I never like these hard cut-offs. We should establish a name/expression for all these rules a simple wording which represents 200k=0% and eg. 250k=100% or something.
Otherwise we always have a situation where making more money suddenly leads to less net
This is a great step in the right direction. I can't speak directly for MIT, but there are issues with how these programs don't apply to parents with small family businesses. My parents had a small business, with my father taking home a salary of $XX,XXX. Duke University used the business assets to determine the EFC (expected family contribution) of literally 90% of the salary. Essentially saying to sell off the family business for the college fund, which was a non-starter.
Small businesses are allegedly the backbone of America, and I feel these tuition support programs overlook this segment of the middle-class.
I can understand why they might do this. Many people who own a small business underpay themselves significantly and use the extra funds on the business to build up assets. This defers taxes and allows the funds to be reinvested without tax. They might even take out loans on those business assets. The same way the wealthy will pay themselves a tiny salary and just live off the asset value of their stock. Someone who owns their own business could also easily drop their salary significantly for the year prior to applying to college.
As an owner of a small family business, I have to pay close attention to making sure my salary and that of my other family members involved is "generally commensurate with our duties" or the IRS will be up my backside pretty quick. I obviously try to minimize it as much as possible, but if you drop it to something insignificant and the IRS notices, they'll adjust your income and expenses reported to reflect your non-compliance with tax code.
> This defers taxes and allows the funds to be reinvested without tax.
All business funds are re-invested without tax, this is actually a good thing. Also for the majority of business owners taking a loan against your assets to pay yourself is a terrible idea, yes it may defer taxation but that tax will still come due and now you have to pay interest.
> Someone who owns their own business could also easily drop their salary significantly for the year prior to applying to college.
This could be a problem but i think the amount of difference this would make would be negligible - most people don't plan like this. You could also emancipate your 17 year old or have them live independently for a period of time (my friend actually deferred his entry and worked for a year in order to get a full ride)
The "mistake" is that the assets themselves are the source of income. Sell them off, and the income goes away too. It's the equivalent of expecting the parents to use 100% of their income to put their kids into college, which is impossible.
Is it a small business netting the owner 100K a year with 500K in the bank?
That's different than a small business netting the owner 75K a year but the trucks and equipment for the landscaping business (easiest example, replace as needed) being worth 200K...
Heh, for my jurisdiction, to get gov financial aid for a 2nd degree, they expected me to withdraw from retirement savings to fund it, but no similar expectation if you had a locked-in defined contribution pension plan (lol I wish).
Nor would they expect you to take a line of credit against the equity in property if you owned any, but stocks are always a rich person luxury that you can sell!
Kinda cemented that we’re rewarding a failure to save and rewarding a failure to save in something liquid.
Why are such things in the US so complicated? Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone!
That's the only fair way. Also, a set of well educated people pays itself back later in the form of mostly income and added value taxes, which provides money to keep studying for cheap for the next generation.
Because the US government will loan people very large sums to attend, which allows the universities to raise prices at will. The buyers are price-inelastic, which means that they want to go regardless of price, because they are surrounded by people that tell them that going to college is the right thing to do - and the more prestigious the better.
College in the US would be a lot cheaper if the government didn't inflate it. If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive.
The short answer is greed, plain and simple. Higher Education has not been an institution for the people in the US for a long, long time. It may never have been, actually. It's a business, same as our Healthcare industry and businesses run on maximizing profit margins so that is their primary goal.
>Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone!
I'll go out on a limb and bet people in your country earn much less than the average American, too. Why? Why don't companies just pay these people more? IT all comes back in income and value added taxes.
Some prominent universities in the US have ballooned with administration in the past 20 years. MIT in particular has a $1.2 billion administration cost out of a $4.5 billion annual budget.
Roger Freeman, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan's education advisor, was afraid that educated voters would turn the United States towards communism.
One of Ronald Reagan's campaign promises was dismantling or breaking the department of education, similar to what he had done to California's state universities by limiting their budgets and moving the burden of tuition to students.
At the time this was quite popular as it lowered taxes.
the ideal is that college should be very expensive for rich people and cheap, free, or at least more affordable, for less wealthy people.
american universities get closer to this ideal than you might expect. the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away, at least for undergraduate degrees.
it would make more sense to do this redistribution through taxes if possible, but many US institutions are private so that doesn’t really work. so the colleges basically have their own privately-run means testing programs, and like all such programs there are flaws and loopholes.
We have plenty of cheaper schools too, and they’re fine.
The expensive schools are for the richest people to say they went to school next to the best students who get in free.And for the best students to meet rich people.
American universities sell their students a lot of amenities that aren't really necessary for study. Not to mention the bloated admin class. You want to feel "in" when it comes to social justice? Here are your administrators that do the rituals of social justice as a full-time job, but they demand salaries.
As for amenities, back in Europe, many universities don't even have a campus, just a scattering of buildings all around the city, acquired randomly as the school grew (that includes dorm buildings, often quite far from one another). You will spend some extra time commuting among them, but the university saves money - and, indirectly, you too.
Getting from dorm to lectures usually took me about 30 minutes each way - on foot, then subway, then on foot again.
Because America is a place where people have been indoctrinated to believe that misery is the cost of freedom. It's a place where half the population would rather read your obituary or donate to your fundraiser than simply have a healthcare system that people can use in a timely manner without worrying about cost.
Same problem for families with multiple kids of similar age - never saw discount for those.
Also, no discount for the cost of living in a specific area…
>but there are issues with how these programs don't apply to parents with small family businesses.
That's a "happy accident". The college educated bureaucrats who joined hands with academia to create these programs were perfectly fine omitting the plumber's children. They sure weren't gonna do a huge amount of work to find away to avoid an edge case they were ok with.
You wouldn't have to sell the business. You could convert it from an LLC to an INC. Yes it's a lot of work but it's a better alternative to selling it.
Had the same problem (with MIT among others). Somehow I heard farmland was treated a bit more generously (a recognition that you can't just sell the land to pay for college & remain a going concern). For a small biz with 4 employees, though, the math was impossible. Good thing Caltech was cheaper.
s1artibartfast below is saying that it seems intentional. But how can someone with a small business sell the assets, eliminating their own income in the process, and provide for the remaining children/themselves/etc? Sacrifice is one thing; killing the job you created is another and far too short-sighted.
On the flip side, it’s possible to sell a business for 7+ figures and then have little to no income in subsequent years in which case quite wealthy families would qualify for assistance.
Similarly, I wonder how they’d consider shares of a non public company. Probably a common situation for people on HN, that take a pay cut to work as early employees at a startup.
Tuition for undergraduate studies should be affordable. Not for a small number of very rich universities that can afford it. But to all universities, as it is in most of the world.
Parents should not be allowed to support their kids in college. Make the kid like away from home buy thier car if they want one. work jobs not for the family. don't let them take loans for more than their yearly income.
It’s incredibly difficult to structure these rules in a way that doesn’t discriminate against small businesses while not opening a giant loophole for the rich.
When I was touring colleges as a high school senior I met someone who had gotten into MIT but whose family could only afford to send one kid to an elite college, him or his sister. He decided to go to a state school which was a lot less expensive but whose academics weren't close to the same level. This stuff matters to people.
Most students go into debt to attend college. I fell into a bracket where I didn’t get any financial assistance but my parents didn’t want to/couldn’t pay for tuition. I got personal loans for everything. I think this is a common scenario.
Same here. I paid "full price" for my degree coming from a normal middle class family. Fortunately I was able to pay it all off a few years out of school with my first job.
This was more than several years prior to that, I just tried to look up the financial aid of previous years and for some reason couldn't find it. If someone else finds it, I'd be curious to take a look.
I met him when I was at MIT for Campus Preview Weekend when accepted students visit the school. Is it necessary to assume things in such a cynical fashion?
I wonder, too. In 1965,
3580 applied, 1532 were admitted, and only 929 enrolled. How many of that 39% had better options than MIT, knowing about the draft?
