21 ms·

I'll probably be downvoted on a forum like this, but I worry about the most successful universities using their funds to subsidize those who would be fine witho

by sf_rob 8y ago

I'll probably be downvoted on a forum like this, but I worry about the most successful universities using their funds to subsidize those who would be fine without it. I was actually made aware of this by a wealthy Stanford alumni which has a fairly broad program for undergraduate tuition assistance. Graduates of mid/low tier universities seem more and more likely to have to compete with better credentialed people with lower debt. Don't get me wrong, this is fantastic on an atomic level, and the levels of debt required to get an MD these days is insane (have a lot of family in the field). Also, it's not like this is a unique structural disadvantage, just a new one.

mbostleman 8y ago
The paywall hits for me before the source(s) of the subsidies is identified (assuming they are identified). So how much is public and how much is private?
- classichasclass 8y ago
  "NYU raised more than $450 million of the roughly $600 million it estimates it will need to fund the tuition package in perpetuity, including $100 million from Home Depot founder Kenneth Langone and his wife, Elaine." Sounds largely private.
  - gt_ 8y ago
    That is a shame. I wonder what the stipulations are. Of course, we will never be sure. But there’s no doubt private money is ruining science enough as it stands. A far more humane system would not be giving wealthy people so much influence on what people learn at school.
btian 8y ago
What are you worried about?
- caymanjim 8y ago
  Indeed. Some of these universities (Stanford, Harvard) are so filthy rich that they could provide free tuition for everyone and still watch their endowments grow from investment returns alone. Not to mention the enormous gifts they receive from successful alumni. Harvard has received hundreds of millions from the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
  - koala_man 8y ago
    And to think that this was Stanford's original mission.
DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
> a wealthy Stanford alumni Grammar tip: In English, the word "alumnus" is typically declined as it would be in Latin. Especially amongst academics, I'd say. So if you're writing for that audience, the appropriate forms of "alumnus" are, I think, as follows [0]: "alumnus" - One male, or one person of unspecified sex. "alumna" - One female. "alumnae" - Multiple females. "alumni" - Multiple persons whose sex is all male, mixed male/female, or unspecified. [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/alumnus#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/alumnus#Latin
- jordigh 8y ago
  I rarely hear that anymore. I almost always hear "alumni" in all cases. I've tried saying to the librarians of my alma mater that I'm an alumnus and they repeat back to me, "oh, you're an alumni, sure, let me get you alumni access to our system." Maybe it's common somewhere else to make those distinctions, but they're not common at McGill.
  - xcbxx 8y ago
    It sounds immensely uneducated though. But the distinction between plural and singular seems to be abolished in other useless taxpayer-funded fields, too...
  - wenc 8y ago
    Unfortunately, common or not, the usage of "alumni" in that context is incorrect. It may be a bit pedantic to insist on correctness in Latin, but all other schools use the term correctly and it doesn't reflect well on a well-regarded school to use the term incorrectly.
    - SahAssar 8y ago
      Isn't language defined by common use over time?
      - wenc 8y ago
        Yes it is by processes of consensus arising from appeals to stylistic license, shared community language, memes, etc. But not every grammatical error falls into these categories. Think of it this way - let's say you make a grammatical mistake that most people consider a mistake. You shouldn't hide behind the "language evolves" catch-all card... you should to recognize it as a mistake and try to use the correct form. "Alumni" is plural.
bitxbit 8y ago
More to do with undergraduates not pursuing MDs. I believe # of applicants actually dipped last year for the first time in a very long time.
gt_ 8y ago
Well, now those same graduates “of mid to low tier universities” will be graduates of high tier universities. Will your logic still hold up? Are you assuming a certain correlation between the university one goes to and their abilities, given equal opportunity? It sounds like you might be, but please explain yourself if not. The more humane way to categorize people might not be to start with what “tier” their college is, especially when you’re discussing what “tier” they should have access to.
blehn 8y ago
Those competitive jobs will likely to go to the better-credentialed people anyway, regardless of debt status. On the other hand, perhaps some great minds choose to go into medicine rather than banking, or more important but lower-paying medical disciplines, because they know they won't be graduating with crippling debt. That seems like a big win.
- DoubleCribble 8y ago
  This. Specialties that have a high quality of life but are often impossibly underpaid relative to the student loan debt burden (eg Family Medicine / Rural Medicine) should see a boost in residency candidates.
dunpeal 8y ago
While "gaining admission to NYU medical school" is likely correlated with good socio-economic background (as do all accomplishment), the correlation is not 100%. You can get into NYU from a poor socio-economic background, if you work hard and attain academic excellence. And while all students will appreciate this discount, it will make more of a difference to those who are not "fine without it", i.e. those below the top richest and most privileged (for whom spending $200-300k on education is easily affordable). Finally, this isn't exactly pure charity out of the kindness of NYU's heart. It's a response to medical candidates choosing other fields due to cost and debt issues: https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-search-of-more-doctors-new-training-efforts-grow-1497021686 https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-search-of-more-doctors-new-t... These are the exact candidates this subsidy seeks to relieve.
