“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 alsomakes 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. Collegetuition and housing are costlier in the Northeast, too — families in the regionspent 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.
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 allto 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.
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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.”
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.”
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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.
“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, saidKaren E. Van Voorhis, a financial planner based in Norwell.
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“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 collegetuition 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.
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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.”
Liz Polay-Wettengel’s oldest son is heading to college in the fall but she doesn’t yet know how they will pay for tuition. Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
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.
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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.
Massachusetts voters will not have the opportunity to decide whether to end a decades-long ban on rent control after the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) ruled Tuesday that it must not appear on the November ballot, citing the exemptions for religious organizations included in the question.
The SJC ruled that the initiative petition “impermissibly” relates to religion and religious institutions – something the Massachusetts Constitution states cannot be involved in the initiative petition process.
It’s the second ballot initiative struck down by the SJC in less than a week where the high court cited errors made by Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office, with justices issuing an opinion in May on a third ballot initiative regarding legislative stipends they said should not have been certified the AG’s office.
Last week, the SJC struck from the ballot a measure that would have gradually lowered the state income tax, citing a “misleading summary” authored by Campbell’s office. The SJC sided with Campbell on three other challenges to ballot initiatives certified by her office.
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But even with the Attorney General’s office committing errors on three of six ballot initiative certifications, Campbell is defending her staff, and even calls it a “great record.”
“We have 47 (ballot initiatives) that we approved, we have 44 we certified. We had six challenges, and we got three wrong. I think that’s a great record,” Campbell said when asked by the Herald if the her qualifications, as well as those of her staff, should be called into question.
“That just tells me we have more to do to be better. Any institution, whether it’s media outlets or any industry, if they can get it 100% right every time…that doesn’t happen. We own these mistakes, I own these mistake, and now we’ll move forward to improve our process to get it right the next time,” she said.
When it comes to the rent control decision, Campbell had certified the question for the ballot. She reacted to the court’s ruling to block it shortly after it was posted by the SJC .
“We got the rent control initiative, we certified it. But we, of course, have to respect the court’s decision which was against us, and we got that wrong,” Campbell admitted during her monthly appearance on GBH radio Tuesday morning.
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Campbell went on to say that her office attempted to explain in its summary, which appeared on the petition used to gather required signatures to qualify for the ballot, that religious institutions would be exempt from the law, if it were to pass.
The exemption for religious organizations controlling rental units was part of the language of the original petition.
“The court disagreed and said that even a minor reference to religion was not appropriate for a valid initiative, and we were just reviewing this. Obviously the decision just came out, and I think it was only the second time that the court has broken this standard, so it’s not like it happens frequently,” she said.
The plaintiffs, whom the SJC sided with in its ruling, claimed the petition should be disqualified because “religion is a factor in the application of the law,” citing a legal precedent that is key to the court’s ruling.
“The petition … concerns a generally secular subject matter — rent control. But, by including an express exemption for facilities operated solely for religious purposes, the petition impermissibly makes religion “a factor in [the petition’s] application.” And in order to enforce the proposed law, the exemption would require the government to determine if a facility is “operated solely for . . . religious . . . purposes,” and then make an enforcement decision based on the facility’s religious purpose (or lack thereof),” Justice Frank Gaziano in the SJC decision. “Further, the petition would confer preferential treatment on religious institutions by allowing them to increase rent prices, while limiting rent increases for secular facilities.”
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The AG’s summary of the proposal stated that the rent control measure “would not apply to … units operated for educational, religious, or non-profit purposes.” Campbell had certified the question for the ballot, using a process that she has called “stupid” and said needs to be “revamped.”
Several other organizations involved in the fight for and against rent control are weighed in on the ruling, with rent control proponents calling it “disappointing,” and opponents celebrate.
“This decision is a massive disappointment after all the work that thousands of volunteers and advocates in every corner of the state put into qualifying our rent control initiative for the ballot, but it’s far from the end of our campaign to protect Massachusetts renters from excessive rent hikes,” said New England Community Project Executive Director, who also chairs the Keep Massachusetts Home campaign, adding that the plaintiffs were financed by “equity-backed real estate investment corporations.”
Housing for Massachusetts – a nonprofit organization against the rent control initiative, called it “the nation’s most extreme” rent control proposal in a statement celebrating the ruling.
“Today the Supreme Judicial Court confirmed that the nation’s most extreme rent control proposal was unconstitutional. While we firmly believe that Massachusetts voters were prepared to vote ‘no’ in November, today’s decision puts the issue to rest and protects our housing pipeline and our communities from the proven damage that rent control inflicts,” the organization said. “We are incredibly grateful to the countless small property owners, real estate professionals, elected officials, and community leaders who supported our coalition, and we look forward to working together to create more homes and tackle affordability through real policy solutions.”
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The rent control question was the last of this year’s ballot questions still pending with the SJC.
Meanwhile, the SJC also ruled this week to allow a question to move forward that would switch the state’s primary election system to an all-party primary, proving to be a significant influence on what voters will decide on in the November election.
WESTBORO, MASS. (WHDH) – A Westboro police officer became the first officer to ever be crowned Miss Massachusetts over the weekend.
Ashlyn Mercier, who is from Worcester, highlighted her community service initative “Nick’s Courage: One Smile Goes A Mile.” It’s named after her younger brother Nick, who is a two-time pediatric cancer survivor.
“I created this initiative really just to give back to the community, and to provide hope for children who are battling critcal illnesses,” Mercier said.
