Comment by currymj
4 days ago
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.
> 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.
Why should college be very expensive for rich people?
Because they can afford it. It's a redistribution tactic. You can also phrase it like this: college should be free for all to attend. Then, as long as you have a progressive tax scheme, the outcome is the same. Cheap for the poor, expensive for the rich.
Then are you suggesting buying anything should work like this?
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According to the old story, the New York Times asked a famous bank robber why he robbed banks. The answer: Because that's where the money is.
The money for funding public and quasi-private (universities and hospitals) institutions has to come from somewhere. Making it equally affordable for everybody doesn't raise enough money to maintain operations. Same for funding the government.
Granted, I think all of those institutions are due for reforms, which have little chance of happening right now, but still, I think the basic funding equation can't be eliminated.
> The money for funding public and quasi-private (universities and hospitals) institutions has to come from somewhere. Making it equally affordable for everybody doesn't raise enough money to maintain operations. Same for funding the government.
That's what taxes are for: you take proportionally more from people with more assets. I find the entire conversation about "not wanting my tax dollars to pay for some millionaire's kids' education", because those millionaires would end up paying the difference in taxes (under a fair system) than they do now.
That's without even considering the perverse incentives at play when a wealthy parent can use the payment or withholding of payment for education as a way to control their kids. Just because a parent is wealthy it doesn't necessarily mean that the kid would have access to those funds, or that explicit or implicit requirements that could be imposed to access those funds would be reasonable.
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This is an excellent summary of the Harvard University tuition strategy for the last 20 years.
But this strategy only applies to the wealthy universities, like Harvard, which are extremely difficult to get into -- and that is by design (Harvard could expand its student body), since what Harvard is selling these days, above all, is exclusivity.
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.
Wait so US colleges are allowed to require any kind of real financial information from you all? Shouldn't they just say if you're accepted or not, then send you the bills? And for any financial aid program, shouldn't someone else review that instead of them directly having access to all that financial data of students without being any kind of financial institution? Let's say some kind of government letter instead giving them your income statements.
They're allowed to ask for the info; and if not explicity "need-blind", are allowed to accept or reject your application based on how much of a discount on tuition they anticipate you needing. Practically speaking, this means that if you look like you can pay the $65-85 thousand a year w/o any help, that's a plus.
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> Dunno where you got this "ideal".
I wonder if people like you just lack the imagination or system thinking or equate poor with useless or are just afraid of thinking people? From the perspective of the state and the society it’s beneficial to have an educated population, unless you think you won’t have enough stupid people to man the factories?
The track record over the past thirty years of sending more and more people to nominal "college" as "a way to have more thinking people" hasn't exactly done wonders, unless you're in the student loan servicing business.
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