26 ms·

MIT to be tuition-free for families earning less than $75,000 a year

49 points by pius 19y ago

iamdave 19y ago
Feel free to take this at face value, but this somewhat concerns me. I attended community college for one semester before transferring to a state uni where tuition was almost 20,000 dollars more and in my experience the characteristic and personal motivation was much different. At the community college (where students often did not have to pay tuition at all because of the low cost bundled with state provided financial support) students seemed apathetic about attending class, and personal success whereas the students at the state uni (who faced the prospect of having to pay thousands in student loans) this was the complete opposite. Students had a higher degree of personal commitment, and motivation to succeed at the uni level. Who knows if this will be the case at MIT, but this is just what I happened to experience when the disparity of income became as overt as it did
- pius 19y ago
  students seemed apathetic about attending class and personal success For what it's worth, students like this get weeded out of MIT rather quickly.
  - iamdave 19y ago
    Aye, I don't know how they work things there but that's at least good to know. It's more beneficial to the organization to weed them out and let them find success than to not care and bring everyone around them down. Thanks for that tidbit.
- jey 19y ago
  Why is it good for kids to be motivated by the fact that they're paying a lot of money? People should be in school if they're motivated by their desire to learn, or they should just get out and stop diluting the experience for everyone else. Our society doesn't do a good job of serving kids who just want job training and don't have an academic bent. Right now we lump together the people who want vocational training and a certificate of competency with the people who are passionate and want to learn. This leads to a mixed weird situation where too much irrelevant stuff is "taught"[1] from the perspective of the vocational students, and the course work is largely busy work from the perspective of those who want to learn. That "Mathematician's Lament" that appeared on here recently is a great exposition on this problem. http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf 1. I use the word "taught" loosely here to refer to the process of memorization and regurgitation that is standard in the formal education system.
  - wheels 19y ago
    I live in Germany, where college, with a very few exceptions is free across the board. On the one hand that's wonderful and part of me wants to love a system that offers free educational access to all. On the other hand, you see the influence of a value economy on it: there's little motivation to finish for those who enjoy it. I think there's a sweet spot in the middle where people pay just enough to assign value to a semester of schooling, but not so much that they're crippled by debt upon graduation. In an ideal world, for me, tuition costs should be for engendering value rather than recuperating costs.
  - curi 19y ago
    /upvote for caring about the source of motivation
    - BrandonM 19y ago
      I downvoted this because I've seen three "/*vote" comments from you just today and they're starting to get annoying. What's the point of the "/" again?
      - curi 19y ago
        My votes don't count, so I write them in comments. Feel free to complain to pg. the / is like an irc command or various other places. PS your profile says to email you but doesn't give an email address.
      - rms 19y ago
        what's the point of Paul Graham taking away voting rights and refusing to give them back?
        allenbrunson 19y ago
        i don't know the whole story of pg taking away your voting rights, but as a guess, i'd say he did so because he felt you were abusing the privilege. so now, rather than getting the message and being cool about it, you and curi are incessantly belly-aching instead. in pg's place, i'd be thinking it's about time to ban both of you altogether.
- ldambra 19y ago
  I dropped out from college after a successful year because I understood I was losing my time. If I had gotten in debt to pay an expensive tuition, I would have pursued the studies for the wrong reasons, just to rationalize the insane expenses and to get that piece of paper. Thank god I was free to drop out and do something else. On a side note, a lot of psychological studies as well as common sense suggest that people wherever they are and whatever they do are less motivated if they don't get consideration. No wonder why the students that have the perspective of a Harvard or MIT diploma are much more motivated than those who attend to community college.
timr 19y ago
Well, damn. Had this existed in the mid-90s, it would have changed were I went to school.
- thorax 19y ago
  :( Very much so.
- run4yourlives 19y ago
  Had it existed, it may have changed my life... although I actually love my life right now, so maybe that's overrated. :-)
