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Related: I wish more schools could/would adopt the Ivy League's financial aid model. Free (with room and board) if your family makes under ~$65k, and you only p

Related: I wish more schools could/would adopt the Ivy League's financial aid model. Free (with room and board) if your family makes under ~$65k, and you only pay a small percentage if your family makes up to $150k - depending on the school. Stanford is free (excluding room and board) for families making under $125k - http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/01/pf/college/stanford-financial-aid/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/01/pf/college/stanford-financia...

sotojuan 10y ago
I'm sure it's much easier to make those policies when your endowment is $22.2 billion.
- DasIch 10y ago
  Also helps that they only accept a small proportion of such students.
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    Source?
    - DasIch 10y ago
      The Revisionist History podcast has two great episodes on the subject. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/05-food-fight http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/05-food-fight http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-million http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-...
      - gohrt 10y ago
        Revisionist History is Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, not a reliable source for anything. https://www.boston.com/news/education/2016/07/15/bowdoin-college-malcolm-gladwell https://www.boston.com/news/education/2016/07/15/bowdoin-col...
        DasIch 10y ago
        Every podcast is someones podcast, that doesn't mean anything nor does it make podcasts in general or this podcast specifically unreliable. Additionally this critique is laughable and if anything proves Gladwell's point. It's not about the food, it's about spending money on things that aren't relevant to education. Gladwell could have made the very same podcast and talked about expensive sports programs instead of food. Maybe Bowdoin isn't wasting money on food and that was a bad example to make. They're still spending a lot of money and not on financial assistance. If they felt confident about what they're spending it on, they would have brought that up and mentioned that they're not spending as much on financial assistance but instead have some large education or research project going on but they're not doing that either. Bowdoin is wasting money and they clearly know it or they would have responded differently.
  - simbomi 10y ago
    It's clearly a token effort at disguising their elitist admissions procress. If they let in too many poor people the rich wouldn't send their chilren there. The whole point of these Ivy League schools is to prove membership in the club of the elite.
    - djf1 10y ago
      Admission to all the Ivy League schools is need blind, so I don't think letting in too many poor people is a big concern for them.
      - saretired 10y ago
        When I was in grad school at an Ivy League university in the early 80s, it was reported in the school paper that about 50% of undergraduates were legacies. Has that changed?
        _acme 10y ago
        Yes. It was far easier to get into college in the '80s, in part because far fewer bothered to attend; this resulted in more legacies then than now (I believe the percentage of legacies at Harvard is in the single digits).
        saretired 10y ago
        According to this article, 16% of the Harvard class of 2019 are legacies: http://features.thecrimson.com/2015/freshman-survey/makeup-narrative/ http://features.thecrimson.com/2015/freshman-survey/makeup-n... (The survey was voluntary, and there is no mention of the percentage response. Apparently Harvard does not publish the actual number of legacies.) So yes, things are better than in my day. I would say that the number of people who would not have bothered to attend Harvard in the 80's was very small indeed.
    - DasIch 10y ago
      You don't need to come up with a conspiracy here. Ivy League schools simply don't care about providing as many people as possible with a good education. The goal is rather to be the best in research, education and in the experience of studying for the people that do attend. They achieve that goal by significantly limiting how many people are allowed to attend, especially poor students that take money away from the school. If you really want to help poor people, ignore what the rich are doing, ignore inequality and identify who those poor people are, what problems they have and fix them. That will be far more beneficial than attacking the "elites".
- tedunangst 10y ago
  Lots of policies are easier to make when you have cash. The flip side of being forced to spend down the endowment is an increasing focus on the short term. For an institution that's supposed to have some insulation from whichever way the wind is blowing today, that's not such a good thing.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    $20B is much more than "some insulation."
intrasight 10y ago
My daughter is at Yale. They basically say: "How much do you make? Give us 20%". While painful, I do think it is the most fair approach.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  Having multiple children sure is expensive.
  - rconti 10y ago
    Typically in a need-blind financial aid model, the family's expected contribution is all-in. Your kid's twin sibling would hence be 'free'. At least in theory.
  - mjevans 10y ago
    It should be exponentially more expensive per child. Not specifically in relation to college, but in relation to taxation in general. We want to encourage the population to grow in sustainable ways, not only in some families that make having lots of kids a priority.
    - astrocat 10y ago
      You posture that an effective policy to put downward pressure on fertility is to deny access to education. A policy whose effects specifically target individuals who didn't make the decisions you want to disincentivize. I think you might want to re-think your policy positions :) In general, I don't think inhibiting access to quality education is ever an appropriate response to any situation.
      - mjevans 10y ago
        I meant precisely what I stated. A child doesn't have a choice about where it is brought in to being. Unstated: all children should have a good education/etc. Now, the /parents/. They do have a choice. The general system outlined in Larry Nivin's science fiction universe where exponentially higher costs were associated with children past the first free one (there were also lotteries to fairly distribute most of the rest of the population sustenance quota, as well as the option of emigrating off of earth to unrestricted colonies). Mostly, however, is the issue that today there are many who do not /have/ children because the imbalances in today's society make them feel unworthy or simply unable to do so.
apsec112 10y ago
I went to an Ivy League college, and my parents are by no means rich, or even upper middle class. What happened was the college tried to use any excuse they could possibly find to deny "financial aid". One time I was denied because of a rounding error in my parents' tax returns. Literally a rounding error. The only reason I managed to graduate was because a lawyer I happened to know threatened to sue the school. If the Ivies want to say, "we're a school for the rich, tuition is $XXXK, put up the cash or don't come here", that is 100% their right as private institutions. But if they promise that aid will be provided to anyone who needs it, and they then revoke that promise on a whim when someone is already partway through their degree, they are lying bastards and need to be called out on it.
- dbg31415 10y ago
  The schools have to look out for themselves. What I saw was that since the schools give a lot of grants / reduced tuition to students that come from families that make less than $X, a lot of parents tend to rig their returns to make less than $X. If you own your own business, it's easy to game your income.
  - kevan 10y ago
    There's a big difference between looking out for yourself and denying financial aid because of a discrepancy of less than a dollar. Intent matters, and it's hard to argue that someone is trying to fleece you for $1 at a time.
    - dbg31415 10y ago
      Intent matters to... software? It's literally just a formula and someone plugs in numbers and gets a green screen or a red screen. The people doing financial aid probably aren't enabled to change the screen colors once a response comes back. Bureaucrats are bureaucrats -- you have to bypass them to get anything done.
- sidek 10y ago
  You speak of the Ivies as a group which has wronged you, but I don't necessarily think your experience is representative of the group as a whole. Certainly my experience at another Ivy has been that this one goes out of their way to make sure students are funded, and will usually accept even egregiously late paperwork with no reduction in financial aid.
maguay 10y ago
Perhaps the worst part is how few students who could truly use that financial aid simply don't apply to Ivy League schools since they think they'd never be able to pay for them. I didn't know this until long after starting college.
- tedunangst 10y ago
  It doesn't help that there's a long line of very angry people telling anybody who will listen "you'll never get in, only rich snobs go there".
  - allemagne 10y ago
    Are you trying to say that the real issue here is bias against the rich and powerful?
    - tedunangst 10y ago
      Telling lower middle class students that they shouldn't attend or even apply to elite schools seems like a poor strategy to reduce the power of the elites.
c3534l 10y ago
I mean, this kind of only works for Ivy League because they're pairing up the unbelievably privileged with the extraordinarily talented. When you're just mixing a bunch of middle class people together, not only will you not have enough money to actually keep the <$65k kids funded, but those extra-talented kids are still all at more prestigious schools.
mhb 10y ago
Perhaps a pedantic point, but regardless of income, there is no financial aid for families with assets over a certain amount.

