Let me sing you a song of the sorrows of the semi-affluent looking at college prices.
Yeah, semi-affluent looking down the barrel of paying for a four-year private college here.
On the one hand, it's an amazing reveal and explains a lot.
It also feels like yet another place where businesses [sic] use their greater access to information and other organizational advantages to soak the customers more efficiently. I still hate paying a different price for an airline seat than the person next to me, but at least the airline doesn't make me fill out forms and send evidence of every cent of income and every asset down to the last used car before setting their price. (We have one college age kid and one 17 year old, no private college tuition yet but it could happen.)
What I anticipate: "Oh," says the college financial aid office "you lived in a smaller house than your peers, got and paid off a 15 year mortgage instead of a 30 year one, scrimped and saved, taught summers and put some money in the bank? How much money? Oh, yes, we'll take that." I guess the song I'm singing is proactively paranoid and bitter.
I don't think using the discount rate as a stand-in for the cost of college makes a lot of sense.
Come to think, I'm not sure how it makes any sense at all. It doesn't reveal what college costs. It doesn't reveal what people pay, because the average is close to meaningless. I'm not sure what it does reveal other than colleges have massively increased financial support for non-elites over the past half century, which tells us what we already knew: we've gone a long way toward democratizing higher education in the United States in that time.
I think I'll stop serial-posting and re-read the Drum post instead.
I don't know what to make of this, but: I think that if we'd gone back to yesterday and discussed this question, most of us would not have guessed this state of affairs. So it means *something*. I don't know what, though. But something.
Okay, second time through: by "college," he means "second- and third-tier private colleges and universities"; by "costs," he means "how much tuition people pay out of pocket at those schools"; and by "fascinating," you mean "not especially interesting once you think about how little this data tells us."
Or maybe I'm too close to all of this and missing the forest for the trees.
You seem a bit tense. Maybe tomorrow start your day with Eggo™ Brunch in a Jar Waffles & Syrup Sippin' Cream.
Private secondary school with no scholarship has gone up a lot. 1989 - boarding school tuition 13k. 1993 13k and with board it was 18k. Now day school is 60k. I was talking to a grade school classmate of mine who lives in Boston who is in a funny spot with her kids' education. She's a psychiatris with a part-time job at a non profit agency for developmentally disabled kids and a solo cash practice, and her husband is an ER doc, and they sent kids to private school, because they live in Boston. I think they would have been fine with Boston Latin or public school in an inner suburb, but she really wanted her daughter to go to a school with art classes, and it wasn't offered. It was tight for them, and they felt poor because of the affluence of classmates (I think there was some Moderna money).
But now, her daughter is going to Ob*erl*in, and she is getting some kind of merit scholarship. This means that college will be less of a burden than high school even though they would not be eligible for financial aid based on their incomes. I don't feel bad for them, but in the 1980's people like that were quite comfortably upper income and could pretty easily afford private school, to save for college without needing to worry much about financial aid *and* afford some kind of vacation. This year, they skipped even a staycation.
At least there's a Ben Franklin next to the college.
10: I'm sorry your friends are either uninformed or lying about their motivation, but this for instance looks like a cool program and their information shows that in 2007-2008, when a current senior would have been about 2 years old, only 11% of Boston public schools didn't offer art instruction, which is awful but clearly not universal.
Augh, I should have stayed gone! link [Link fixed by the management. LB]
My phone hates me and I give up. Point is, Google works fine for other people anyway and not just me.
I also deleted a ton about how hard it is for me to imagine normative annual family vacations. But I also know I've made the choices I live with now.
Let's all list our SAT scores and rationalizations for using private schools.
k drum adds one thing of immense value to my life - consistently providing the counterexample of my father, i.e., a white dude of a certain age who drifts rightward but feels fine about that, even congratulates himself, by developing clever aka facile & self serving "but actually" patronizing takes. i think my father has been saved from this common fate by his hard scrabble youth as compared to drum's solidly middle class to umc upbringing, & by having kids & step kids who are struggling decade after decade to make progress against what has been a relentlessly deteriorating economic situation for middling working people. among his 5 kids & step kids two of us have made decent headway. things are varying degrees of grim for the rest. broaden this out to cousins & the ratio of success plummets.
I sometimes wondered why my dad went the other way as he got older. It may have just been that the world is driving anyone who pays attention that way and he was too in-contact with the world to fall for delusions. Stuff like that flat-tax troll was spouting bothered him because my dad expected elected officials to see to the functioning of the government because he was aware of how many people would be impoverished without it.