While I think this is well meaning, I’d be much more impressed by institutions actually cutting costs, The ratio of administrators to students is insane as is the faculty ratio at most universities, not to mention the outlays for extravagant projects like sports centers and student centers.
Thank you for this comment; articles on the rising costs of college almost always uncritically treat it like a law of nature, and rarely have I seen articles that attempt to study in-depth the extent to which college administrations have become bloated, self-perpetuating jobs programs. All while at the same time departments are cut, professors are expected to do more with less, and more and more classes are pushed on to adjunct faculty who get paid a pittance. Until this is addressed, any efforts to improve the ways in which students finance their education is just a band-aid.
I bet this describes Whitfield Diffie, who started at MIT in 1961. A riot happened that year over tuition rising from $1200 to $1400 [0]. He’d intended to transfer to Berkeley where tuition for residents was something like $120.
It's not really something new; most top universities like CMU already have a similar policy. MIT has had it as well, they just raised the threshold for qualification.
Maybe it has something to do with the incoming Trump administration and federal student loans. They seem to want to reduce government spending and may see federal student loans as waste, especially since some were forgiven. Maybe there is some amount of arm-twisting involved. Better for the universities to not mention any of that and appear altruistic.
Started looking and found out there's some much worse, and far more obvious cases that need to implement these reforms. [1]
UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.
BTW, amazing site to be horrified by gun violence (and vaguely fascinated). Look upon the awfulness of Philadelphia. [2] Sitting in their safe little haven while East and South is wounding murder land with overlapping murder / wounding statistics. (12k from 2014-2023, 190/100000 urban) [3] Northwestern and the violence everywhere South in Chi-town is maybe a personal second choice. ($13,700,000,000, +74%, 26.9k, 280/100000 urban) [4][5]
Is there a coherent argument tying A to B here? Schools have large endowments and are also sometimes located in violent cities. Is it your contention that one causes the other, or even could in theory affect the other? Otherwise I don’t see the point, you might as well bring up the number of potholes in Philadelphia too.
Also Northwestern is in Evanston, not Chicago. Two different cities.
> UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.
Why is it UPENN's responsibility to solve these issues? This is Philadelphia's problem, the university is just a business operating in the city.
I think that speaks to the low bar we have come to expect from our endowed institutions today more than anything else.
American Universities, historically, are supposed to improve not just their students’ lives but also society as a whole, especially as serving as boosters for the city they’re in and their immediate neighbors. That’s why they’re nonprofits. That’s also likely their strongest lifeline to remain relevant in the future rather than as the hollow alumni clubs and gatekeepers their critics say they are, with AI/the internet/online schooling/topic of the day breaking down socioeconomic barriers to knowledge access
That’s why the Carnegies and Mellons built libraries, museums, and the very literally named Carnegie-Mellon university, back then. Now it seems like the first thing billionaires today do is isolate themselves and their wealth from the masses as much as possible.
UPenn is a land-grant institution, they are not "just a business" they were given land and money specifically to serve the public good. They're why we have engineering degrees, the government specifically wanted institutions that taught practical marketable skills and to do research in those fields.
Just want to point out that Philadelphia’s homicide count is down ~40% from last year. And Penn’s “haven” looks similar to the other affluent commercial corridors throughout the city.
> UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.
Also, an endowment is meant to be perpetual, so only a small fraction of it is spent every year to ensure the principal amount doesn’t go down. “Don’t kill the golden goose” in other words.
I've never heard of anyone doing this either, but it is true and it's a pretty reasonable rule in my opinion. If you're an "independent student" then you don't need to report your parents' income, and the government is fairly generous about who qualifies as independent: https://studentaid.gov/help-center/answers/article/independe.... You can definitely game some of these qualifications, but that's fine, the overwhelming majority of people who qualify for this are legitimately independent from their parents and should be considered for financial aid.
Another way to save money is to rent an apartment and make that your permanent address freshman year than to pay out of state tuition and room and board. I always thought this scheme could never work until I met someone who played it and saved tens of thousands in the process.
Or, crazy idea, have the government pay all tuition up front for everyone and then collect an extra .5% on your income tax for every semester you attend (or .33% for every quarter). Obviously you'd have to put some limits on what colleges can charge to get paid from that pool of money.
Then you can't go broke from debt because it's a percent of your income, but it's also not "free" to address those who have concerns with that.
You could apply it to all outstanding school loan balances too. Get your loans paid off in exchange for an extra 4% income tax.
I actually quite like the system we have in the UK.
Graduates pay roughly 9% of their income above £27k towards debt repayment, and the remaining balance is written off after 30 years. Typical tuition fees are just over £9k per year.
This strikes a nice balance between encouraging people to carefully consider alternative non-university careers whilst also not preventing too many people from not being able to afford it.
Note my numbers are approximate because they can vary depending on when & where a person went to university a couple of other factors. Also I do think the system could be slightly improved (especially around maintenance loans) but on the whole has a good structure.
That subsidizes useless degrees, low quality colleges, and punishes people who work in vocations (likely providing more value to society), among some other issues.
This is great and all, but will we be addressing the fact that the acceptance rate of these institutions are all artificially low? The size of freshman classes are the same or smaller than the same in the 1980s, and the population of the country is much larger.
Tuition isn't the only problem here. If we want a country with social mobility, our higher ed institutions should reflect this and not create artificial scarcity.
Is that how "family income" in this context is calculated in the US? That until I'm married I count as being part of my parents' family but as soon as I marry I have my own? No age restriction or consideration whether I live with my parents or anything?
The article claims 80% of American households meet this threshold. I wonder what % of their incoming class (say restricted to Americans) meets this threshold.
That's a great question, I'd bet it's fair to say that 80% of their applicants would not qualify, and yet it opens the door for some really deserving humans.
(Not being able to afford it is why I didn't go to MIT, I also wasn't accepted at Cal, yet UCLA (and all of the UC system for that matter) was under 4,000 a year and that's what my folks and I could afford so that's where I studied.)
That link says 72% of incoming freshman in 2022-2023 received financial aid. Also has a full-time beginning net cost average of just under $22,000 in 2022-2023.
It's not a perfect source of data, but there is enough on College Navigator to let you dig into it a bit and compare to other schools.
Note that aid includes federal student loans though. They may have needed to come up with $22,000 out of pocket but also have taken on thousands more in loans that will need to be paid back. If they don't have the $22,000, then private student loans at much worse terms are likely required.
Yes but the algorithm also is that they take 5% of your assets each year. So if you've saved $1M (not much for a $200K a year couple in their 50s), that's $50K a year out the door.
Honestly, that wouldn’t be a bad way to fund education: education is free, but the university gets taxation power over you so they can tax you at x% of your income. It aligns incentives better than the current system.
In which case you may like how it’s done in the UK. it’s technically debt but in essence works as a graduate tax. The government pays for your education with a loan. You then only pay back 9% of your income over a certain income threshold. You do this until you pay back the loan or 30-40 years have passed. So in practice this is a graduate tax.
FAFSA. That's one of the calculations that goes into Expected Family Contribution. There is an expectation that parent's contribute some % of income (20%?), 5% of assets, and that the student basically contributes 90% of any income or assets to their name before a single dollar of aid, usually federal loans, will be offered.
For all of you younger folks just starting your families, expect to pay full price for college if you are anywhere near the top 25% of earners (most of this site presumably). Any scholarship money is a bonus but aid probably isn't going to be forthcoming.
The subtext of this MIT announcement is that any family making more than $200,000 will be paying full price to subsidize the poorer students.
I knew a student at my high school whose parents earned enough to be able to both take simultaneous sabbaticals for a year so that their child could avoid tuition at a school with a similar program.
MIT is a great financial investment. There is financing already available (federal and private) so presumably if someone wanted to go they likely could. They may leave with debt however.
