right,
Speaker 1: Matt Ron Lieber just rocketed up the list my favorite
Speaker 1: human beings. What a fun conversation and just enlightening. Um
Speaker 1: just he brought so much passion, wisdom, and energy to
Speaker 1: this conversation. I honestly wish like our oldest kids, like
Speaker 1: my oldest daughter was older, like even older almost, so
Speaker 1: I could put some of this to work, like immediately. Yes,
Speaker 1: like some of what I learned I want to implement.
Speaker 1: I think sometimes when you sit on knowledge like us,
Speaker 1: is just like, well, this is good to know now
Speaker 1: that like I wish I could put this to use,
Speaker 1: you know, like I wantant to start saving myself money
Speaker 1: now makes me want to adopt a fourteen year old
Speaker 1: do it? Dude? I can implement it, but that would
Speaker 1: you know, throw off some other family dynamics. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I talked to your wife about that first before I
Speaker 1: need one. Um. But yeah, what was your big takeaway
Speaker 1: from our convo with Ron? Well? I liked at the
Speaker 1: end he we you know, we asked about community college,
Speaker 1: and he specifically, you know, made a point to say
Speaker 1: that he wasn't against community college in order to save money,
Speaker 1: but how a high percentage of folks who go to
Speaker 1: community college don't actually end up transferring to a state
Speaker 1: or private school. Uh. And he said that if that
Speaker 1: is your approach, if that's what you're gonna do, you're
Speaker 1: gonna go to your local community college to save some money,
Speaker 1: get some of the pro acquisites, some of the base
Speaker 1: classes out of the way. You need to make sure
Speaker 1: that you have in mind your goal, your end goal.
Speaker 1: You need to know your why. And specifically he said
Speaker 1: how it's good to have a specific school in mind.
Speaker 1: You know, like you're not just going to community college
Speaker 1: to save money, so that you don't have to pay
Speaker 1: that money to where to what school? You know, like,
Speaker 1: have a have a school in mind, even have a
Speaker 1: specific degree in mind. There's nothing worse than not having
Speaker 1: credits to transfer when you're like, because this is totally
Speaker 1: gonna work out, you're paying twice, uh and you're doing
Speaker 1: twice to work twice the money. But my gosh, and
Speaker 1: and he recommended to specifically be in touch with an
Speaker 1: advisor at that target school, be in touch with some
Speaker 1: checking within multiple times every semester. Make sure that the
Speaker 1: classes you're taking, make sure that the classes you're you're
Speaker 1: signing up for for next semester that those are all
Speaker 1: going to apply to whatever degree that you're looking to
Speaker 1: pursue at that specific school. It's going to give you
Speaker 1: so much clarity. Uh. And you're on a path, you're
Speaker 1: you're you're on a track, versus just kind of going
Speaker 1: to community college and feeling like, all right, let's I'm
Speaker 1: gonna lay in somewhere and not totally sure where. But
Speaker 1: that has a ton of negative consequences down the road
Speaker 1: because things may not line up, those credits may not count. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I think my big takeaway from our our conversation here,
Speaker 1: let me hear it, was that the average discount at
Speaker 1: a private school, it's like it's so big, that's huge, right,
Speaker 1: And so I think like that the biggest thing, the
Speaker 1: way that translates for or our listeners out there, is
Speaker 1: if your kid is excited to go to a school,
Speaker 1: don't necessarily let that sticker price make you think that
Speaker 1: you can't afford it, because that sticker price doesn't reflect
Speaker 1: what most people pay to go to that university. And
Speaker 1: I think sometimes people can be like, man, that school
Speaker 1: is really expensive, and it is. But um, at the
Speaker 1: same time, there are all sorts of merit aid opportunities
Speaker 1: for you to go to that school at a greatly
Speaker 1: reduced price, and not only merit aid, but the need
Speaker 1: based aid as well. But like, I think it's important
Speaker 1: just to just to be aware of the fact that
Speaker 1: there's a game that you're playing. You know, it's it's
Speaker 1: sort of like, I mean, we don't recommend for folks
Speaker 1: like everyone to go out there and buy a new car.