But maybe he read Kevin Drum? I know he read Eric Rauchway, but I hope for his sake he never found Crooked Timber.
I'm sure there were other motivations. She sent her daughter to the school we went to, although her daughter didn't like it and transferred to a different school. I think she regrets the decision to send her kids to private schools for financial reasons- the point is that the finances of education look very different than when we were kids. Other people might have made a decision to buy in Brookline. I don't know which public school she was referring to, but there was a profile of one recently which did not have much in the way of extracurriculars. They were making the point that there's a lot of angst about who gets into Boston Latin (which is not undeserved) but not enough effort to make the experiences at all BPS high schools good quality. You don't necessarily go to your local school.. BPS is a really screwed up system in ways that are not true of Cambridge or Somerville.
That does look cool, although once a week is not a lot.
I also mentioned her, because I think that "merit" scholarships have taken on a new meaning. A doctor I work with who has 2 kids and a stay at home spouse was pretty shocked at how much he's expected to pay for his daughter's education (he recognizes that he makes more than a lot of people) noted that certain places offered her money off in the form of merit scholarships. He said "what merit? I know what her grades are; they're fine but not outstanding." I think they do that to attract more middle class students which improves their rankings and just goes to show what a stupid game the way higher ed is financed in this country is. I think his salary is very UMC, like 200k, but he has a semi disabled older son and student loans of his own to pay off and a house in MA, so being expected to pay $70k per year out of pocket as his contribution before loans seemed like a lot to him. He had a number he was willing to pay before she had to take out loans, and it was not as high as what the schools thought it should be. And I don't think he was being unreasonable given the world we live in and the realities of retirement and elder care.
Thorn - please don't stay gone. I've missed you and didn't want to alienate you.
more middle class students which improves their rankings
I don't think there are any rankings that would be improved by having more middle-class students (maybe SWPL Quarterly has rankings?). I think the situation you're describing is the one Drum finds so fascinating: second- and third-tier private* schools have high discount rates, including offering aid of one kind or another to middle- and upper-middle class kids.
* I'm assuming your doctor friend's kid was being offered merit aid by private schools.
21: People have said that Northeastern pursued that strategy. 30 years ago, still, and certainly 50 years ago, it was a YMCA commuter school with night classes which had as much prestige for undergrad as a community college in California. They raised their prices and built dorms and are now considered a "respectable" private university.
If people are saying Northeastern rose in the rankings because their admissions folks managed to recruit more middle-class students, those people are wrong(ish)--or at least they don't understand causation. Northeastern rose in the rankings by changing its mission and recruiting strategies and attracting more students with HIGHER SAT SCORES. Were some, perhaps even the majority, of those students middle-class and above? I'm sure they were. For what it's worth, many other private schools gamed the rankings in similar ways: Vanderbilt, WashU, USC, etc. But now that SAT scores are being devalued in the rankings--the inverse is true of social mobility--some of those schools are starting to fall. I don't know what will happen to Northeastern, because I think it still does well on the social mobility metrics (which, unsurprisingly, are controversial).
"Gamed" sounds too pejorative there. I don't mean it in quite that way. The rankings are, as most right-thinking people believe, largely bullshit. They cry out to be gamed by schools that see opportunities to use them as levers.
Seems like if you rule out the idea of going to in-state public schools (for whatever reason) college is going to be expensive, maybe more than what you feel is justified based on however you came up with that idea. Not to say that college hasn't gotten more expensive across the board, but sometimes people learn information that they didn't have before and conclude that the world must have changed suddenly rather than their understanding of it.
Getting into in-state public schools is not a given. At least not the better ones.
From the link in the OP:
²Keep in mind that this is solely for tuition and fees. It doesn't count either books or room and board, both of which have increased at a higher rate.
I'd be interested in what the numbers looked like if you included those. When I was in college 18 years ago (ugh), I remember how the bookstore bills could easily be several hundred dollars depending on your major and how careless your professors were. Or in some cases, how greedy. And that cost is per semester, of course, since publishers would reissue textbooks as frequently as possible. I assume these trends haven't got better. As for room and board, real estate is expensive too.
Middle class people cannot afford private college unless they are able to save up around $150,000 or $200,000. before the kid goes to college.