The median salary of an MIT graduate is 120k and the median debt is 12k, and less for lower income families (2023-2024):
$0 - $30,000 family income: $6,866
$30,001 - $75,000 family income: $9,132
$75,000+ family income: $12,500
Bumping this up to families making $200k seems really unnecessary and helps people that don't really need to help.
> Bumping this up to families making $200k seems really unnecessary and helps people that don't really need to help.
My household income is right around $200k, and my daughter (still a few years from college) would definitely consider e.g. UC Berkeley, which (including housing) is half the cost of MIT for an in-state student. Free tuition would certainly make her look at MIT more closely, so if the goal is to draw the best students (and helping poor students is a side-effect), then it's a good idea.
Also, it's headline-grabbing. There's at least one poor kid somewhere in the US who will read this headline and consider MIT, when they previously didn't (even though they probably already would have qualified for free, or nearly-free tuition).
True. Counselors at poorer school districts frequently don't recognize that these "dream schools" are often more affordable than a state school for certain populations. The students certainly don't know it unless a trusted adult shows them and really pushes them towards pursuing it. Hopefully, some students out there will see this and realize that while MIT is crazy selective, getting in is the hardest part.
How do we know that is true? Among folks whom MIT would accept, do we know whether those who choose to attend MIT get a greater return on their investment (of time and money) compared to those who choose to not apply or not attend?
families making $200k seems really unnecessary and helps people that don't really need to help
There are certainly families earning $200k who need help. $200k income for a family of 5 in San Francisco is different from $200k income for a family of 3 in rural Idaho.
From the page GP linked, the median scholarship for students with household income under $65k/yr also covered housing, and $65k-$100k covered most of the housing costs.
It definitely is and is made worse by institutions like MIT and Harvard that don't pay their full tax burden to the city due to the PILOT program. They're allowed to accrue more and more real estate while paying a fraction of the taxes that other property holders would and drive prices up dramatically.
Loans are not included in our financial aid offers because we believe your financial aid will cover your expenses. We do not expect any undergraduate to take out a loan. Rather than borrow, most students opt to work during the academic year. At MIT, this work often provides students not only a way to help pay for college but also with world-class research experience.
Of course there is still the small matter of investing a few years of your life. The biggest regret I have with my degree (Canterbury) is the waste of time. I didn't learn much but the degree did get me a job.
I feel like the number of children you have makes a big difference. 1 child vs 5 kids potentially with 2 in college / 3 in private school would be vastly different financial situations.
Awesome. Now let’s lower the bar further and do it everywhere. And then let’s keep doing more until students can pay their tuition with a summer job, like they could when our elders went to school.
I’ll hold off on asking for higher education to be free, as the culture still pushes back on that. But a return to the former model would be most welcome.
I'd like to see a future where a student can have free tuition but (with exception) is required do meaningful civic service work that benefits the community and country that is paying for tuition, ultimately graduating with zero debt if requirements are met.
Maintaining national parks? Helping support inner city? Tutoring and improving public education? Imagine having the majority of American college students contributing to these worthy causes AND getting a strong education.
This is basically the point of PSLF[0]. The cost to participants is not $0, but it can ultimately be very low if they only make income adjusted payments during their 10 years of service.
In the former model, which I also would love to back to, college was cheap because the government didn't keep inflating the price with huge loans, coupled with every adult in range telling kids that the HAVE to go to college and the more prestigious the better.
Get rid of government loans, bring us back to how universities used to operate, and education will once again be something you can pay for with a summer job.
All we're doing with these government loans is transferring the wealth of society to the universities.
Do we also return the facilities to the state they were in before, particularly the residential programs? College enrollment percentage? What about a near universal military draft for men?
Not that I think lowering the cost of education is a bad effort but appeals to some prior culture like they are apples to apples comparison is dishonest.
> Do we also return the facilities to the state they were in before, particularly the residential programs?
Yes, please. Students learned just fine without all the fancy facilities. Perks are great and all, but I would trade them for a low cost of education in a second.
It's never going to happen in a country where politicians try to convince people that college education == elitism, and a significant part of the population actually believes that
It is difficult to enact meaningful change in a country that doesn't see supporting its people as an investment in itself. Discussing the price when it should be free is a distraction.
I tried to check if that was true, but couldn't find much historical tuition data online. What little I did find showed that tuition adjusted for inflation has been increasing fairly steadily for over 100 years, and I didn't really see any change in the rates between before government loans and after.
Maybe if I had found data for a wide range of schools instead of just a couple of hard to get into schools there would have been a more noticeable effect.
Clearly nothing to do with inefficient administration, then. Here in Australia, where a friend's wife works as the PA for the Dean in one of our foremost universities, and I know numerous lecturers, some of whom are moving overseas for better opportunities (in Southeast Asia of all places!), the faculty-members-over-beer perspective is largely that the universities are head-in-sand about AI and about to become far less relevant. IMHO MIT OCW is great, we need more of that, and more mini-courses.
As far as I know, and countries where tuition is free entrance is restricted and the students do not expect to live the United States university lifestyle.
Free would be fine if we could expect actual return on the investment instead of extended high school, delaying adulthood, and channeling people from useful vocations within their grasp.
that's nice, but it's become nearly as difficult to get into MIT as winning the lottery
The MIT undergraduate student body is about the same as it was in 1960, but the number of applications rose from around 4000 in 1960 to 11000 in 2000, to 20000 in 2024.
This isn't just an MIT problem. The undergrad populations of the top universities (Ivy league and similar) have hardly grown over the decades despite a large increase in student population overall in the US, not to mention the very large increase in foreign students over the past 25 years. This is by design to create increasingly exclusive brands.
> The undergrad populations of the top universities (Ivy league and similar) have hardly grown over the decades despite a large increase in student population overall in the US
Why should we expect individual universities to scale up their class sizes proportional to the student population in the US? Some universities may choose to, and new universities could spin up to serve the increased student body, but I don't see a compelling reason to argue that any given university should scale up just because college has (somewhat arbitrarily) become the default path for the entire middle class.
There's nothing wrong with MIT wanting to stay small, and it's not necessarily a conspiracy to build exclusive brands. They could also just recognize that their system won't scale up to an order of magnitude more students.
Check out CSS or FAFSA calculators to figure out your expected family contribution. Financial Aid offices at places like MIT that are need blind fill in the gap between your expected contribution and cost of attending with aid.
The answer to your question is it depends. Some assets like your primary home and retirements can be shielded from expected family contribution. If you've got assets sitting in a taxable account....
I've come to realize what we think as progressive places are what I consider "inclusively conservative" as in liberal socially, but very much bound to keeping wealth strata in place.
San Francisco + older bay area cities are a prime example of being a bastion of free market capitalism in the guise of progressivism.
The reality is, the university student and his family are different entities.
Family might be filth rich and still decline to pay for the student's university costs.
As a reminder, the student is an adult and should really be treated as such. An able individual, not a dependant kid under the responsibility of his parents.
This may have unintended consequences on chances of a successful application. Now, as a high school senior, you have to compete against an additional pool of strong students who aren't especially interested in MIT's offerings, but have parents pushing them toward the least expensive of all top universities.
It’s not an unintended consequence. Another way of phrasing your concern is “MIT will have an especially strong applicant pool” which is a desirable outcome.
The other side of this is saying the status quo is; as a high school senior with wealthy parents, you don't have to compete against as many strong students if you apply for MIT because it has high barriers to entry (that aren't based on merit), and so you should apply even if you aren't particularly interested in their offering.
Also, the reality is most kids will be applying for all of the schools. MIT might want to improve their yield rate.
The decrease of buying power, post Covid, makes this pretty much moot at best. It’s sort of depressing to think that even if I had children, or magically qualified to attend a prestigious school like MIT, I’d still be surely priced out. Just like I am buying a house. Making $200k a year ensures I’ll never own a home unless I want to move to an area I don’t feel safe in. I imagine having children make that trade off better, but not without substantial intrinsic costs to one’s self and one’s children. If someone makes $199k at this point, they’re likely unable to afford a home in any major metropolitan area. While being able to have your gifted children receive a free education is great, I imagine many folks will push ever so slightly past that, assuming two years working parents, by the time their children would be of age to go to school.
