Originally Posted by
duke79
Admittedly, at many of the wealthy, well-endowed schools (including Duke), about 50 to 55% of the kids receive some form of financial aid/grants/scholarship, so those schools can claim that most of the kids (or their parents) are not really paying the full, listed cost of attending the school (I've seen some estimates that the average "rate" paid is somewhere in the range of $30,000 to $35,000 per year at private colleges and universities). BUT I'm still amazed that, at most of the top schools, 45 to 50% of the students (and their parents) ARE paying the full cost (and when you take into account the associated costs of attending college - books, spending money, clothes, transportation, etc., it works out to $85,000 to $90,000 per year and this is an after-tax amount, so for many people, you would need to earn $140,000 or so to net out the $90,000 needed to pay one year's worth of costs). It makes you realize that we DO live in an affluent society (for some people, at least).
Interestingly, I looked at the employee/professor ratio for a small, top-rated private college (2,000 students) near where I live (Williams College), and, there, the ratio of non-teaching employees to "teachers" is about 3.5 to 1 BUT the cost of attending Williams is almost identical to Duke. I don't know if they are more generous with financial aid than Duke (and they have a very large endowment).