- felipemnoa 8y ago
  >>You can get into NYU from a poor socio-economic background, if you work hard and attain academic excellence. Very true. Unfortunately many times the schools where a kid from a lower socio-economic background will attend will not prepare them for a school like NYU. In fact, sometimes it will probably be a net negative. Not necessarily the school itself, but the whole environment. Other students will be so disruptive to an entire class or school that they will drag down their piers down with them. And by this I'm talking about gangs, drugs, bullying. And if it is not their piers it may be their family themselves who will drag down the kids (alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence). And it is not like you can just say they should know better, because at that age they don't really know any better. Kids from crappy neighborhoods don't even start in the home base, many times they are not even allowed to play.
  - oxide 8y ago
    Why does a socio-economic background disqualify someone from having drive? How about dreams? Should poor kids flush those for the good of the class? Because they MIGHT have bad apples in their social circle? For circumstances they don't control- we ought to prevent them from being able to change those circumstances via opportunity and hard work? How common do you think this is? I would bet it is no more common than other shitty circumstances regardless of socio-economic status. This entire sentiment is nonsenical IMO.
hackandtrip 8y ago
Completely different situation, but something like that is discussed in Italy too, where the majority and most prestigious university happen to be public: why should we make the tuition free for everyone, specially when it's so low here, refusing the moneys of more riches people that pay more? The natural solution is invest more in scholarships, at least here. I'm sure that the situation in US is fully different though.
monocasa 8y ago
IDK. The same thought process led me to not being able to complete college due to financial reasons. Despite being emancipated, FAFSA still considers you a dependent until you're 24. I was told that only with documentation of leaving an abusive household would a dependency exception grant be applied. So according to FAFSA I was supposed to use all this money that I didn't have to pay for college. By 24 I had dropped out and gotten a development job, now putting me outside of the income level where I'd get even federal loans (and quite frankly I still can't take on that debt load). Just make college free. Trying to make all of these complicated rules to make sure that a few people aren't "getting one over us" is just making more cracks for people to fall into. If you're concerned that the rich are going to somehow use the system without paying, structure the backing tax so that they pay their fair share. No one cares that high school is free for the rich too. Everyone pays in, everyone can participate.
- kfrzcode 8y ago
  > Just make college free. Sure, have some funding ideas?
  - jeffreybaird 8y ago
    Raise the income tax, create a VAT, kill the mortgage-interest tax deduction, add a Financial transaction tax, tax capital gains like normal income, stop subsidizing fossil fuel extraction, add a carbon tax, and lower the threshold for the inheritance tax and raise the percentage.
    - WillPostForFood 8y ago
      All that for a worthless degree in antaractic penguin studies from Shady St Univ. You still graduate unemployed, unskilled, but instead of you paying the debt, someone else does. Also, with no skin in the game, I’m sure college will get even less serious.
      - thatfrenchguy 8y ago
perfmode 8y ago
I am the first person in my family to attend university. Stanford gave me a full ride to study CS and it has made a world of difference in my ability to access opportunities. I am an anecdote obviously. However, I want it to be known that at Stanford, people at the bottom of the economic ladder receive aid, but people in the middle still get squeezed. Making tuition free for all would actually be a net positive. Sure. There are people at the top who would benefit, but for the most part, financial aid is financed by the estates of people in that elite socioeconomic class. I don't really have a point here. This is just my experience of the system.
- bootloop 8y ago
  Yea but historically Stanford was tuition free for everyone. (Like the founders wished it to be.) So that's why they have such an extensive student aid program, properly not the same anywhere else. Edit: Actually more of a comment for the post before.
  - tnecniv 8y ago
    This is pretty common at top schools. I know many of the Ivies also gives tons of aide to those who need it the most.
  - perfmode 8y ago
    it’s definitely falling short of that ideal. i know too many people getting squeezed.
sotojuan 8y ago
To be so privileged that the free med school is something you can do without is to be in an almost insignificant percentage of the population. Even for the upper middle class med school costs are huge. Now less privileged people can see NYU med school as something to aspire to. I fail to see the problem here.
jakobegger 8y ago
On the other hand, subsidies that everyone gets are the best kind: they're a small help for people who don't need them, and a big help for people who do need them. And there's no bureaucrats who get to decide if you need them or not.
Spooks 8y ago
I would say it is pretty hard to determine who would be fine without it. Just because a student is from a wealthy family does not mean that the family will pay for their kids tuition.