It’s just depressing. Sorry, I’ll go back into my hole.
> And for the 50 percent of American families with income below $100,000, parents can expect to pay nothing at all toward the full cost of their students’ MIT education, which includes tuition as well as housing, dining, fees, and an allowance for books and personal expenses.
> This $100,000 threshold is up from $75,000 this year, while next year’s $200,000 threshold for tuition-free attendance will increase from its current level of $140,000.
- even though that's the article's 2nd and 3rd paragraph.
I'm sure this causes pause for more than a few people who always wanted to go to MIT, knew they could, and didn't. Tuition wasn't appetizing even 20 years ago.
In addition to pioneering Open Courses that were of high enough quality that you'd want to take them, this is hopefully the start of another trend/wave.
Please tell us that counts for the Micro-Masters certs like Data Science. That would open up a lot of opportunities for people who can’t put in as much time due to working to pay bills.
Just read an adjacent banger that interrogates the underlying reasons why our (US) education system is broken, how it got that way, how it's influenced culture beyond our (individual) control, insinuates why these institutions are so preposterously expensive, and proposes thoughts on how to fix it (TL;DR prolly won't get fixed)
Yeah, education should be free. Record all lectures and put them out there. Charge a small fee to view them if you must but lecturers repeating themselves is not my idea of a great use of their time. Yes, I know lots of lectures are already published.
It really depends on the subject matter and the institution's focus (and tier). For disciplines where foundational knowledge remains relatively unchanged (say, Latin) recorded lectures could be an efficient way to disseminate information without requiring professors to repeat the same material. A "flipped classroom" would offer opportunities for more dynamic interaction and deeper understanding, and of course this would cost money.
However, as a professor myself in a rapidly evolving STEM field adjacent to AI, I update at least 20% of my course materials each year to keep pace with new developments. As it happens, about a third of the new content is derived from my research group's latest work. Recording lectures isn't a one-time effort; it would require constant updates to remain relevant (and let me tell you, if you want to get the voice-over right, it is a lot more time-consuming and soul-crushing than simply turning up in class and giving a live lecture).
The value of live lectures goes beyond just "transmitting" content. They offer real-time interaction, immediate feedback, and dynamic discussions that adapt to the students' understanding. This level of interaction devilishly difficult to replicate in recorded formats.
I would ramble on more, but I need to return to the lecture materials I am developing for this Friday on Vision-Language Models :P
Watching non-interactive lectures is a small part of the overall experience. I'm not commenting on whether the experience is 'worth it', but assuming the only thing people get is the ability to watch lectures doesn't make the point.
A big part of it is having a long-term peer group of people who were disciplined and motivated enough to get into MIT and succeed there. Arguably true for any university. We're products of our environments, and if you surround yourselves with hardworking people it rubs off on you.
On the other hand, many people act like "talking to professors over beer" (or to your classmates, for that matter) is supposed to add "value" to the college experience, when it's perfectly possible to get at least a bachelor's and a master's without ever doing that (source: I did).
Its not the lecture thats valuable. Its everything else. Particularly research opportunities. That’s how you get really solid in your domain. The difference between a student who only took class in the subject and a student who applied those concepts in a lab environment to make contributions is staggering. Its like the difference between someone who watched a video on engine maintenance and someone who has not only watched that but has been rebuilding engines themselves for 2-3 years.
I never like these hard cut-offs. We should establish a name/expression for all these rules a simple wording which represents 200k=0% and eg. 250k=100% or something.
Otherwise we always have a situation where making more money suddenly leads to less net
This is a great step in the right direction. I can't speak directly for MIT, but there are issues with how these programs don't apply to parents with small family businesses. My parents had a small business, with my father taking home a salary of $XX,XXX. Duke University used the business assets to determine the EFC (expected family contribution) of literally 90% of the salary. Essentially saying to sell off the family business for the college fund, which was a non-starter.
Small businesses are allegedly the backbone of America, and I feel these tuition support programs overlook this segment of the middle-class.
I can understand why they might do this. Many people who own a small business underpay themselves significantly and use the extra funds on the business to build up assets. This defers taxes and allows the funds to be reinvested without tax. They might even take out loans on those business assets. The same way the wealthy will pay themselves a tiny salary and just live off the asset value of their stock. Someone who owns their own business could also easily drop their salary significantly for the year prior to applying to college.
As an owner of a small family business, I have to pay close attention to making sure my salary and that of my other family members involved is "generally commensurate with our duties" or the IRS will be up my backside pretty quick. I obviously try to minimize it as much as possible, but if you drop it to something insignificant and the IRS notices, they'll adjust your income and expenses reported to reflect your non-compliance with tax code.
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> This defers taxes and allows the funds to be reinvested without tax.
All business funds are re-invested without tax, this is actually a good thing. Also for the majority of business owners taking a loan against your assets to pay yourself is a terrible idea, yes it may defer taxation but that tax will still come due and now you have to pay interest.
> Someone who owns their own business could also easily drop their salary significantly for the year prior to applying to college.
This could be a problem but i think the amount of difference this would make would be negligible - most people don't plan like this. You could also emancipate your 17 year old or have them live independently for a period of time (my friend actually deferred his entry and worked for a year in order to get a full ride)
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>The same way the wealthy will pay themselves a tiny salary and just live off the asset value of their stock.
When you say them living off the asset value of their stock, you mean the dividends from the stock?
I remember CEOs having a salary of $1...
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A difficult problem, if you own a business then your "income" is completely manipulatable.
If your parents run a struggling corner store then you should be eligible, but if they own a successful chain of stores, maybe not.
Why not just say Income of 200K, or if you own a business then income + pre tax profits <=200K and book assets <500K or something?
Isn't the entire point of these assessments to look at total assets, and not just annual income?
I dont think this was an oversight or mistake. I think the expectation was that yes, people should sell assets if they have them .
The "mistake" is that the assets themselves are the source of income. Sell them off, and the income goes away too. It's the equivalent of expecting the parents to use 100% of their income to put their kids into college, which is impossible.
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Should they also cut their kidneys out and sell those too?
For someone not in your system, the expectations that seem normal to you sound absolutely insane to others.
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I'd ask how the assets are structured internally.
Is it a small business netting the owner 100K a year with 500K in the bank?
That's different than a small business netting the owner 75K a year but the trucks and equipment for the landscaping business (easiest example, replace as needed) being worth 200K...
It's complicated.
Heh, for my jurisdiction, to get gov financial aid for a 2nd degree, they expected me to withdraw from retirement savings to fund it, but no similar expectation if you had a locked-in defined contribution pension plan (lol I wish).
Nor would they expect you to take a line of credit against the equity in property if you owned any, but stocks are always a rich person luxury that you can sell!
Kinda cemented that we’re rewarding a failure to save and rewarding a failure to save in something liquid.
Why are such things in the US so complicated? Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone!
That's the only fair way. Also, a set of well educated people pays itself back later in the form of mostly income and added value taxes, which provides money to keep studying for cheap for the next generation.
Because the US government will loan people very large sums to attend, which allows the universities to raise prices at will. The buyers are price-inelastic, which means that they want to go regardless of price, because they are surrounded by people that tell them that going to college is the right thing to do - and the more prestigious the better.
College in the US would be a lot cheaper if the government didn't inflate it. If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive.
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The short answer is greed, plain and simple. Higher Education has not been an institution for the people in the US for a long, long time. It may never have been, actually. It's a business, same as our Healthcare industry and businesses run on maximizing profit margins so that is their primary goal.
Because education is largely an afterthought, and universities primarily compete on entertainment and prestige.
High cost and exclusivity is the entire point.
A university open to all with a fraction of the price would be a poorly ranked one in every competitive measure.
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>Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone!