I saved some but felt like if I had made it to $200,000 maybe I should get a down payment on a house for my kid maybe rather than get them a fancier BA that would eventually allow them to make a down payment on a house? I
I don't know the income level for middle class. For me, I felt middle class when I could afford a sandwich whenever I wanted a sandwich. Median income I guess? We were always below median income, sometimes a lot below, but our area is richer.
It's 70-80 thou for college so maybe you'll get a scholarship of around $35,000--which seems amazing. (I don't know if having saved a lot will reduce your scholarship.) But then that leaves about $40,000. For most middle class people, that's your whole take home salary. Middle class, I assume, means you can afford your bills from your take home salary without much left over. So it would be hard to belt tighten enough to take on that burden.
But the public university where we live is usually just as good--and around half what the 'middle class scholarship' price is.
The only middle class friends I know with kids at private university are either people with rich parents who pay it or parents who are paid very low or unemployed so most of the tuition is covered.
This is obviously anecdotal and possibly not helpful as a result. I am curious about parent incomes for kids at prestige schools. People who are middle class just don't go to them, as far as I can tell. Perhaps if your child is a star athlete?
One reason middle class people can't save is you often have SOME periods of unemployment, or a healthcare crisis, so used savings to cover that.
Possibly things like universal healthcare or childcare and other efforts would increase the middle class savings rate.
Plus many states are actively undermining their regional universities, to ensure no one first generation realistically can compete.
27: 25 years ago my generation of cousins did it by being exceptional, getting Pell grants, or by ridiculous amounts of saving -- but that last option is increasingly out of reach.
22: Building dorms made it more attractive to middle class students with higher SAT scores who wanted the Boston-area college experience and would pay higher tuition. The original co-op model was supposed to allow people to work, gain on-the-job experience, and support themselves through college. It's probably a better school now. The buildings are certainly nicer, but there isn't exactly an institution that fills its old niche.
Tufts has moved up a lot in the rankings too, but it hasn't completely changed its character in the same way.
Heebie U (third tier SLAC) has a giant discount rate of the kind described here, roughly 1/3 the sticker price. It's weird, I don't have a larger point.
Northeastern coops are awesome. Many of the companies I know about like to hire them and potentially bring them in full time after graduation.
My first instinct reading this and having recently paid our first tuition bill I thought Of course it went up. But then I saw the point about different tiers and that was our experience- some schools offered our kid scholarships which he hadn't applied for and now I see it's part of this trend.
Anyway we're fortunate enough to be mostly in good shape with kids starting to attend. God bless RSUs.
I think colleges should be sensitive to the needs of parents to buy some land where they built a cob cabin and to understand that you really need like 10 acres so no one can see you as a grown adult playing with mud.
26: my take is that textbook costs peaked 5-10 years ago and now instead of being "forced" (in air quotes because many students didn't buy the required text) to cough up $250 for book they'll use for one semester, they now use or "rent" a digital copy for $70 or $45. And I think even the hardcover editions are cheaper now. I don't know about room and board costs, and the book thing is just for a couple courses I'm involved in, might be local instead of general.
Newt has had a couple of professors start the year by being outraged that there are websites where pirated copies of textbooks are available, and writing on the board the address of the website where students should Absolutely Not go to download a copy of the text for the class.
FWIW, there are an absolute boatload of perfectly good to great open source math books, and there is no respectable reason to prohibit professors from using these, imho.
FWIW, there are an absolute boatload of perfectly good to great open source math books, and there is no respectable reason to prohibit professors from using these, imho.
Friend of mine is an economist at the Fed who teaches an intermediate macro class ad an adjunct "professor of the practice" that is the less mathy version which no real professor wants to teach. I think he refused to use the most recent edition of whatever book he uses because he thought it was a sin to make people all go out and buy brand new books goven how little things had changed.
32: Tim's boss's wife had RSUs from when she worked for your company. That is how they bought a house in my old town last year while still owning two condos in Camberville as investment properties.
Clearly the best way to determine if a PDF of a textbook is illegitimate is to provide the address of said PDF for verification purposes. Once satisfied that it is not legitimate, students will simply close the window.
I once wanted a text that cost several hundred dollars. A co-worker from China got it for me as a pdf. Apparently, to protect themselves from mono-lingual lawyers, the files were only indexed in Chinese.
We are under a lot of pressure to have all of our course materials be free, and I get that books are expensive, but sometimes anthologies are useful and $40 for a class is not actually insane.
|| Wow, check out these gentrifiers working that "hike rents, upgrade the appliances, and turn over the old tenants" model. |>
Do college financial aid offices care if a lifetime surplus is kept in cash vs. in investment properties, I wonder?
