Kari Strouth, a single mom of two living in Randolph, was disappointed that she did not qualify for more financial aid when her two children were in college at the same time. The tuition bills amounted to about $50,000 a year, a huge chunk of her income, then in the low six figures, and she’d only saved about $30,000 in 529 plans.
Her daughter is currently a student at Maine College of Art & Design, and her son graduated from Syracuse University, where she owed about $60,000 for his senior year alone after he lost his merit scholarship. Strouth took out Parent PLUS loans, and drove Uber for extra cash, on top of her former day job in procurement at Harvard University.
“Gig work is a blessing to people like me,” Strouth said. Still, her son graduated with about $90,000 in student loans.
While college tuition is broadly affordable for the rich, who have the wherewithal to pay the bills, and many poor students qualify for significant financial aid, especially at the wealthiest schools and state institutions, it’s a calamity for those in the middle. They face stratospheric prices but aren’t likely to get much help from colleges or the government.
The sticker price for a year at a private college in Massachusetts now exceeds the annual salary of most middle-income earners in the state. College officials say only the wealthiest families pay the full amount, but for those earning $150,000 to $200,000, which is at the upper end of the middle income range in the Boston area, the expected yearly contribution is often north of $30,000 a year, and can be much higher depending on the school.
“What the college thinks you need and what you think you need are often very different figures,” said Shannon Barry Vasconcelos, a college finance coach with Bright Horizons, the child care provider that also advises families on educational matters, including college admissions. “It can be a problem for those families who fall in the middle.”
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New research from Phillip Levine at the Brookings Institution found price increases have made it especially difficult for families on the lower portion of the “higher-end of the income distribution,” Levine said in an interview.
“That is a range that has the most difficulty affording those increases,” Levine said. “They’re subject to the greatest extent of price increases, with income levels that can’t strongly support that.”
The high cost of living in Massachusetts also makes it hard for families to save when kids are young, as experts say they should. Day care costs are exorbitant, sometimes as much or even more than a year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. College tuition and housing are costlier in the Northeast, too — families in the region spent an average of $33,668 on higher education last year, 20 percent more than the national average, according to a 2023 report from student loan provider Sallie Mae.
The Globe checked six popular universities’ online price calculators to see what each school would charge a hypothetical family of four earning $170,000 a year, the equivalent of two average public school teacher salaries, with a $600,000 home, roughly the average Massachusetts home value, and college savings of $20,000. The findings show they could expect to pay anywhere from $32,600 a year to attend Williams College to $45,800 a year for Boston College. UMass Amherst’s price, which falls in between, still costs close to $3,000 a month. And many families have more than one child to put through school.
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To be sure, affording college can be even more challenging for some lower middle income and poor families, particularly if they attend colleges with less robust resources for aid. Financial aid for lower-income families is easier to come by at some of the most selective colleges, though, especially for strong students; those from households earning less than $85,000 a year do not pay anything at all to attend well-endowed schools in the region, including Harvard College. And last fall, Governor Maura Healey stepped in to help less affluent families afford public institutions; she expanded the state’s MASSGrant Plus program, which now covers tuition, fees, and books for students eligible for federal Pell Grants at public universities, and reduces the cost for middle-income families.
Still, many middle- and upper middle-income families have fewer options and often find themselves resorting to large loans.
Although Strouth wishes she and her son did not have to turn to loans, especially private ones with high interest rates, Strouth, whose parents were Cornell University graduates who emphasized the importance of higher education, gets frustrated when she hears people say “you shouldn’t go to a school you can’t afford.”
“That really shouldn’t be the deciding factor,” Strouth said. “If your kid is fortunate enough to get into the school of their dreams, that you know is going to lead to more success, if you can just get through the next four years ... as a parent, you need to figure it out.”
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Laurie and Tom Stanley in Medford tried to plan, but looking back, they say, their efforts to save were almost laughable. They put away $30 a week — $10 per child — for future college costs while their three daughters were growing up, plus whatever else they could scrape together, ultimately saving $16,000 for each of their daughters’ college educations.
“We saved every single dime that we could,” said Laurie Stanley, a nurse at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “We collected bottles and cans, and we’d go weekly to the liquor store [to redeem them] ... every penny we found, their birthday money — everything went into their education accounts.”
Two of their daughters decided to live at home for college to save money and commute to the University of Massachusetts Boston and the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
“We wanted them to come out with good jobs, but with minimal or no loans,” Stanley said.
The couple, who are nearing retirement, have spent $100,000 on sending their youngest daughter, Emily, to a much more expensive school, Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, to study aerospace engineering. They had to dip into their retirement savings to pull it off, said Tom Stanley, a teacher at Lynn Classical High School. Emily, who is currently working as a substitute teacher at her father’s school, recently applied to finish her studies at UMass Lowell while living at home.
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“My only regret is the money,” she said. “As cool as it was to go to school out of state, it’s just too expensive.”
The Stanleys said they spoke with their kids candidly about the high costs of college — something families today are increasingly doing, compared to past generations, said Karen E. Van Voorhis, a financial planner based in Norwell.
“It’s become much more of a collaborative process,” Van Voorhis said.
David Thibault-Muñoz, a Gardner resident who works at Mount Wachusett Community College, said his daughter took a practical approach in her college search. She enrolled at Framingham State last fall as a junior after completing a dual enrollment program in high school, graduating with an associate degree. The family is taking out loans to pay for the two years at Framingham State, which is about half the price of UMass Amherst, where she was also accepted.
“When a student graduates with a lot of debt, they’re several steps away from being able to save money to purchase a first car, to purchase a home,” Thibault-Muñoz said. “It’s harder for young people to get on their feet because they have this debt.”
Some Massachusetts parents continue to make big sacrifices to pay for college.
Juraci Capataz recently left a job she loves working for the Massachusetts attorney general’s office after just a year to earn a higher salary in the private sector so she can afford her son’s college tuition next year. Capataz, a Portuguese immigrant, said her son is hoping to study health care finance at the University of Connecticut next year, a program not offered at UMass.
The family is still waiting to receive their FAFSA information, but Capataz is not expecting much aid beyond loans based on their six-figure income level. UConn currently charges $58,092 for out-of-state students.
Capataz hopes her son could qualify for a lower regional price for residents of the Northeast outside Connecticut in a couple years if he commits to the program, which is not available at UMass.
“We aren’t poor enough for financial aid, not rich enough to write out a check,” Capataz said. “If I didn’t have this opportunity of a job that happened to fall onto my lap, the stress would be so much more.”
Even families that seem to be doing pretty well financially are worried about paying for college. Liz Polay-Wettengel works in public relations, earning about $130,000 a year; her husband David’s job at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt pays $90,000. The reality, though, is that the cost of living in Greater Boston is high, and most of their money goes to paying the bills, she said, not luxuries, and they have a high debt load.
They are still waiting for the financial aid information to come through, but they’re not likely to get much based on their salaries, Polay-Wettengel said. They’ve already decided they can’t afford one of their son’s top choices, Syracuse University, which posts a sticker price of $85,214 a year and has offered him no scholarships. Instead, he has committed to UMass Amherst, which will likely cost more than $140,000 over four years.
“We will figure it out somehow,” Polay-Wettengel said.
Hilary Burns can be reached at hilary.burns@globe.com. Follow her @Hilarysburns.