I'll go out on a limb and bet people in your country earn much less than the average American, too. Why? Why don't companies just pay these people more? IT all comes back in income and value added taxes.
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Some prominent universities in the US have ballooned with administration in the past 20 years. MIT in particular has a $1.2 billion administration cost out of a $4.5 billion annual budget.
Roger Freeman, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan's education advisor, was afraid that educated voters would turn the United States towards communism.
One of Ronald Reagan's campaign promises was dismantling or breaking the department of education, similar to what he had done to California's state universities by limiting their budgets and moving the burden of tuition to students.
At the time this was quite popular as it lowered taxes.
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the ideal is that college should be very expensive for rich people and cheap, free, or at least more affordable, for less wealthy people.
american universities get closer to this ideal than you might expect. the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away, at least for undergraduate degrees.
it would make more sense to do this redistribution through taxes if possible, but many US institutions are private so that doesn’t really work. so the colleges basically have their own privately-run means testing programs, and like all such programs there are flaws and loopholes.
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We have plenty of cheaper schools too, and they’re fine.
The expensive schools are for the richest people to say they went to school next to the best students who get in free.And for the best students to meet rich people.
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Education in the US isn't cheap but those are elite colleges. The price tag is mostly for the networking.
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American universities sell their students a lot of amenities that aren't really necessary for study. Not to mention the bloated admin class. You want to feel "in" when it comes to social justice? Here are your administrators that do the rituals of social justice as a full-time job, but they demand salaries.
As for amenities, back in Europe, many universities don't even have a campus, just a scattering of buildings all around the city, acquired randomly as the school grew (that includes dorm buildings, often quite far from one another). You will spend some extra time commuting among them, but the university saves money - and, indirectly, you too.
Getting from dorm to lectures usually took me about 30 minutes each way - on foot, then subway, then on foot again.
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Because America is a place where people have been indoctrinated to believe that misery is the cost of freedom. It's a place where half the population would rather read your obituary or donate to your fundraiser than simply have a healthcare system that people can use in a timely manner without worrying about cost.
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Same problem for families with multiple kids of similar age - never saw discount for those. Also, no discount for the cost of living in a specific area…
>but there are issues with how these programs don't apply to parents with small family businesses.
That's a "happy accident". The college educated bureaucrats who joined hands with academia to create these programs were perfectly fine omitting the plumber's children. They sure weren't gonna do a huge amount of work to find away to avoid an edge case they were ok with.
That's quite a claim. Got any evidence for it?
Well, how big were the business assets?
Specifically, what percent of the business would have to be sold off? My reaction is very different for 5% versus 50%.
There’s no market for limited partnerships in mom and pop shops. The whole thing may go for a low multiple of yearly revenue, like 2 or 3x.
You usually can't sell off 5% of a small business. A sole proprietor is not going to issue stock for 5% and get any buyers.
You wouldn't have to sell the business. You could convert it from an LLC to an INC. Yes it's a lot of work but it's a better alternative to selling it.
Had the same problem (with MIT among others). Somehow I heard farmland was treated a bit more generously (a recognition that you can't just sell the land to pay for college & remain a going concern). For a small biz with 4 employees, though, the math was impossible. Good thing Caltech was cheaper.
s1artibartfast below is saying that it seems intentional. But how can someone with a small business sell the assets, eliminating their own income in the process, and provide for the remaining children/themselves/etc? Sacrifice is one thing; killing the job you created is another and far too short-sighted.
On the flip side, it’s possible to sell a business for 7+ figures and then have little to no income in subsequent years in which case quite wealthy families would qualify for assistance.
I find it hard to believe that total liquid assets would not be considered during the financial aid application process.
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Similarly, I wonder how they’d consider shares of a non public company. Probably a common situation for people on HN, that take a pay cut to work as early employees at a startup.
Isn't this another way of asking how they consider assets? Which never seems to be mentioned in these headlines about income qualifications.
Small Family business assessment should be different than larger businesses for this kind of criteria.
This is not a step in the right direction.
Tuition for undergraduate studies should be affordable. Not for a small number of very rich universities that can afford it. But to all universities, as it is in most of the world.
Parents should not be allowed to support their kids in college. Make the kid like away from home buy thier car if they want one. work jobs not for the family. don't let them take loans for more than their yearly income.
That is prove the kids are really responsible.
I remember how the FAFSA was more complex than any tax return I've had to do as an adult (late 30s now).
It’s incredibly difficult to structure these rules in a way that doesn’t discriminate against small businesses while not opening a giant loophole for the rich.
The reason is because small business owners are often, by any measure that doesn’t explicitly discount ownership of the business, actually rich.
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Why is the price you have to pay for something dependent on how much money your parents make? Feels so unfair
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There really aren't that many rich people, relatively speaking, so who cares? That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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When I was touring colleges as a high school senior I met someone who had gotten into MIT but whose family could only afford to send one kid to an elite college, him or his sister. He decided to go to a state school which was a lot less expensive but whose academics weren't close to the same level. This stuff matters to people.
Most students go into debt to attend college. I fell into a bracket where I didn’t get any financial assistance but my parents didn’t want to/couldn’t pay for tuition. I got personal loans for everything. I think this is a common scenario.
Same here. I paid "full price" for my degree coming from a normal middle class family. Fortunately I was able to pay it all off a few years out of school with my first job.
* in the US.
In many developed countries higher education costs the same as high school.
The large majority of MIT undergraduates graduate debt free.
When was this? MIT's financial aid was already very generous when I was applying (in 2008); IIRC the no-tuition threshold was 100 k$ back then
This was more than several years prior to that, I just tried to look up the financial aid of previous years and for some reason couldn't find it. If someone else finds it, I'd be curious to take a look.
> I met someone who had gotten into MIT but whose family could only afford to send one kid to an elite college, him or his sister.
So they were rich enough that he didn't get exempt from tuition but still could only send one kid to an elite school?
I wonder if the guy was just pulling your leg.
I met him when I was at MIT for Campus Preview Weekend when accepted students visit the school. Is it necessary to assume things in such a cynical fashion?
needlessly adversarial. financial aid is a best effort kind of thing, and plenty of people with unusual situations fall through the cracks.
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I wonder, too. In 1965, 3580 applied, 1532 were admitted, and only 929 enrolled. How many of that 39% had better options than MIT, knowing about the draft?
His sister got in and he didn’t.
While I think this is well meaning, I’d be much more impressed by institutions actually cutting costs, The ratio of administrators to students is insane as is the faculty ratio at most universities, not to mention the outlays for extravagant projects like sports centers and student centers.
Thank you for this comment; articles on the rising costs of college almost always uncritically treat it like a law of nature, and rarely have I seen articles that attempt to study in-depth the extent to which college administrations have become bloated, self-perpetuating jobs programs. All while at the same time departments are cut, professors are expected to do more with less, and more and more classes are pushed on to adjunct faculty who get paid a pittance. Until this is addressed, any efforts to improve the ways in which students finance their education is just a band-aid.
If you’re interested.
https://www.goacta.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/The-Cost-o...
I bet this describes Whitfield Diffie, who started at MIT in 1961. A riot happened that year over tuition rising from $1200 to $1400 [0]. He’d intended to transfer to Berkeley where tuition for residents was something like $120.
[0] https://alum.mit.edu/slice/what-50000-i-better-practice-more
I saw a similar headline just today (albeit on a much smaller scale) for Carnegie Mellon University: https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/carnegie-mellon-univ...
I feel like the timing is too close to be a coincidence—does anyone know if there's a link?
It's not really something new; most top universities like CMU already have a similar policy. MIT has had it as well, they just raised the threshold for qualification.
Maybe it has something to do with the incoming Trump administration and federal student loans. They seem to want to reduce government spending and may see federal student loans as waste, especially since some were forgiven. Maybe there is some amount of arm-twisting involved. Better for the universities to not mention any of that and appear altruistic.
The freshman class of MIT pays enough to cover all other students every year.