I'm hoping someone pops up here to explain why textbooks actually should cost an arm and a leg, students should be forced to buy lots of new ones every term, and anyone who disagrees is a nitwit.
YMCA commuter school with night classes which had as much prestige for undergrad as a community college in California
I hear some people who go to community college in California later go on to get PhDs at rather impressive institutions.
46: it's just textbook manufacturers trying to squeeze out the maximum profit. I don't know why you say anyone who disagrees is a nitwit. Teachers and administrators turning against this business model (see Cala's post) is a large part of why it finally is breaking down. Shorter: you've never heard of capitalism, then?
I think Ajay in 46 was setting forth a bunch of things that he would perceive as likely to start a fight, rather than endorsing them himself.
the average is close to meaningless
Right, Count Cookie, I get that, but I'm still surprised (fascinated, even) that the average has stayed roughly the same over the last 30 years. Given funding cuts, facilities build-outs, and all the rest of the stuff that's normally blamed for "skyrocketing tuition", I wouldn't have guessed that the money going in via tuition has stayed roughly the same, regardless of which group of students is paying it. You're obviously closer to this stuff than most of the rest of us, so maybe this is old news, but it was new news to me.
Its fun to make up a guy and bust on them for how wrong they are.
Given funding cuts, facilities build-outs, and all the rest of the stuff that's normally blamed for "skyrocketing tuition", I wouldn't have guessed that the money going in via tuition has stayed roughly the same, regardless of which group of students is paying it.
The money going in via tuition *per student* has stayed roughly the same - but since 1992 US enrolled student numbers have gone up from 14.5 million to 19 million. Roughly a third. That might solve the puzzle of cost to the customer staying flat but higher spending by the provider?
And, of course, over the same period real median average income has gone up by about 21% - so even if the inflation-adjusted cost of college has stayed constant, the affordability has improved. (Hence why more people can afford to go!)
47: I wasn't knocking them in any way. I think they're great. That's not what Northeastern wanted to be though. In fact, in some ways I think that Northeastern's transformation is a real loss, because it wasn't for people with a lot of money who wanted to live in dorms, and a lot of people who might have benefited from the old Northeastern don't have a replacement.
VW says that they weren't aiming to admit more middle class people, but i think that was how they were able to raise their fees and therefore part of their strategy.
Speaking of rising incomes. I saw an attempt at a deeply researched YouTube thinkvid about the decline of automats and diners, which mentioned modern fast food but avoided the obvious observation that it is the modern equivalent.
I particularly disliked the implication that eating out sucks now and people are impoverished because the creator's aesthetic preference of restaurant no longer exists, and used the same 100-year consumption data they did to make some comparisons of my own. It was an even better picture than I imagined I'd find. The average 2021-22 New York MSA household's remaining income after food, housing, clothing, and transportation was ten times more, adjusted for inflation, than the average NYC household in 1918-19's income after just food, housing, and clothing (2021-22, $61k "surplus" after $117k income; 1918-19 adjusted, $14k after $34k income.) Also the average NYC household spends 25% less, in aggregate, on food (and presumably eats a lot more overall, and more out relative to in).
Obviously I wish medians rather than averages were available.
Correction, the 1918-19 "surplus" was $6.6k after adjustment. $14k was what they spent on food, which went down to $10.6k.
I feel like "fast casual" is what ultimately killed lots of diners, not older styles of fast food.
What actually are the defining features of a diner, beyond the floorplan?
I can get a fast food lunch at Wendy's for $5, which the inflation calculator says is 32 cents in 1920 money. Free tiny frosty, too, since I bought the keytag. Anyway, I can buy a lot of lunches.
58: That seems possible, yes. Fast casual feels just that hair classier, despite coming from the same people.
59: That's a good question, and I'm not sure I have an answer beyond "I know it when I see it." Some features:
1. No tablecloths, and all or most of the tables are booths rather than freestanding. Very often an Art Deco (even if very bastardized) look.
2. Breakfast served all day, and a very predictable set of standard American breakfast options: eggs, bacon/sausage, toast/muffins, potatoes, some kind of cereal/oatmeal, I'd be surprised if there wasn't fruit salad. I would expect to walk into a diner and be able to order any 'normal' breakfast without looking at the menu.
