- This event has passed.
Member Mondays: Ron Lieber presents The Price You Pay for College with with Anand Giridharadas & Priya Parker
January 25, 2021 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Ron Lieber joins us to presents The Price You Pay for College, in conversation with Anand Giridharadas and Priya Parker. This program will take place on Zoom and is co-sponsored by the Community Bookstore and Park Slope Parents.
The New York Times “Your Money” columnist and author of the bestselling The Opposite of Spoiled offers a deeply reported and emotionally honest approach to the biggest financial decision families will ever make: what to pay for college.
Sending a teenager to a flagship state university for four years of on-campus living costs more than $100,000 in many parts of the United States. Meanwhile, many families of freshmen attending selective private colleges will spend triple—over $300,000. With the same passion, smarts, and humor that infuse his hugely popular personal finance column, Ron Lieber offers a much-needed roadmap to help families navigate this difficult and often confusing journey.
Lieber begins by explaining who pays what and why and how the financial aid system got so complicated. He also pulls the curtain back on merit aid, an entirely new form of discounting that most colleges now use to compete with peers.
While price is essential, value is paramount. So what is worth paying extra for, and how do you know when it exists in abundance at any particular school? Is a small college better than a big one? Who actually does the teaching? Given that every college claims to have reinvented its career center, who should we actually believe? He asks the tough questions of college presidents and financial aid gatekeepers that parents don’t know (or are afraid) to ask and summarizes the research about what matters and what doesn’t.
Finally, Lieber calmly walks families through the process of setting financial goals, explaining the system to their children and figuring out the right ways to save, borrow, and bargain for a better deal.
The Price You Pay for College gives parents the clarity they need to make informed choices and helps restore the joy and wonder the college experience is supposed to represent.
Ron Lieber is the Your Money columnist for The New York Times. His most recent book, The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money was a New York Times Bestseller in 2015. He lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with his wife and two daughters and is a proud member of Congregation Beth Elohim.
Anand Giridharadas is the author of Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling. He writes the newsletter, The.Ink, and is an editor-at-large for TIME and was a foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times from 2005 to 2016. He has also written for The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. He is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and a former McKinsey analyst. He has spoken on the main stage of TED. Anand’s writing has been honored by the Society of Publishers in Asia, the Poynter Fellowship at Yale, the 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year award, Harvard University’s Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Priya Parker is helping us take a deeper look at how anyone can create collective meaning in modern life, one gathering a ta time. She is a master facilitator, strategic advisor, acclaimed author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters, and executive producer and host of the New York Times podcast, Together Apart. Trained in the field of conflict resolution, Parker has worked on race relations on American college campuses and on peace processes in the Arab world, southern Africa, and India. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and two children.