samirillian 8y ago
Just out of curiosity, would you(r family) have been able to afford medical school anyway? This isn't just for the poor, it's also for the well-educated, solidly middle-class people who still can't afford med school, or have to go deep in debt, thus leading to them being forced to prioritize high-earning careers over those they might otherwise be inclined towards, medical careers that might have a more positive social impact.
Afforess 8y ago
>I'll probably be downvoted on a forum like this, but I worry about the most successful universities using their funds to subsidize those who would be fine without it. This is the definition of "means-testing" and it is bad. Testing and "checking" that the recipients of social welfare is complicated and doomed to create a group of excluded people who believe they should have merited it. Means-testing introduces fiscal cliffs, creates a separate of haves and have-nots, and lots of other unnecessary anxieties between classes of peoples. The savings means-testing produces is tiny in aggregate and the harm to culture is large. Moreover, means-testing becomes the fulcrum that anti-social welfare reformists use to destroy programs. Means-testing introduces an additional point of failure, brittleness that can be exploited. It's hard to rip away a program that is granted to all comers, but if there is a clear line between haves and have-nots, they you can just move the line. This has happened multiple times to the Affordable Care Act, and states regularly do this to medicaid and food stamp programs, to their detriment. The most successful social programs have no means testing: social security, medicare. If you value social welfare programs, you will not inflict means-testing on them.
salimmadjd 8y ago
I decided against doing an MD degree at USC because I was shocked by how much money I would have owned at the end of it. So this is a great news for many people like me. I wish this was around when I was applying.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
Graduates of mid/low tier universities seem more and more likely to have to compete with better credentialed people with lower debt. Or maybe it starts a trend that if you apply yourself and make sure you do really well at X, you can graduate without a lot of debt. Maybe this leads to a world where we get better at helping people find the thing they can excel at so they can qualify for the free ride and then be awesome at their profession after they graduation. And maybe this becomes a trend where other universities decide a full ride is the only thing that makes sense. There is an S curve where rich people, who can afford to take risks, try new things. They get to winnow out what doesn't work. The things that succeed become popular and this makes them affordable to the masses. But, first, someone needs to give it a shot. And that someone is usually pretty well-heeled. I'm okay with that.
- bob_marley2 8y ago
  How many Billion dollar companies haven't been started because a brilliant but poor entrepreneur was unable to take the risk? How enormous is the societal loss because of this? Frankly I find your position disturbing.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
viburnum 8y ago
You mean parents. All this money you're talking about comes from old people. If you're worried about inequality, you need to take the money away from the rich people, not worry about this or that little thing.
colek42 8y ago
University may be affordable without loans if it were not for all of the capex expenditures every year and needless administration. Education has a huge HR problem. Lots of people doing nothing and it is sucking our young dry.
fma 8y ago
I don't believe it will lower medical costs, but would drive students to consider the much needed general practitioner which generally pays less.
bayesian_horse 8y ago
That would presuppose that admission at schools like Stanford is more skewed towards wealthy students than the "lesser" schools. Which I doubt. But even if, then that would be the problem to address, rather than cutting the assistance programs.
- bob_marley2 8y ago
  It's not even remotely controversial that students at top schools are overwhelmingly more well off than average. At Stanford theres roughly the same number of students whose families are in the top 1% of income as those in the bottom 60%. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-the-bottom-60.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-c...
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    But isn't that a tremendous endorsement of Stanford? That they have recruited so well and changed their cost structure so effectively that even the poor can attend? How do other top-level schools compare?
    - bob_marley2 8y ago
      Not really? Yes there are other schools that are worse than Stanford, sometimes significantly more but take a top public school like University of Texas which has 5x as many students from the bottom 60% as from the top 1% (5.4% and 27.7%) Stanford is at 17.5% and 18.6%. For comparison Harvard is better, MIT is significantly better, on par with Texas, Yale and Princeton are slightly worse.
      - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
        But do they charge tuition to their bottom 60%? Stanford has a tuition program where its no-cost if your family income is low.
      - bayesian_horse 8y ago
bradleyjg 8y ago
I agree. The system is set to means test in a backwards looking fashion rather than a forward looking one. I don’t think that makes much sense. I don’t especially see why a future-hedge-fund worker ought to get free tuition even if his parents don’t make much money. That said, insane cost growth is obviously the overwhelming issue in education over everything else. Almost any system that reins that in is going to be superior to one that doesn’t—-even if it is otherwise less fair.

