Figuratively Speaking: Survey: Families lean more on college financial aid

Percentage of parents who have encouraged their children to excel in academics in hopes of earning merit scholarships: 72

Percentage of parents who are counting on their children receiving scholarship and/or grant money: 87

Footing the tuition bill

Percentage of U.S. college students who say it will take 10 years or longer to pay off their student loans after graduation, according to a survey conducted by Hartford Financial Services Group: 14

Percentage of U.S. college students who say it will take five to 10 years: 20

Percentage of U.S. college students who say it will take one to five years: 30

Percentage of U.S. college students who say it will take less than one year: 19

Percentage of parents who say that paying for their child’s college education is at least somewhat important to them, according to a survey conducted for Futuretrust: 91

Percentage of parents who say they have actually saved as much for college as they had planned: 9

Percentage of parents who say that they are absolutely certain they will save enough for their child’s college education in the next 10 years: 13

Calculating college costs

Average tuition, room and board (for in-state students) at the nation’s four-year public colleges and universities for an entire academic year (2005–06), according to the U.S. Census Bureau: $13,425

Average tuition, room and board at the nation’s four-year private colleges and universities for one academic year (2005-2006): $36,510

Best business schools

Ranks of the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton), Virginia (McIntire), UC Berkeley (Haas) and Emory (Goizueta) among the top undergraduate business schools in the United States, according to a survey conducted by BusinessWeek magazine: 1, 2, 3, 4

Students’ key concerns

Percentage of U.S. students attending college who ranked “making ends meet financially” as their No. 1 concern, according to a study conducted by Key Bank: 25

Percentage who ranked “workload” as their No. 1 concern: 20

Percentage who ranked “getting good grades” as their No. 1 concern: 16

Work force preparations

Percentage of U.S. students who say that completing an internship is “extremely” important for future career success, according to a survey conducted by Vault Inc.: 82

Percentage of U.S. registered voters who say that the skills students need to be prepared for the jobs of the 21st century are different from what they needed 20 years ago, according to a national poll conducted by Public Opinion Strategies and Peter D. Hart Research Associates on behalf of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills: 80

Percentage of voters who say that schools have done only a fair or poor job keeping up with changing educational needs: 60

Employee training

Percentage of U.S. workers who say they have the necessary education and training to get ahead in their current career, according to a 2006 study conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press: 57

Percentage of U.S. workers who say they have taken special courses or retraining to improve their job skills: 72

Back-to-school spending

Estimated total value of all U.S. back-to-school spending for 2007, according to a study conducted by BIGresearch: $18.4 billion

Total value of back-to-school spending per U.S. family: $563.49

Rank of clothing and accessories among the largest spending categories: 1

College-bound dreams

Rank of New York University, Harvard, Stanford and Princeton as the school students most often named as the “dream college” they wish they could attend if acceptance or cost weren’t issues, according to The Princeton Review’s 2007 “College Hopes and Worries Survey”: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Rank of Stanford, Princeton, Harvard and Brown as the school parents most named as the “dream college” they wish their child could attend if acceptance or cost weren’t issues: 1, 2, 3, 4

Idle Thought

“The more intelligent and cultured a man is, the more subtly he can humbug himself.”

—Carl Jung, psychiatrist

John MacIntyre is an author and former city magazine editor. His “Figuratively Speaking” column, launched in 1989, is published in more than 40 newspapers and magazines. [[In-content Ad]]