Comment by TheJoeMan
19 hours ago
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.
My understanding is that the IRS attitude toward this depends on the exact tax status of your small business. The approach you describe reflects an S corporation, which is nowhere near always the right choice for every small business that sends their children to MIT: as one counterexample, if the parents' business is in NYC, the city's General Corporation Tax (which applies to S corporations) is often more punishing than its Unincorporated Business Tax, and therefore many NYC small businesses organize as LLCs not taxed as a corporation if they even choose to create a separate legal entity at all.
For every type of business entity other than an S corp or an LLC electing to be taxed as one, the IRS either doesn't care about any notion of reasonable salary or - in the case of a C corp or an LLC electing to be taxed as one - actually wants it to be as low as possible (whereas the owner wants to maximize it).
From what I've observed (worked at a few small businesses before I got an office IT job, and even then...) it's about figuring out enough 'fringe benefits' and/or 'explanations' that are plausible with your CPA. e.x. how many profitable company car buy/leases can you do, a good explanation of why you are saving that money as a small or privately owned company (i.e. saving for expansion via acquisition/etc, but you have to follow through and then sell the results ASAP)
You can't have it be 'insignificant' salary but you can do plenty of fringe benefits or long term profiteering via acquisition as mentioned.
I will say, ironically, the small business owners like that were great to work for, although they were paranoid, they were often generous to employees.
OTOH, at the computer shop there was a standing rule that if the CPA brought his computer in it was 100% priority and we treated him better than the one org that was 10-30% (depending on year) of our entire gross income...
EDIT: To be clear, it's complicated, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42199534 is a good explanation of where I sit overall.
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Are you saying that the IRS will literally officially modify your recorded / reported income and expenses to be different from what you reported, at their discretion, even if based on what they think are plausible reasons?
That still seems like heavy handed overreach to me. Should they not instead contact you for clarifications about the ambiguity?
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> the IRS will be up my backside pretty quick
How many times were you audited before learning this valuable lesson?
As a former owner of a small business I can tell you that what my accountant told me about that is that as long as the salary is over the Social Security max, (which is about $160K) the IRS doesn't really care.
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Will they actually though?
You hear a lot of anecdotes both ways and it is quite hard to get a good picture of the real situation.
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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)
> most people don’t plan like this.
This is a pretty naive take. It is a $85k per year cost. If you can shift some money around and avoid $85k per year, you would absolutely do that.
> you could also emancipate your 17 year old.
This is complicated. Emancipation is not a “sign a form” kind of thing. The kid would have to be living completely independently (no support from the parents) and would have to convince a judge that they need to have rights and responsibilities otherwise given to adults. “Because the parents don’t want to pay for school” isn’t really a valid reason.
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> All business funds are re-invested without tax, this is actually a good thing.
Paying tax and investing in your kid is also a good thing. Putting your income into the S&P 500 is also a good thing, but being wealthy enough to do so should exempt your children from this subsidy
I remember CEOs having a salary of $1...
Usually plus stock grants though, which are taxed as income.
>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?
usually it's done by taking out a succession of loans, with the stock as collateral. that way the actual sale of stock is deferred until death
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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.
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.
IF I have stock and make $XX,XXX in dividends, how is that different? IF I have own apartments and make $XX,XXX in rent, how is that different?
I think the idea is that Yes, the expectation is for people to make actual sacrifice before they qualify.
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A bunch of stock is a source of income too, but it wouldn't be wrong to use some of it.
If the business is worth enough then selling it can replace all the income you would have ever gotten from it. It's not as simple as "income goes away". The specific numbers make all the difference.
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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.
Does MIT include the market value of their kidneys in their assessment? You might have lost track of what is being discussed here.
Anyway no, they should not cut their kidneys out and sell them.
Nobody is forcing them to pay this price any more than you are forced to sell a kidney for a private jet.
Education costs are out of control, but you can still get a degree elsewhere for 10% the MIT cost, and have it paid for entirely by the government if you are low income
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.
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.
It isn't solely the government's fault. Most American universities are corporatized and exist primarily as money printers for the admin staff. The purpose of an adjunct professor is to cost the institution as little as possible while passing as many marginal students as possible so they can maximize profits with sheep that keep coming back to the trough.
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European colleges are incredibly thrifty, though. German universities for example can lack dorms, student unions, and professors lack TAs to grade homework (so homework isn't graded) and your entire grade depends on one final.
We could do this in the USA also, or perhaps even bother with online universities, except those are generally considered not very useful as degrees.
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This is a common myth. This might explain why Harvard or MIT tuition is high but not the average college. Tuition mostly reflects staff costs and those have been going up due to Baumol's cost disease. Dentists, along with many other industries with its main cost being highly educated staff that haven't managed to scale production like online brokerages, have had a similar price increase since 1970.
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> 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.
...if you go back in time a few decades basically everything was about 1/10th as expensive.
e.g. "Adjusted for inflation, $1.00 in 1960 is equal to $10.43 in 2024" according to https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=1...
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> and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement
This here is where the money is... college degrees are a very effective dull-weeder for job applications. It filters out people of lower social classes (because they cannot afford college or effects of their social status like having to work jobs next to school to help their family make rent prevent them from getting good enough grades), it filters out people with unmanaged mental health issues, it filters out young parents (good luck managing to get a degree parallel to raising a child), it filters out people with disabilities... and all of that without violating a single anti-discrimination law.
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.
> universities primarily compete on entertainment and prestige.