3. A predictable set of sandwich/burger options. Here, there are more possibilities, so I wouldn't be able to count on not looking at the menu, but I would expect hamburgers, BLT, tuna melt, club sandwich.
4. A surprisingly broad array of other sort of general American food menu options, which will generally be lousy but may be good at any given diner, just don't count on it.
5. The diner is probably run by immigrants, and there will be some options on the menu from their home cuisine, which will usually be pretty good. In NYC, this used to reliably be Greek, and there's still some of that but less than there used to be. Now I see more diners with some Mexican options.
But I'm not sure how to draw a bright line around what's a diner versus not a diner, just a cheap restaurant.
Speaking of automation, the airport has a robotic hand washing machine after you get through security. But once to go into the restrooms, it's back to century-old technology for washing your hands. They may as well have a chamber pot.
My closest diner meets all 1-5, except it closes after lunch (inner suburb's downtown, go figure). Also it has the wood finishes and dense kitsch of a TGI Friday's. But not nearly as new or shiny. A big old decrepit Dutch door in front.
I'm curious about a similar list for the "house of pizza" genre. I took a friend group of five teens and a tween (three boys three girls- maybe for discussion in the new thread) to one last night.
- Is this a northeast thing or more widespread?
- typical menu is pizza, hot or cold sandwiches, salads (always including greek), and also maybe a fried submenu including fried clams.
- usually have some kind of multi pizza deal. I amazingly fed the six kids and myself for $57 and had a whole pizza left over at the end, and they said they were pretty hungry before I ordered.
62.5: Interesting. I wouldn't have gotten that from Hollywood. Would that be similar countrywide?
While I'm ethnographizing, anyone read this?
https://uncpress.org/book/9781469655383/an-environmental-history-of-the-civil-war/
Oh, and mine is definitely Mexican-run. Or conceivably Californios.
What's a diner? seemed tailor-made for chatgpt:
66: That's a good question. I think maybe off the coasts you replace the immigrant food with weird local food. Like, if you're someplace where you aren't a local, and you see strange local options that you couldn't get at home, those will probably be good.
And what Minivet implied in 64 should have been on the list -- normally, a diner should have very long hours.
This may be informative as well: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj-D0jc17D0
The diner is probably run by immigrants, and there will be some options on the menu from their home cuisine, which will usually be pretty good. In NYC, this used to reliably be Greek, and there's still some of that but less than there used to be. Now I see more diners with some Mexican options.
Hmm. I can also picture lots of Kountry Kitchens which are basically diners, but not run by immigrants.
Avoid the ones where they find a reason to put in a third word starting with K into the name.
Nothing in 68 seems wrong to me.
65: We have one of those near us, without the clams. Fried clams are not common in local menus. I think the owner is Iranian, but the food is pizza and sandwiches and gyros.
Whence the breakfast all day?
Breakfast things are all easy to make fresh on a grill? The menu is going to be sort of conceptually split between griddled things made to order, and the rest of the giant menu which is all premade in the freezer.
As the subsequent discussion shows, diners are very much still around, though maybe no longer as central to the restaurant ecosystem as they used to be, so the whole premise of the video Minivet mentioned seems weird. Automats, yes, are totally gone and definitely were replaced by fast food (which, fascinatingly, is actually more labor-intensive).
Happy birthday teo! I won't say belated because it's probably still last week in Alaska.
There was a modern automat that opened near here but the pandemic killed it. There have been other attempts using actual robotics but don't know if those are still around either.
I worked in a beach club restaurant one summer and it's eye-opening seeing how many things on the menu are just complete pre-made dishes from the giant food suppliers (usually Cisco). I read their catalog one day and recognized many things I'd eaten at other restaurants.
We have a sushi bar with a conveyor belt, but I've never been.
69: And what Minivet implied in 64 should have been on the list -- normally, a diner should have very long hours.
There are a class of "breakfast" places that are dineresque but which tend to close at 2 or 3 PM. Not sure if there is a distinct category for them. Been travelling in rural areas a fair bit recently so am quite aware of these and their generally not-what-helps-me-in-the-moment hours.
62: there are dome diners around here that are quite good but not exactly cheap. Meatloaf is kind of a classic menu item. Often baked haddock too.
Some are in the old rail-car inspired buildings.
McDonalds is kind of expensive compared to Wendy's.
I've noticed sandwiches and take-out fast casual food has gotten a lot more expensive post pandemic. But I think we had artificially cheap restaurant meals for a whille. Like, in the 80's going out to dinner as s family was more of a treat. Wages were just too low in those industries for the past 20-25 years.