Mercier said her fellow officers at the Westboro Police Department have been nothing but supportive of her win. She said she’s proud to represent police officers on a national stage.
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“The department has been so supportive, and it’s just really filled my heart with so much pride, and and so much joy on the Miss America stage, and also to represent law enforcement officers across the country,” she said. “I’m super thrilled and just honored to represent Miss Massachusetts 2026.”
She said pageantry and policing skills have crossover.
“The ability to perform on the spot as you are in pageantry, and in my job, responding to calls that require me to act quickly and respond with a calm, cool level-minded head, these are all things I do in my role as Miss Massaschusetts, and my role as Officer Mercier,” she said.
Mercier is also set to compete in the Miss America pageant in September.
(Copyright (c) 2026 Sunbeam Television. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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Family members of slain trooper George Hanna Jr. speak before killer’s parole hearing
Family members of State Police Trooper George Hanna Jr., shot on Feb. 26, 1983, outside an Auburn liquor store, speak moments before Hanna’s killer, José Colon, goes before the Parole Board in Natick.
The Massachusetts Parole Board has denied parole for Jose Colon, who was convicted of killing State Trooper George Hanna in 1983.
Colon became eligible for parole after a 2024 court ruling regarding offenders who were under 21 at the time of their crimes.
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey expressed support for the board’s decision to deny parole.
The Massachusetts Parole Board has denied parole for a man who was convicted in the slaying of Massachusetts State Trooper George Hanna in 1983, saying he has failed to take full responsibility for his actions.
Jose Colon, now 64, killed Hanna, of Holliston and originally of Natick, on Feb. 26, 1983, outside an Auburn liquor store.
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In its ruling, the Parole Board cited several reasons in its decision to deny parole. Those included that Colon testified during his parole hearing that he had been sober for 30 years, contradicting evidence of drug use during that time while in prison. It also cited the fact that he denied committing an armed robbery two days prior to killing Hanna, despite pleading guilty to the crime.
The Board also wrote that Colon hasn’t taken full responsibility for killing Hanna.
“Although he accepts responsibility, Mr. Colon maintains that he closed his eyes and fired his gun six times, hitting Trooper Hanna all six times,” the Board wrote. “He insists he had no intention of harming or killing Trooper Hanna. (However) Mr. Colon did appear to be remorseful that his actions led to the death of Trooper Hanna.”
‘What I did was wrong’: Opponents say state trooper’s killer should not get parole
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Although Colon was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, a Supreme Judicial Court decision in 2024 ruled that those younger than 21 at the time a crime is committed can’t be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Colon was 20 when he killed Hanna.
Worcester District Attorney Joseph Early applauded the Parole Board’s decision.
“We are pleased with the Parole Board’s decision and grateful that it carefully considered the seriousness of this crime and its lasting impact on the Hanna family and our community,” Early said in a statement. “Our thoughts remain with the Hanna family, whose strength and perseverance throughout this process have been remarkable.”
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State trooper intervened on armed robbery attempt
Hanna was killed on Feb. 26, 1983. According to published reports, that night Hanna pulled over a red Chevy Vega in the parking lot of J&S Liquors on Southbridge Street in Auburn. He did not know that the three men in the car were there to rob the store. All three were armed with handguns.
Hanna frisked one of the men and a struggle ensued. During the struggle, Colon shot Hanna six times. Hanna was shot a total of seven times.
Colon, Emilio Otero and Miguel Rosado, were all convicted of first-degree murder. Colon was the only one younger than 20 at the time, so the SJC ruling only affected him.
In a statement, Gov. Maura Healey celebrated the Parole Board’s decision.
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“I strongly opposed Jose Colon’s parole and am grateful that the Parole Board denied his request,” she said in a statement released by her office on Monday, June 22. “More than four decades after Trooper George Hanna was brutally murdered while serving and protecting the people of Massachusetts, his loss continues to be felt by his family, fellow law enforcement officers and communities across our state. Today’s decision recognizes the magnitude of that loss and provides some measure of relief to those who have fought to ensure his memory is never forgotten.”
Hanna grew up in Natick, the son of longtime Natick Police Officer George Hanna Sr., and became a state trooper in 1974. He was married and had three children, and was living in Holliston at the time of his death.
A series of awards in his name, The Hanna Memorial Awards for Bravery, are the highest the state presents to police officers who exhibit exceptional bravery while in the line of duty.
Colon admitted to wrongdoing at parole hearing
During his parole hearing on Jan. 15, Colon admitted what he did was wrong.
“What I did was wrong and inexcusable,” he said during the five-hour hearing in Natick. “I will have to live with that for the rest of my life. I have asked God for forgiveness. I hope that one day the Hanna family will forgive me for the suffering I’ve brought into their life.”
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The Board wrote in its decision that it realized Colon was not eligible to participate in several programs that most people seeking parole could because he was serving a life sentence with no chance at parole, until the court’s ruling.
However, the board also wrote that it felt Colon needs to seek treatment regarding his history of trauma and other issues that were contributing factors to the shooting.
“The Board recommends that Mr. Colon address the concerns of the Board, specifically related to accountability and treatment needs,” according to the decision. “The Board concludes Jose Colon has not demonstrated a level of rehabilitation that would make his release compatible with the welfare of society.”
Colon is eligible to seek parole again in 2029.
Norman Miller can be reached at 508-626-3823 or nmiller@wickedlocal.com. For up-to-date public safety news, follow him on X @Norman_MillerMW or on Facebook at Facebook.com/NormanMillerJournalist.