papersmith 19y ago
I wonder if it applies to Canadians or other foreign students. I had a friend who ditched MIT for Waterloo because the latter gave him full scholarship.
- rglovejoy 19y ago
  MIT is a private institution. It's their endowment, so they should be able to support Canadians or anyone else if they choose to.
rglovejoy 19y ago
It would have been nice for the Institute to have done this when I was an undergrad there. I only wish that it didn't have to require a Senate investigation to get them to open up the pursestrings.
neilk 19y ago
I wonder how many people are really going to take advantage of this. I think it will tend to benefit academic families more than disadvantaged communities. If you have two parents working and they're earning less than $75,000 per year combined, I kind of wonder how they're going to afford the kind of things an MIT-caliber mind needs, growing up.
- pius 19y ago
  Since when are growing up smart and growing up poor mutually exclusive?
- BrandonM 19y ago
  If you're poor and you're not taking advantage of free (and moral) opportunities to better yourself, that might be part of the reason that you're poor to begin with. All you can really do is offer the opportunity; you can't hold someone's hand and force them to take it. Besides, what does an "MIT-caliber mind" need growing up? I would like to think of myself as an MIT-caliber mind (99.5 percentile PSAT/NMSQT, 35 ACT, 1500 SAT), and I didn't have anything special growing up. We qualified for reduced lunches, I worked at least 20 hours a week, played sports, did a lot of work at home (my family completely renovated our first house ourselves (everything from plumbing and electricity to siding), and we also had a dog-breeding business we were starting up), and still did well enough in school to be valedictorian. And before you get the wrong idea, I don't think I'm anything special; I simply have an inquisitive mind that my mother (no college) was smart enough to stimulate at a young age. After that it's just hard work and good habits. The implication that intelligence requires some material object is off mark.
  - neilk 19y ago
    Yes, but did you go to MIT? Or any "name" university? If not, why not? Perhaps I wasn't clear. I have seen lots of insanely smart children whose parents were not rich. But, unfortunately, to get into these top colleges takes more than brains. Nowadays the average MIT freshman has had a lifetime of parents indulging their curiosity and ambitions, prep tests and tutors, and this takes money. Not to mention (in the USA) the expense of living in an area where the schools are good enough. These days, sometimes it's the difference between a microscope or just a textbook. Sometimes it's the difference between a textbook and NO textbook. Many parents risk bankruptcy just to move to a district where their kids get a little better education. Finally, there is the problem of not having connections. A family making less than $75,000 in household income probably doesn't have elite connections -- unless they are a family of academics or artists. Which is why I mentioned that. When I was a kid, just buying a home computer was the equivalent expense of 10% of a laborer's salary. My Dad was able to do that because he was a bit richer, and it changed my life. Today, maybe the couple consisting of a cleaner and a day laborer could buy a decent computer for the whole family -- but their kid is competing against a richer kid that had two or three of their very own, to play with and take apart. If you want to believe in Horatio Alger and that anybody can do anything given enough willpower, fine. But in my opinion, when the children of the rich are often essentially coasting into such schools on a small measure of precocity, it should not require superhuman effort for the poor geniuses to get in. In my ideal world, we'd have something like Swiss policy; ensure that all primary and secondary education is up to snuff, no matter where you live, and kindergarten to Ph.D is free as long as you can make the grade.
mpc 19y ago
To me, it seems like a random number. 75k can be a lot or very little depending where you live. What if your parents make 76000?
- dfranke 19y ago
  I assume that tuition is still a continuous function of income. I doubt you suddenly pay full boat if you're a dollar over $75k.
codeLullaby 19y ago
Wow! I studied at one of South India's finest Engineering Colleges [College Of Engineering,Trivandrum( Not even remotely comparable to MIT in facilities)]. My tuition fee was less than 50 $ a year ! [Accommodation :- 50 cents a month!! Food from College: approx $20] Entry to the college is 100% based on merit. [FYI,here in Kerala a decent beef steak costs $7 , 320 gram pack of Top Ramen Noodles cost $1.1 and a litre of petrol @ $1.24 ]
michjeanty 19y ago
If parent's assets combine with income is less than $60,000 for the year, students get to attend Harvard for free. If less than $90,000, students would pay 30% of the school tuition. I thought I would post that for people to know.

