Comment by changoplatanero
3 days ago
Why is the price you have to pay for something dependent on how much money your parents make? Feels so unfair
3 days ago
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.
> 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.
No you can't. The school is the one choosing to set their prices based on the parents, who might or might not have anything to do with the student's school budget. That is the school's faulty assumption, and they, not the parents, are the ones screwing over those students.
My point is that the school has zero obligation to a prospective student. If the parents have the means to pay, but dont want to, that seems to be a bigger question of responsibility and obligation.
You can't make that case at all. The price these name-brand schools ask is pretty much "how much do you(r parents) have?", and your kids could instead go to state school (if they can get into MIT, they probably qualify for a full ride scholarship or at least close) and have that tuition go to an ~80% down payment on their first house.
I agree with that. I dont see how that is MIT's problem.
6 replies →
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?
still seems weird to me. is there any other product for 18-22 year olds where the price changes depending on their parents wealth?
> still seems weird to me. is there any other product for 18-22 year olds where the price changes depending on their parents wealth?
If by “price” you mean, “net price after available subsidies”, then, yeah: healthcare, housing, and food, among others.
The difference is that the subsidies are usually public, whereas the education subsidies are by the seller—but the seller is also a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the entire premise of which, and the reason donations to them are tax deductible to the donor on top of the nonprofit being tax exempt, is that the nonprofit functions serves social needs in lieu of the government doing so.
When I was 18-22 and living with my parents (pretty normal in Europe) I worked and contributed to the house expenses. I'm pretty sure kids of rich people don't do that. If I wanted to take out a loan, my parent's wouldn't be able to provide guarantees and thus the kind of loan and conditions I had access to would be much different than those a kid with rich parents could. In University people could also get grants based on your family income.
Those examples are varied and are not the same thing as purchasing a concrete product, yet I believe they are relevant to your question - education is a service that supports society, not a concrete product for your personal use and enjoyment. How and if you get it, relies not entirely on you at that point in your life, but heavily on your parents and in general on your family as a single economic unit to which you belong.
It isn’t a mcburger. It’s an investment with an excepted variable return realized over like 4-5 decades. There’s almost nothing else an 18-22 can do that has comparable odds of increasing value of oneself in dollar terms and in impossible-to-measure-society terms than getting accepted into a good school.
(E.g. you hear about college dropouts starting businesses all the time. You barely ever hear that about people who haven’t attended college at all.)
Interesting question. I can't think of anything outside of the education sphere, no. Maybe someone else will chime in with an example.
3 replies →
So there is an upper limit, which is the real price?