sotojuan 10y ago

I'm sure it's much easier to make those policies when your endowment is $22.2 billion.

DasIch 10y ago
Also helps that they only accept a small proportion of such students.
- tedunangst 10y ago
  Source?
  - DasIch 10y ago
    The Revisionist History podcast has two great episodes on the subject. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/05-food-fight http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/05-food-fight http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-million http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-...
    - gohrt 10y ago
      Revisionist History is Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, not a reliable source for anything. https://www.boston.com/news/education/2016/07/15/bowdoin-college-malcolm-gladwell https://www.boston.com/news/education/2016/07/15/bowdoin-col...
      - DasIch 10y ago
        Every podcast is someones podcast, that doesn't mean anything nor does it make podcasts in general or this podcast specifically unreliable. Additionally this critique is laughable and if anything proves Gladwell's point. It's not about the food, it's about spending money on things that aren't relevant to education. Gladwell could have made the very same podcast and talked about expensive sports programs instead of food. Maybe Bowdoin isn't wasting money on food and that was a bad example to make. They're still spending a lot of money and not on financial assistance. If they felt confident about what they're spending it on, they would have brought that up and mentioned that they're not spending as much on financial assistance but instead have some large education or research project going on but they're not doing that either. Bowdoin is wasting money and they clearly know it or they would have responded differently.
- simbomi 10y ago
  It's clearly a token effort at disguising their elitist admissions procress. If they let in too many poor people the rich wouldn't send their chilren there. The whole point of these Ivy League schools is to prove membership in the club of the elite.
  - djf1 10y ago
    Admission to all the Ivy League schools is need blind, so I don't think letting in too many poor people is a big concern for them.
    - saretired 10y ago
      When I was in grad school at an Ivy League university in the early 80s, it was reported in the school paper that about 50% of undergraduates were legacies. Has that changed?
      - _acme 10y ago
        Yes. It was far easier to get into college in the '80s, in part because far fewer bothered to attend; this resulted in more legacies then than now (I believe the percentage of legacies at Harvard is in the single digits).
        saretired 10y ago
        According to this article, 16% of the Harvard class of 2019 are legacies: http://features.thecrimson.com/2015/freshman-survey/makeup-narrative/ http://features.thecrimson.com/2015/freshman-survey/makeup-n... (The survey was voluntary, and there is no mention of the percentage response. Apparently Harvard does not publish the actual number of legacies.) So yes, things are better than in my day. I would say that the number of people who would not have bothered to attend Harvard in the 80's was very small indeed.
  - DasIch 10y ago
    You don't need to come up with a conspiracy here. Ivy League schools simply don't care about providing as many people as possible with a good education. The goal is rather to be the best in research, education and in the experience of studying for the people that do attend. They achieve that goal by significantly limiting how many people are allowed to attend, especially poor students that take money away from the school. If you really want to help poor people, ignore what the rich are doing, ignore inequality and identify who those poor people are, what problems they have and fix them. That will be far more beneficial than attacking the "elites".
tedunangst 10y ago
Lots of policies are easier to make when you have cash. The flip side of being forced to spend down the endowment is an increasing focus on the short term. For an institution that's supposed to have some insulation from whichever way the wind is blowing today, that's not such a good thing.
- rhizome 10y ago
  $20B is much more than "some insulation."