Started looking and found out there's some much worse, and far more obvious cases that need to implement these reforms. [1]
UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.
BTW, amazing site to be horrified by gun violence (and vaguely fascinated). Look upon the awfulness of Philadelphia. [2] Sitting in their safe little haven while East and South is wounding murder land with overlapping murder / wounding statistics. (12k from 2014-2023, 190/100000 urban) [3] Northwestern and the violence everywhere South in Chi-town is maybe a personal second choice. ($13,700,000,000, +74%, 26.9k, 280/100000 urban) [4][5]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...
[2] (Guns, Philadelphia) https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...
[3] (Location, UPenn) https://www.google.com/maps/place/University+of+Pennsylvania...
[4] (Guns, Chicago) https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...
[5] (Location, Northwestern) https://www.google.com/maps/place/Northwestern+University/@4...
Is there a coherent argument tying A to B here? Schools have large endowments and are also sometimes located in violent cities. Is it your contention that one causes the other, or even could in theory affect the other? Otherwise I don’t see the point, you might as well bring up the number of potholes in Philadelphia too.
Also Northwestern is in Evanston, not Chicago. Two different cities.
> UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.
Why is it UPENN's responsibility to solve these issues? This is Philadelphia's problem, the university is just a business operating in the city.
I think that speaks to the low bar we have come to expect from our endowed institutions today more than anything else.
American Universities, historically, are supposed to improve not just their students’ lives but also society as a whole, especially as serving as boosters for the city they’re in and their immediate neighbors. That’s why they’re nonprofits. That’s also likely their strongest lifeline to remain relevant in the future rather than as the hollow alumni clubs and gatekeepers their critics say they are, with AI/the internet/online schooling/topic of the day breaking down socioeconomic barriers to knowledge access
That’s why the Carnegies and Mellons built libraries, museums, and the very literally named Carnegie-Mellon university, back then. Now it seems like the first thing billionaires today do is isolate themselves and their wealth from the masses as much as possible.
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UPenn is a land-grant institution, they are not "just a business" they were given land and money specifically to serve the public good. They're why we have engineering degrees, the government specifically wanted institutions that taught practical marketable skills and to do research in those fields.
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>Why is it UPENN's responsibility to solve these issues?
Who's responsibility is it? Have you seen how the government operates? Why wouldn't UPENN want to help solve it?
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Just want to point out that Philadelphia’s homicide count is down ~40% from last year. And Penn’s “haven” looks similar to the other affluent commercial corridors throughout the city.
What is the argument here, exactly?
Thetrace.org is in fact pretty sweet looking. Interesting that philly seems to be shot to injur and next door camden seems to be shoot to kill.
They are not sitting on it. They spend about 5% of it annually.
You left off
(Drugs) https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/mexico-depicts-phi...
> UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.
Endowments have strings attached that limits the use of funds, the endowed money isn’t just a general slush fund: https://www.acenet.edu/Documents/Understanding-College-and-U...
Also, an endowment is meant to be perpetual, so only a small fraction of it is spent every year to ensure the principal amount doesn’t go down. “Don’t kill the golden goose” in other words.
philadelphia rots? please. I grew up in baltimore. philly is not what a rotting city looks like.
So if a university has money, learning there should be free?
If you don't have guns, you won't have gun violence, but I guess the second amendment won't be changed any time soon.
For a private school, they can choose how to spend their money. Hoarding it is one option.
For the federal government, they can choose how they allocate grants. Withholding grants from greedy schools is one option.
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> So if a university has money, learning there should be free?
Not an unreasonable proposition. The purpose of the university is ostensibly to provide an education, not to continue hoarding more and more money.
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This is only tuition though. Using their estimates you would still be expected to spend $30k/yr
https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...
A sham marriage (get a prenup if you want) is sufficient to have parents' income not counted by FAFSA.
If true, this is wild. I've never heard of it, nor of anyone exploiting it.
I've never heard of anyone doing this either, but it is true and it's a pretty reasonable rule in my opinion. If you're an "independent student" then you don't need to report your parents' income, and the government is fairly generous about who qualifies as independent: https://studentaid.gov/help-center/answers/article/independe.... You can definitely game some of these qualifications, but that's fine, the overwhelming majority of people who qualify for this are legitimately independent from their parents and should be considered for financial aid.
Another way to save money is to rent an apartment and make that your permanent address freshman year than to pay out of state tuition and room and board. I always thought this scheme could never work until I met someone who played it and saved tens of thousands in the process.
What happens if family earns $200,001 ?
Follow up question - what is a “family” here? A single parent with 3 kids? A married couple with one child?
Why don't they determine aid with a formula, instead of using these thresholds that set up weird incentives? (Same question applies to tax brackets)
I think there is a formula. From what I understand of the figures, $200k is just where the tuition reached zero?
Or, crazy idea, have the government pay all tuition up front for everyone and then collect an extra .5% on your income tax for every semester you attend (or .33% for every quarter). Obviously you'd have to put some limits on what colleges can charge to get paid from that pool of money.
Then you can't go broke from debt because it's a percent of your income, but it's also not "free" to address those who have concerns with that.
You could apply it to all outstanding school loan balances too. Get your loans paid off in exchange for an extra 4% income tax.
I actually quite like the system we have in the UK.
Graduates pay roughly 9% of their income above £27k towards debt repayment, and the remaining balance is written off after 30 years. Typical tuition fees are just over £9k per year.
This strikes a nice balance between encouraging people to carefully consider alternative non-university careers whilst also not preventing too many people from not being able to afford it.
Note my numbers are approximate because they can vary depending on when & where a person went to university a couple of other factors. Also I do think the system could be slightly improved (especially around maintenance loans) but on the whole has a good structure.
It would be a good system if the interest rate on the loan wasn't absolutely insane.
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That subsidizes useless degrees, low quality colleges, and punishes people who work in vocations (likely providing more value to society), among some other issues.
How does it punish vocations?
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Make this .5% go directly to the university. Will incentivize universities to teach more useful skills
It would incentivize them to only offer majors that lead to high incomes. By pooling the money it removes that issue.
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What makes a skill useful?
MIT is rich and can certainly front the money. If it’s such a great idea, let them do it.
Sounds similar to how it works here in Australia
This is great and all, but will we be addressing the fact that the acceptance rate of these institutions are all artificially low? The size of freshman classes are the same or smaller than the same in the 1980s, and the population of the country is much larger.
Tuition isn't the only problem here. If we want a country with social mobility, our higher ed institutions should reflect this and not create artificial scarcity.
Is this going to create some weird incentive for me, a parent of a college kid, to go 4 years unemployed traveling the world?
Honey, think about how much money the divorce will save us on tuition!
It creates an incentive for you to get married, so you are the relevant family instead of your parents.
Is that how "family income" in this context is calculated in the US? That until I'm married I count as being part of my parents' family but as soon as I marry I have my own? No age restriction or consideration whether I live with my parents or anything?
The article claims 80% of American households meet this threshold. I wonder what % of their incoming class (say restricted to Americans) meets this threshold.
Princeton has had a similar rule since 2001. Their current number is $100k. 25% of students pay nothing to attend. [0]
[0] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2024/03/29/princeton-trustees... (go tigers)
Approximately 60% of American households earn less than $100K. That's quite a difference in relative size.
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That's a great question, I'd bet it's fair to say that 80% of their applicants would not qualify, and yet it opens the door for some really deserving humans. (Not being able to afford it is why I didn't go to MIT, I also wasn't accepted at Cal, yet UCLA (and all of the UC system for that matter) was under 4,000 a year and that's what my folks and I could afford so that's where I studied.)
Use College Navigator for these types of questions:
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=MIT&s=all&id=166683#...
That link says 72% of incoming freshman in 2022-2023 received financial aid. Also has a full-time beginning net cost average of just under $22,000 in 2022-2023.
It's not a perfect source of data, but there is enough on College Navigator to let you dig into it a bit and compare to other schools.