49 points by pius 19y ago

Feel free to take this at face value, but this somewhat concerns me. I attended community college for one semester before transferring to a state uni where tuition was almost 20,000 dollars more and in my experience the characteristic and personal motivation was much different. At the community college (where students often did not have to pay tuition at all because of the low cost bundled with state provided financial support) students seemed apathetic about attending class, and personal success whereas the students at the state uni (who faced the prospect of having to pay thousands in student loans) this was the complete opposite. Students had a higher degree of personal commitment, and motivation to succeed at the uni level. Who knows if this will be the case at MIT, but this is just what I happened to experience when the disparity of income became as overt as it did

pius 19y ago
students seemed apathetic about attending class and personal success For what it's worth, students like this get weeded out of MIT rather quickly.
- iamdave 19y ago
  Aye, I don't know how they work things there but that's at least good to know. It's more beneficial to the organization to weed them out and let them find success than to not care and bring everyone around them down. Thanks for that tidbit.
jey 19y ago
Why is it good for kids to be motivated by the fact that they're paying a lot of money? People should be in school if they're motivated by their desire to learn, or they should just get out and stop diluting the experience for everyone else. Our society doesn't do a good job of serving kids who just want job training and don't have an academic bent. Right now we lump together the people who want vocational training and a certificate of competency with the people who are passionate and want to learn. This leads to a mixed weird situation where too much irrelevant stuff is "taught"[1] from the perspective of the vocational students, and the course work is largely busy work from the perspective of those who want to learn. That "Mathematician's Lament" that appeared on here recently is a great exposition on this problem. http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf 1. I use the word "taught" loosely here to refer to the process of memorization and regurgitation that is standard in the formal education system.
- wheels 19y ago
  I live in Germany, where college, with a very few exceptions is free across the board. On the one hand that's wonderful and part of me wants to love a system that offers free educational access to all. On the other hand, you see the influence of a value economy on it: there's little motivation to finish for those who enjoy it. I think there's a sweet spot in the middle where people pay just enough to assign value to a semester of schooling, but not so much that they're crippled by debt upon graduation. In an ideal world, for me, tuition costs should be for engendering value rather than recuperating costs.
- curi 19y ago
  /upvote for caring about the source of motivation
  - BrandonM 19y ago
    I downvoted this because I've seen three "/*vote" comments from you just today and they're starting to get annoying. What's the point of the "/" again?
    - curi 19y ago
      My votes don't count, so I write them in comments. Feel free to complain to pg. the / is like an irc command or various other places. PS your profile says to email you but doesn't give an email address.
    - rms 19y ago
      what's the point of Paul Graham taking away voting rights and refusing to give them back?
      - allenbrunson 19y ago
        i don't know the whole story of pg taking away your voting rights, but as a guess, i'd say he did so because he felt you were abusing the privilege. so now, rather than getting the message and being cool about it, you and curi are incessantly belly-aching instead. in pg's place, i'd be thinking it's about time to ban both of you altogether.
ldambra 19y ago
I dropped out from college after a successful year because I understood I was losing my time. If I had gotten in debt to pay an expensive tuition, I would have pursued the studies for the wrong reasons, just to rationalize the insane expenses and to get that piece of paper. Thank god I was free to drop out and do something else. On a side note, a lot of psychological studies as well as common sense suggest that people wherever they are and whatever they do are less motivated if they don't get consideration. No wonder why the students that have the perspective of a Harvard or MIT diploma are much more motivated than those who attend to community college.

timr 19y ago

Well, damn. Had this existed in the mid-90s, it would have changed were I went to school.

thorax 19y ago
:( Very much so.
run4yourlives 19y ago
Had it existed, it may have changed my life... although I actually love my life right now, so maybe that's overrated. :-)

papersmith 19y ago

I wonder if it applies to Canadians or other foreign students. I had a friend who ditched MIT for Waterloo because the latter gave him full scholarship.