Dome diners woukd be an interesting concept. I meant "some".
"McDonalds is kind of expensive compared to Wendy's."
Huh I had no idea. I've almost never gone to a fast food place other than BK and McD. I did notice they're kind of expensive compared to what I remembered as generic fast food meal.
A couple examples of local rail-car-likediners.
There's also a phenomenon of sort of intentional retro "diners" that are not functional cheap restaurants, they're more expensive and a sort of touristic diner experience. Those give me the creeps in general, but some of them aren't that terrible. But they're not diners, they're "diners".
giant food suppliers (usually Cisco
"I can't believe they really serve all 802.11 items listed on the menu!"
There was a period pre-pandemic where I was wanting to eat at a diner locally in the south Bay Area and the options seemed to be
- really busy place that's basically breakfast on the weekends, close before 2
- "diner" in the retro style
- outpost of a chain like Denny's set up in a former traditional diner building
- outpost of a chain like Denny's in a building that looked like it was built for the chain
I went to a diner in Portland in 2017 while at a conference that fit the traditional diner criteria. It wasn't busy and I was informed by a Portland colleague that it closed shortly thereafter.
Oh yeah Sysco. I'm surprised the lawyers at two large similarly named complies haven't tried to destroy the other.
Have I told the story of the time we went to a strip club in high school? We were curious, so we went to a place called Cafe Risque, whose billboards you may have seen up and down I-75.
In my memory, it was a brightly lit diner. I think there was a law that you couldn't serve booze if you had full nudity, so Cafe Risque just embraced the no-booze and went full diner. Like, bright overhead lights and tables and the whole nine yards. Very much like, "Nice tits! And is there syrup for my pancakes?"
Apparently it was started by the same people who also started the Skeeter's local chain of diners, and the customer experience definitely tracks.
I can't tell from the internet if it has closed down or not.
Apparently the closest thing the US has to a homegrown maid cafe is a place in Vegas where waitresses in naughty-nurse outfits deliver competitive-eating-level meals of ridiculous size in a faux-medical register (IV bags of wine, etc.) and then spank you if you fail the challenge.
If the bottle of water on the night stand in a hotel says "With compliments", it's free, right? I'm asking because the smoked almonds are $14 for a very small bag. Maybe they priced in the true cost of the water to grow the almonds?
Anyone else keep reading this post title as A Fisher Price Surprise?
62.5 picture of the owner with Telly Savalas on the wall behind the cash register.
I found the gum from when I wore this suit last time.
Apparently, 2019 was a bad year for the Trident region.
96 Orbach was Greek? No, it was always Telly.
The 70s were a more loving time, but not in a way we can understand.
91: That's hilarious. My grandmother lived in Myrtle Beach. We'd drive once a year or so to visit, and after she died I spent the summer of 2003 in her house by myself. I remember seeing billboards for a place by that name frequently but never got around to going.
Google informs me that there have been places by that name in North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, and they all seem to be closed. Interestingly, the logos seems different, as if they're unaffiliated.
really busy place that's basically breakfast on the weekends, close before 2
I think the term "luncheonette" applies here, but is mostly out of use? Like, there's big overlap between diners as described above and luncheonettes, and the only essential differences are 1. hours, and 2. presence of dinner-type items. Luncheonettes often have daily/blue plate specials that are fork-and-knife meals (especially meatloaf), but otherwise everything is either breakfast or a sandwich.
IME less likely to be immigrant-run, partly because the immigrant advantage for 24-hour (or 18-hour) restaurants is extended families/networks for labor. A luncheonette only runs one shift (or two half-shifts), greatly simplifying the labor equation.
I feel like any day now someone is going to pioneer the switcheroo restaurant - some kind of fold-up or quick-change furnishings so it feels like a breakfast/lunch place until mid-afternoon when it switches to a dinner place. Labor supply and turning the kitchen over would be an issue, but with rents it makes sense.
I've definitely been to ethnic places that dress up for dinner, eg adding tablecloths.
Anyway, 27.1 is definitely not true. Our annual out of pocket for a SLAC* is in the $25-30k range, which we're managing with a blend of savings, out of pocket, a little help from family, and small student loans (the less-onerous ones that don't start charging interest until graduation). I think our savings were only $80k or something when Iris started, maybe less, certainly not more.
*sticker price $73k inc. room & board