intrasight 10y ago

My daughter is at Yale. They basically say: "How much do you make? Give us 20%". While painful, I do think it is the most fair approach.

Hydraulix989 10y ago
Having multiple children sure is expensive.
- rconti 10y ago
  Typically in a need-blind financial aid model, the family's expected contribution is all-in. Your kid's twin sibling would hence be 'free'. At least in theory.
- mjevans 10y ago
  It should be exponentially more expensive per child. Not specifically in relation to college, but in relation to taxation in general. We want to encourage the population to grow in sustainable ways, not only in some families that make having lots of kids a priority.
  - astrocat 10y ago
    You posture that an effective policy to put downward pressure on fertility is to deny access to education. A policy whose effects specifically target individuals who didn't make the decisions you want to disincentivize. I think you might want to re-think your policy positions :) In general, I don't think inhibiting access to quality education is ever an appropriate response to any situation.
    - mjevans 10y ago
      I meant precisely what I stated. A child doesn't have a choice about where it is brought in to being. Unstated: all children should have a good education/etc. Now, the /parents/. They do have a choice. The general system outlined in Larry Nivin's science fiction universe where exponentially higher costs were associated with children past the first free one (there were also lotteries to fairly distribute most of the rest of the population sustenance quota, as well as the option of emigrating off of earth to unrestricted colonies). Mostly, however, is the issue that today there are many who do not /have/ children because the imbalances in today's society make them feel unworthy or simply unable to do so.

apsec112 10y ago

I went to an Ivy League college, and my parents are by no means rich, or even upper middle class. What happened was the college tried to use any excuse they could possibly find to deny "financial aid". One time I was denied because of a rounding error in my parents' tax returns. Literally a rounding error. The only reason I managed to graduate was because a lawyer I happened to know threatened to sue the school. If the Ivies want to say, "we're a school for the rich, tuition is $XXXK, put up the cash or don't come here", that is 100% their right as private institutions. But if they promise that aid will be provided to anyone who needs it, and they then revoke that promise on a whim when someone is already partway through their degree, they are lying bastards and need to be called out on it.

dbg31415 10y ago
The schools have to look out for themselves. What I saw was that since the schools give a lot of grants / reduced tuition to students that come from families that make less than $X, a lot of parents tend to rig their returns to make less than $X. If you own your own business, it's easy to game your income.
- kevan 10y ago
  There's a big difference between looking out for yourself and denying financial aid because of a discrepancy of less than a dollar. Intent matters, and it's hard to argue that someone is trying to fleece you for $1 at a time.
  - dbg31415 10y ago
    Intent matters to... software? It's literally just a formula and someone plugs in numbers and gets a green screen or a red screen. The people doing financial aid probably aren't enabled to change the screen colors once a response comes back. Bureaucrats are bureaucrats -- you have to bypass them to get anything done.
sidek 10y ago
You speak of the Ivies as a group which has wronged you, but I don't necessarily think your experience is representative of the group as a whole. Certainly my experience at another Ivy has been that this one goes out of their way to make sure students are funded, and will usually accept even egregiously late paperwork with no reduction in financial aid.

maguay 10y ago

Perhaps the worst part is how few students who could truly use that financial aid simply don't apply to Ivy League schools since they think they'd never be able to pay for them. I didn't know this until long after starting college.

tedunangst 10y ago
It doesn't help that there's a long line of very angry people telling anybody who will listen "you'll never get in, only rich snobs go there".
- allemagne 10y ago
  Are you trying to say that the real issue here is bias against the rich and powerful?
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    Telling lower middle class students that they shouldn't attend or even apply to elite schools seems like a poor strategy to reduce the power of the elites.

c3534l 10y ago

I mean, this kind of only works for Ivy League because they're pairing up the unbelievably privileged with the extraordinarily talented. When you're just mixing a bunch of middle class people together, not only will you not have enough money to actually keep the <$65k kids funded, but those extra-talented kids are still all at more prestigious schools.

mhb 10y ago

Perhaps a pedantic point, but regardless of income, there is no financial aid for families with assets over a certain amount.