I like to call this "resort-style education".
Still, I do not get it. Why would this competition / exclusivity rule be so much less prevalent in large parts of Europe?
I don't want to say Europe is without problems, but I think this kind of legislation, together with social security in general, is a clear example of how it can be handled more efficient and fair for most people.
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actually ETHZ and EPFL are very good and highly ranked, and have cheap tuition and open enrollment. i don’t know how they do it. I guess things just work better in Switzerland.
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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.
I don't know where the OP lives. But in Switzerland, where world-class univeristies like the ETH cost something like $ 1.5k a year in tuition, I'm pretty certain that people earn more on average than in the USA.
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Yeah indeed a giant part (75 percent or so) of what the companies pay, does not directly go to the workers bank account.
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.
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.
A few weeks ago apparently, the 'promise less taxes->everybody happy' magic spell has once again worked.
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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.
Why should college be very expensive for rich people?
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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.
this is partly true. it is cheap / free for very low income -- if you qualify for a Pell grant you can usually get additional financial aid from your state university that can bring your cost down to zero.
But if you are above the low income line, but by no means wealthy -- so if you're a household making say $100K a year, then college is extremely expensive and unaffordable especially if you have several kids. You're not poor enough to qualify for substantial financial aid, and you're not wealthy enough to afford tuition. Yeah, your kid can get into Harvard or Stanford for free, but the chances of them being accepted are vanishingly small no matter how smart they are.
The saving grace is community college -- enroll at the local CC for 2 years and then transfer to the state school.
This is an excellent summary of the Harvard University tuition strategy for the last 20 years.
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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.
Dunno where you got this "ideal".
the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away
..."fading away", to the tune of (at last glance ) one and three quarters of a trillion dollars in outstanding student loan debt.
it would make more sense to do this redistribution through taxes if possible
The ability of US higher ed to raise tuition prices will always overwhelm the ability of US taxpayers to meet those prices. The phrase "utility monster" comes to mind.
but many US institutions are private so that doesn’t really work.
Private, in the sense that nobody who answers to someone who must win an election is directly in charge of running them, but, who operate as charities for the purpose of donations, pay no taxes on either capital gains or real estate, and are permitted to act as government contractors skimming up to 85% of grant money they're tasked with administrating.
so the colleges basically have their own privately-run means testing programs, and like all such programs there are flaws and loopholes.
The flaw being that...the school is allowed to have total knowledge of a customer's ability to pay before it chooses to do business with them. Imagine if you had to give three years of your tax returns to the person you were trying to buy a house from.
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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.
Even the cheaper schools in the US (public universities) aren't all that cheap anymore. When was an undergrad in the late 1980s, I paid under $2000 a semester. Now it is close to $10000. Yes, there's been inflation since then, but not 5X (it's more like 2.5X).
The cheapest you're going to get is $10K a year (and that's hard to find), and that's just tuition. If it's not near your parents' home then you're looking at $25K/year bare minimum (as in living off ramen packs and peanut butter). So that's $100K that your parents have to have saved up (per child) or which you have to take on as debt.
Just looked up our main state schools and cost of attendance is $31K - $35K for in-state residents. So that's $120K - $140K for 4 years (not counting increases). And these aren't top-100 schools either.
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Education in the US isn't cheap but those are elite colleges. The price tag is mostly for the networking.
I will say though, that pretending there isn't a difference in education is just untrue sadly. I've had to come to terms with this, going from a very small state college to a more prestigious private school for graduate studies. Nearly everyone around me is from a large, more expensive school, literally everyone else in my program is significantly better educated than me. Of course you can find good programs at small schools, they try very hard. But there's just a difference between a school that can afford to run classical mechanics 2 and one that cannot, a school that can afford to pick and choose a good professor for their classes and one that cannot. And that gap is vastly wider than i had imagined
Funnily enough, if you think about for networking you'd much rather be surrounded by kids who can afford that 200k price tag upfront.
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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.
30 minutes does not seem too bad. Unless you paid a lot for the dorm.
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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.
I really think Freedom, the American way, is super overrated. If the cost is misery, fear of loss of health or job, what's left of Its benefits? "I'm the chosen one protected by God"? Or does social security still have this huge connotation with communism?
Sorry for my ranting, I just cannot believe what is still happening.
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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?
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.
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.
How would they verify?
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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.
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.
How so? I know a guy who has literally millions of dollars tied up in shit that moves dirt and rocks and another mil tied up in some gravel pits.
The free cash he has, the house he lives in, the lifestyle he can afford is on par with "normal" white collar professionals (i.e. not people who get a bajillion monopoly bucks to implement linked list traversals for faang). He works 60hr weeks during construction season and has government agencies up his ass regularly (MHSA regulates him like he's running a pit mine, it's a huge f-ing farce). If you don't place insane value on being your own boss it's kind of a shitty life.
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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
Because it is really a discount to the parents, not the student. It is understood that few 17 year olds have saved enough money to pay MIT's tuition of $85k/year for 4 years and parents are usually footing the bill.
Yes, students who's parents have money but choose not to spend it get a rough deal. You can make a pretty strong case that it is their parents screwing them over, not the school. The school doesn't owe a discount to prospective students.
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In my opinion, you're reasoning about it incorrectly.
What if I said: the price is the same for everyone, but people with less access to money get proportionally more assistance paying that price?
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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.
At an upper end college? Yeah I guess it has to be like definitely below 90% of the population. Basically zero!
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