rglovejoy 19y ago
MIT is a private institution. It's their endowment, so they should be able to support Canadians or anyone else if they choose to.

rglovejoy 19y ago

It would have been nice for the Institute to have done this when I was an undergrad there. I only wish that it didn't have to require a Senate investigation to get them to open up the pursestrings.

neilk 19y ago

I wonder how many people are really going to take advantage of this. I think it will tend to benefit academic families more than disadvantaged communities. If you have two parents working and they're earning less than $75,000 per year combined, I kind of wonder how they're going to afford the kind of things an MIT-caliber mind needs, growing up.

pius 19y ago
Since when are growing up smart and growing up poor mutually exclusive?
BrandonM 19y ago
If you're poor and you're not taking advantage of free (and moral) opportunities to better yourself, that might be part of the reason that you're poor to begin with. All you can really do is offer the opportunity; you can't hold someone's hand and force them to take it. Besides, what does an "MIT-caliber mind" need growing up? I would like to think of myself as an MIT-caliber mind (99.5 percentile PSAT/NMSQT, 35 ACT, 1500 SAT), and I didn't have anything special growing up. We qualified for reduced lunches, I worked at least 20 hours a week, played sports, did a lot of work at home (my family completely renovated our first house ourselves (everything from plumbing and electricity to siding), and we also had a dog-breeding business we were starting up), and still did well enough in school to be valedictorian. And before you get the wrong idea, I don't think I'm anything special; I simply have an inquisitive mind that my mother (no college) was smart enough to stimulate at a young age. After that it's just hard work and good habits. The implication that intelligence requires some material object is off mark.
- neilk 19y ago
  Yes, but did you go to MIT? Or any "name" university? If not, why not? Perhaps I wasn't clear. I have seen lots of insanely smart children whose parents were not rich. But, unfortunately, to get into these top colleges takes more than brains. Nowadays the average MIT freshman has had a lifetime of parents indulging their curiosity and ambitions, prep tests and tutors, and this takes money. Not to mention (in the USA) the expense of living in an area where the schools are good enough. These days, sometimes it's the difference between a microscope or just a textbook. Sometimes it's the difference between a textbook and NO textbook. Many parents risk bankruptcy just to move to a district where their kids get a little better education. Finally, there is the problem of not having connections. A family making less than $75,000 in household income probably doesn't have elite connections -- unless they are a family of academics or artists. Which is why I mentioned that. When I was a kid, just buying a home computer was the equivalent expense of 10% of a laborer's salary. My Dad was able to do that because he was a bit richer, and it changed my life. Today, maybe the couple consisting of a cleaner and a day laborer could buy a decent computer for the whole family -- but their kid is competing against a richer kid that had two or three of their very own, to play with and take apart. If you want to believe in Horatio Alger and that anybody can do anything given enough willpower, fine. But in my opinion, when the children of the rich are often essentially coasting into such schools on a small measure of precocity, it should not require superhuman effort for the poor geniuses to get in. In my ideal world, we'd have something like Swiss policy; ensure that all primary and secondary education is up to snuff, no matter where you live, and kindergarten to Ph.D is free as long as you can make the grade.

mpc 19y ago

To me, it seems like a random number. 75k can be a lot or very little depending where you live. What if your parents make 76000?

dfranke 19y ago
I assume that tuition is still a continuous function of income. I doubt you suddenly pay full boat if you're a dollar over $75k.

codeLullaby 19y ago

Wow! I studied at one of South India's finest Engineering Colleges [College Of Engineering,Trivandrum( Not even remotely comparable to MIT in facilities)]. My tuition fee was less than 50 $ a year ! [Accommodation :- 50 cents a month!! Food from College: approx $20] Entry to the college is 100% based on merit. [FYI,here in Kerala a decent beef steak costs $7 , 320 gram pack of Top Ramen Noodles cost $1.1 and a litre of petrol @ $1.24 ]

michjeanty 19y ago

If parent's assets combine with income is less than $60,000 for the year, students get to attend Harvard for free. If less than $90,000, students would pay 30% of the school tuition. I thought I would post that for people to know.