Speaker 1: Like for some folks that make sense, not for everybody,
Speaker 1: But if you go to a dealership, you you have
Speaker 1: to know that you're you're playing a game. You know,
Speaker 1: like there's a there's a process, there's a dance, and
Speaker 1: there's a way to win, and then there's like an
Speaker 1: uninformed way to lose exactly. And we do not want
Speaker 1: folks to be uninformed and losing when it comes to
Speaker 1: you know, what they're spending on their kids college, or
Speaker 1: what students are out there, what loans they're taking out
Speaker 1: in order to to go to that school. It's so
Speaker 1: important and I'm glad that we were able to talk
Speaker 1: about that today with Ron. I'm also glad that you
Speaker 1: and I we got to share a different type of beer.
Speaker 1: This is This isn't a style that we normally have
Speaker 1: on the show, but I'm glad we were able to
Speaker 1: switch it up. Man. Yeah, So this one was called
Speaker 1: Austar cop By Scepter Brewing Arts, and this is a
Speaker 1: brewer that's like right around the corner from us. I
Speaker 1: haven't actually been to this brewer yet, but I figured
Speaker 1: i'd i'd pick up a can at our local bottle shop.
Speaker 1: And and this is a Southern oyster rouch beer. I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure rouch beers are smoked beers, and this one
Speaker 1: definitely has like a smoked flavor going on. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: were your thoughts on this beer? Yeah? So immediately, like
Speaker 1: you can't deny the fact that there's smoke going on
Speaker 1: in this beer. It's like it's almost like a combination
Speaker 1: of Scotch, which certainly has smoky elements to it. Uh
Speaker 1: in a in a beer. But these types of beers
Speaker 1: are made with malts that is like dried over smoke,
Speaker 1: like over an open flame, so it imparts some of
Speaker 1: that flavor in the malts. Uh, and you certainly taste
Speaker 1: that in this beer. Uh. And I don't know if
Speaker 1: all like oyster beers are also rosh beers. I don't
Speaker 1: think so. But like an oyster stout before, Uh, it
Speaker 1: loved that, Yeah, I think like so traditionally oysters like
Speaker 1: they lend themselves I think to like the clarifying process
Speaker 1: of the beers. But now I think like literally there
Speaker 1: are like oyster flavors that get imparted into the beer,
Speaker 1: but it tastes a touch briny. I'm not gonna lie. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: so the fact that this combines a rosch beer, which
Speaker 1: is a like a smoke beer with oyster flavors, it
Speaker 1: totally makes me feel like I'm just like slurping down
Speaker 1: some oysters that were like roasted over like an open
Speaker 1: wood fire. Uh. It definitely makes me think of my
Speaker 1: favorite Scotch, which is Talisker, which has a super briny
Speaker 1: note to it along with a smoke. This is like
Speaker 1: the beer equivalent to Talisker, if there's any Scotch fans
Speaker 1: out there who like that type of beer. But I
Speaker 1: really enjoyed it. Man, this is not a style we
Speaker 1: normally drink, but I'm glad that you and I got
Speaker 1: to to share this one today. Yeah, what were your
Speaker 1: thoughts on it? Though? Overall, it's definitely a funky style
Speaker 1: and it's definitely one I think I've literally had one
Speaker 1: other rotch beer before in my life, um, maybe two,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, the smoked element of a beer is
Speaker 1: is interesting because that's not what you're expecting going into it.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of our listeners who are like
Speaker 1: craft beer novices, they might not be into the speer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: m it might be a little too out there for them,
Speaker 1: but unless you really like barbecue. But it's kind of
Speaker 1: that earthy, smokey, you brininess to it, and um, you know,
Speaker 1: I thought it was like fascinating. It was kind of
Speaker 1: funny to get to try something that was completely off
Speaker 1: the beaten path on the show today. Absolutely. All right,
Speaker 1: Well that's gonna do it for this episode. For folks
Speaker 1: that want show notes for this episode, there's a lot
Speaker 1: that we're gonna link to and that's up on our
Speaker 1: website at how to money dot com. That's right, and Joel,
Speaker 1: that's gonna be it for this episode until next time.
Speaker 1: Best Friends Out, best Friends Out,