Note that aid includes federal student loans though. They may have needed to come up with $22,000 out of pocket but also have taken on thousands more in loans that will need to be paid back. If they don't have the $22,000, then private student loans at much worse terms are likely required.
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Yes but the algorithm also is that they take 5% of your assets each year. So if you've saved $1M (not much for a $200K a year couple in their 50s), that's $50K a year out the door.
Honestly, that wouldn’t be a bad way to fund education: education is free, but the university gets taxation power over you so they can tax you at x% of your income. It aligns incentives better than the current system.
In which case you may like how it’s done in the UK. it’s technically debt but in essence works as a graduate tax. The government pays for your education with a loan. You then only pay back 9% of your income over a certain income threshold. You do this until you pay back the loan or 30-40 years have passed. So in practice this is a graduate tax.
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Where are you seeing this?
FAFSA. That's one of the calculations that goes into Expected Family Contribution. There is an expectation that parent's contribute some % of income (20%?), 5% of assets, and that the student basically contributes 90% of any income or assets to their name before a single dollar of aid, usually federal loans, will be offered.
For all of you younger folks just starting your families, expect to pay full price for college if you are anywhere near the top 25% of earners (most of this site presumably). Any scholarship money is a bonus but aid probably isn't going to be forthcoming.
The subtext of this MIT announcement is that any family making more than $200,000 will be paying full price to subsidize the poorer students.
I knew a student at my high school whose parents earned enough to be able to both take simultaneous sabbaticals for a year so that their child could avoid tuition at a school with a similar program.
MIT is a great financial investment. There is financing already available (federal and private) so presumably if someone wanted to go they likely could. They may leave with debt however.
The median salary of an MIT graduate is 120k and the median debt is 12k, and less for lower income families (2023-2024):
$0 - $30,000 family income: $6,866
$30,001 - $75,000 family income: $9,132
$75,000+ family income: $12,500
Bumping this up to families making $200k seems really unnecessary and helps people that don't really need to help.
https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...
> Bumping this up to families making $200k seems really unnecessary and helps people that don't really need to help.
My household income is right around $200k, and my daughter (still a few years from college) would definitely consider e.g. UC Berkeley, which (including housing) is half the cost of MIT for an in-state student. Free tuition would certainly make her look at MIT more closely, so if the goal is to draw the best students (and helping poor students is a side-effect), then it's a good idea.
Also, it's headline-grabbing. There's at least one poor kid somewhere in the US who will read this headline and consider MIT, when they previously didn't (even though they probably already would have qualified for free, or nearly-free tuition).
True. Counselors at poorer school districts frequently don't recognize that these "dream schools" are often more affordable than a state school for certain populations. The students certainly don't know it unless a trusted adult shows them and really pushes them towards pursuing it. Hopefully, some students out there will see this and realize that while MIT is crazy selective, getting in is the hardest part.
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How do we know that is true? Among folks whom MIT would accept, do we know whether those who choose to attend MIT get a greater return on their investment (of time and money) compared to those who choose to not apply or not attend?
There are certainly families earning $200k who need help. $200k income for a family of 5 in San Francisco is different from $200k income for a family of 3 in rural Idaho.
When I looked at MIT in 1990, tuition was fully covered but housing was BRUTAL.
More than twice my parents mortgage. I'm sure it's worse, now.
From the page GP linked, the median scholarship for students with household income under $65k/yr also covered housing, and $65k-$100k covered most of the housing costs.
It definitely is and is made worse by institutions like MIT and Harvard that don't pay their full tax burden to the city due to the PILOT program. They're allowed to accrue more and more real estate while paying a fraction of the taxes that other property holders would and drive prices up dramatically.
> They may leave with debt however.
The linked article says not.
Of course there is still the small matter of investing a few years of your life. The biggest regret I have with my degree (Canterbury) is the waste of time. I didn't learn much but the degree did get me a job.
I've never heard an MIT graduate say they wasted their time there.
I feel like the number of children you have makes a big difference. 1 child vs 5 kids potentially with 2 in college / 3 in private school would be vastly different financial situations.
Except it's a financial investment where person A(parents) invests, and person B(student) reaps the rewards.
Is this age dependent? For example I'm in my 40s and make a good salary, but am under this limit. If I got accepted would that apply?
Presumably yes
Awesome. Now let’s lower the bar further and do it everywhere. And then let’s keep doing more until students can pay their tuition with a summer job, like they could when our elders went to school.
I’ll hold off on asking for higher education to be free, as the culture still pushes back on that. But a return to the former model would be most welcome.
I'd like to see a future where a student can have free tuition but (with exception) is required do meaningful civic service work that benefits the community and country that is paying for tuition, ultimately graduating with zero debt if requirements are met.
Maintaining national parks? Helping support inner city? Tutoring and improving public education? Imagine having the majority of American college students contributing to these worthy causes AND getting a strong education.
This is basically the point of PSLF[0]. The cost to participants is not $0, but it can ultimately be very low if they only make income adjusted payments during their 10 years of service.
https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/forgiveness-cancellation...
Doesn't the federal government already do this? Work for them 10 years and student debt is cancelled?
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In the former model, which I also would love to back to, college was cheap because the government didn't keep inflating the price with huge loans, coupled with every adult in range telling kids that the HAVE to go to college and the more prestigious the better.
Get rid of government loans, bring us back to how universities used to operate, and education will once again be something you can pay for with a summer job.
All we're doing with these government loans is transferring the wealth of society to the universities.
>> pay their tuition with a summer job, like they could when our elders went to school.
or like it is currently for EU citizens in any EU country. Americans are getting ripped off from all sides.
Do we also return the facilities to the state they were in before, particularly the residential programs? College enrollment percentage? What about a near universal military draft for men?
Not that I think lowering the cost of education is a bad effort but appeals to some prior culture like they are apples to apples comparison is dishonest.
And the classrooms should be an easy stroll from the dorms, downhill, both ways.
> Do we also return the facilities to the state they were in before, particularly the residential programs?
Yes, please. Students learned just fine without all the fancy facilities. Perks are great and all, but I would trade them for a low cost of education in a second.
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Why not be more ambitious and aim for free?
It's never going to happen in a country where politicians try to convince people that college education == elitism, and a significant part of the population actually believes that
It is difficult to enact meaningful change in a country that doesn't see supporting its people as an investment in itself. Discussing the price when it should be free is a distraction.
Won’t happen as long as the govt is giving out free loans, which is the driver of increasing tuition prices.
I tried to check if that was true, but couldn't find much historical tuition data online. What little I did find showed that tuition adjusted for inflation has been increasing fairly steadily for over 100 years, and I didn't really see any change in the rates between before government loans and after.
Maybe if I had found data for a wide range of schools instead of just a couple of hard to get into schools there would have been a more noticeable effect.
Clearly nothing to do with inefficient administration, then. Here in Australia, where a friend's wife works as the PA for the Dean in one of our foremost universities, and I know numerous lecturers, some of whom are moving overseas for better opportunities (in Southeast Asia of all places!), the faculty-members-over-beer perspective is largely that the universities are head-in-sand about AI and about to become far less relevant. IMHO MIT OCW is great, we need more of that, and more mini-courses.
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As far as I know, and countries where tuition is free entrance is restricted and the students do not expect to live the United States university lifestyle.
Free would be fine if we could expect actual return on the investment instead of extended high school, delaying adulthood, and channeling people from useful vocations within their grasp.
that's nice, but it's become nearly as difficult to get into MIT as winning the lottery
The MIT undergraduate student body is about the same as it was in 1960, but the number of applications rose from around 4000 in 1960 to 11000 in 2000, to 20000 in 2024.
This isn't just an MIT problem. The undergrad populations of the top universities (Ivy league and similar) have hardly grown over the decades despite a large increase in student population overall in the US, not to mention the very large increase in foreign students over the past 25 years. This is by design to create increasingly exclusive brands.
Deep dive into this: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-university-of-impossibl...
> The undergrad populations of the top universities (Ivy league and similar) have hardly grown over the decades despite a large increase in student population overall in the US
Why should we expect individual universities to scale up their class sizes proportional to the student population in the US? Some universities may choose to, and new universities could spin up to serve the increased student body, but I don't see a compelling reason to argue that any given university should scale up just because college has (somewhat arbitrarily) become the default path for the entire middle class.
There's nothing wrong with MIT wanting to stay small, and it's not necessarily a conspiracy to build exclusive brands. They could also just recognize that their system won't scale up to an order of magnitude more students.
that means if the parents earn 300K a year, one can just quit his/her job and take the free ride?
One couple, both PhDs, when their daughter went to Harvard, the mom quit her job to qualify for the free tuition.
What about if someone has a large net asset? will the 200K still apply?
What about wealthy people with low AGI but lots of assets?
Check out CSS or FAFSA calculators to figure out your expected family contribution. Financial Aid offices at places like MIT that are need blind fill in the gap between your expected contribution and cost of attending with aid.
The answer to your question is it depends. Some assets like your primary home and retirements can be shielded from expected family contribution. If you've got assets sitting in a taxable account....
>Newly expanded financial aid will cover tuition costs for admitted students from 80 percent of U.S. families.
What percentage of MIT students...
Two teachers in a HCOL city are going to be above 200k.
https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...
> 58% of full-time undergraduates received [some form of] MIT Scholarship [but not necessarily a full one] during the 2023–2024 academic year.
On a related note, why does an institution so commendably progressive as Harvard charge tuition at all?
I've come to realize what we think as progressive places are what I consider "inclusively conservative" as in liberal socially, but very much bound to keeping wealth strata in place.
San Francisco + older bay area cities are a prime example of being a bastion of free market capitalism in the guise of progressivism.
San Francisco + older bay area cities are a prime example of being a bastion of free market capitalism in the guise of progressivism.
The main reason SF is unaffordable is that the city government forbids people from building housing, which is the exact opposite of a free market.
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Smells like blatant discrimination.
The reality is, the university student and his family are different entities.
Family might be filth rich and still decline to pay for the student's university costs.
As a reminder, the student is an adult and should really be treated as such. An able individual, not a dependant kid under the responsibility of his parents.
UVA does this for households that make less $100K. Hopefully, they’ll follow suit and bump it to $200K as well.
With their endowment it's criminal that they don't
80% of American families... but what % of MIT students?
This may have unintended consequences on chances of a successful application. Now, as a high school senior, you have to compete against an additional pool of strong students who aren't especially interested in MIT's offerings, but have parents pushing them toward the least expensive of all top universities.
It’s not an unintended consequence. Another way of phrasing your concern is “MIT will have an especially strong applicant pool” which is a desirable outcome.
100% agree, isn't this the meritocracy we want?
The other side of this is saying the status quo is; as a high school senior with wealthy parents, you don't have to compete against as many strong students if you apply for MIT because it has high barriers to entry (that aren't based on merit), and so you should apply even if you aren't particularly interested in their offering.
Also, the reality is most kids will be applying for all of the schools. MIT might want to improve their yield rate.
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What's the logic for choosing 200k
More than 100k but less than 300k
Is there a term for doing beneficial things for a tiny fraction of people and coasting off of the PR for it?
What's this going to do for people that aren't good enough to be in the top .1% of merit? Why do we care?
The decrease of buying power, post Covid, makes this pretty much moot at best. It’s sort of depressing to think that even if I had children, or magically qualified to attend a prestigious school like MIT, I’d still be surely priced out. Just like I am buying a house. Making $200k a year ensures I’ll never own a home unless I want to move to an area I don’t feel safe in. I imagine having children make that trade off better, but not without substantial intrinsic costs to one’s self and one’s children. If someone makes $199k at this point, they’re likely unable to afford a home in any major metropolitan area. While being able to have your gifted children receive a free education is great, I imagine many folks will push ever so slightly past that, assuming two years working parents, by the time their children would be of age to go to school.
It’s just depressing. Sorry, I’ll go back into my hole.
What urban hellhole do you live in where you can't buy a home in a safe neighborhood while earning $200K?!
You need to look outside your immediate area. Or at another state. Most of the USA is nothing like that.
Would have been lovely about 20 years ago. Oh well, no MIT for me.
One more reason to select deferred comp!
This part seems to be getting overlooked -
> And for the 50 percent of American families with income below $100,000, parents can expect to pay nothing at all toward the full cost of their students’ MIT education, which includes tuition as well as housing, dining, fees, and an allowance for books and personal expenses.
> This $100,000 threshold is up from $75,000 this year, while next year’s $200,000 threshold for tuition-free attendance will increase from its current level of $140,000.
- even though that's the article's 2nd and 3rd paragraph.
I'm sure this causes pause for more than a few people who always wanted to go to MIT, knew they could, and didn't. Tuition wasn't appetizing even 20 years ago.
In addition to pioneering Open Courses that were of high enough quality that you'd want to take them, this is hopefully the start of another trend/wave.
Please tell us that counts for the Micro-Masters certs like Data Science. That would open up a lot of opportunities for people who can’t put in as much time due to working to pay bills.
wow that’s amazing
Just read an adjacent banger that interrogates the underlying reasons why our (US) education system is broken, how it got that way, how it's influenced culture beyond our (individual) control, insinuates why these institutions are so preposterously expensive, and proposes thoughts on how to fix it (TL;DR prolly won't get fixed)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/meritoc...
https://archive.ph/OC81c
Yeah, education should be free. Record all lectures and put them out there. Charge a small fee to view them if you must but lecturers repeating themselves is not my idea of a great use of their time. Yes, I know lots of lectures are already published.
It really depends on the subject matter and the institution's focus (and tier). For disciplines where foundational knowledge remains relatively unchanged (say, Latin) recorded lectures could be an efficient way to disseminate information without requiring professors to repeat the same material. A "flipped classroom" would offer opportunities for more dynamic interaction and deeper understanding, and of course this would cost money.
However, as a professor myself in a rapidly evolving STEM field adjacent to AI, I update at least 20% of my course materials each year to keep pace with new developments. As it happens, about a third of the new content is derived from my research group's latest work. Recording lectures isn't a one-time effort; it would require constant updates to remain relevant (and let me tell you, if you want to get the voice-over right, it is a lot more time-consuming and soul-crushing than simply turning up in class and giving a live lecture).
The value of live lectures goes beyond just "transmitting" content. They offer real-time interaction, immediate feedback, and dynamic discussions that adapt to the students' understanding. This level of interaction devilishly difficult to replicate in recorded formats.
I would ramble on more, but I need to return to the lecture materials I am developing for this Friday on Vision-Language Models :P
Watching non-interactive lectures is a small part of the overall experience. I'm not commenting on whether the experience is 'worth it', but assuming the only thing people get is the ability to watch lectures doesn't make the point.
A big part of it is having a long-term peer group of people who were disciplined and motivated enough to get into MIT and succeed there. Arguably true for any university. We're products of our environments, and if you surround yourselves with hardworking people it rubs off on you.
On the other hand, many people act like "talking to professors over beer" (or to your classmates, for that matter) is supposed to add "value" to the college experience, when it's perfectly possible to get at least a bachelor's and a master's without ever doing that (source: I did).
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Its not the lecture thats valuable. Its everything else. Particularly research opportunities. That’s how you get really solid in your domain. The difference between a student who only took class in the subject and a student who applied those concepts in a lab environment to make contributions is staggering. Its like the difference between someone who watched a video on engine maintenance and someone who has not only watched that but has been rebuilding engines themselves for 2-3 years.
Why should people be compelled to provide education for free? Compelling work without compensation is slavery.
Is this a Good Will Hunting reference in disguise?
Sorry, but this is peanuts for MIT and merely a performative stunt.
Time to tax these endowments.