by sf_rob 8y ago

mbostleman 8y ago

The paywall hits for me before the source(s) of the subsidies is identified (assuming they are identified). So how much is public and how much is private?

classichasclass 8y ago
"NYU raised more than $450 million of the roughly $600 million it estimates it will need to fund the tuition package in perpetuity, including $100 million from Home Depot founder Kenneth Langone and his wife, Elaine." Sounds largely private.
- gt_ 8y ago
  That is a shame. I wonder what the stipulations are. Of course, we will never be sure. But there’s no doubt private money is ruining science enough as it stands. A far more humane system would not be giving wealthy people so much influence on what people learn at school.

btian 8y ago

What are you worried about?

caymanjim 8y ago
Indeed. Some of these universities (Stanford, Harvard) are so filthy rich that they could provide free tuition for everyone and still watch their endowments grow from investment returns alone. Not to mention the enormous gifts they receive from successful alumni. Harvard has received hundreds of millions from the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
- koala_man 8y ago
  And to think that this was Stanford's original mission.

DoofusOfDeath 8y ago

> a wealthy Stanford alumni Grammar tip: In English, the word "alumnus" is typically declined as it would be in Latin. Especially amongst academics, I'd say. So if you're writing for that audience, the appropriate forms of "alumnus" are, I think, as follows [0]: "alumnus" - One male, or one person of unspecified sex. "alumna" - One female. "alumnae" - Multiple females. "alumni" - Multiple persons whose sex is all male, mixed male/female, or unspecified. [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/alumnus#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/alumnus#Latin

jordigh 8y ago
I rarely hear that anymore. I almost always hear "alumni" in all cases. I've tried saying to the librarians of my alma mater that I'm an alumnus and they repeat back to me, "oh, you're an alumni, sure, let me get you alumni access to our system." Maybe it's common somewhere else to make those distinctions, but they're not common at McGill.
- xcbxx 8y ago
  It sounds immensely uneducated though. But the distinction between plural and singular seems to be abolished in other useless taxpayer-funded fields, too...
- wenc 8y ago
  Unfortunately, common or not, the usage of "alumni" in that context is incorrect. It may be a bit pedantic to insist on correctness in Latin, but all other schools use the term correctly and it doesn't reflect well on a well-regarded school to use the term incorrectly.
  - SahAssar 8y ago
    Isn't language defined by common use over time?
    - wenc 8y ago
      Yes it is by processes of consensus arising from appeals to stylistic license, shared community language, memes, etc. But not every grammatical error falls into these categories. Think of it this way - let's say you make a grammatical mistake that most people consider a mistake. You shouldn't hide behind the "language evolves" catch-all card... you should to recognize it as a mistake and try to use the correct form. "Alumni" is plural.

bitxbit 8y ago

More to do with undergraduates not pursuing MDs. I believe # of applicants actually dipped last year for the first time in a very long time.

gt_ 8y ago

Well, now those same graduates “of mid to low tier universities” will be graduates of high tier universities. Will your logic still hold up? Are you assuming a certain correlation between the university one goes to and their abilities, given equal opportunity? It sounds like you might be, but please explain yourself if not. The more humane way to categorize people might not be to start with what “tier” their college is, especially when you’re discussing what “tier” they should have access to.

blehn 8y ago

Those competitive jobs will likely to go to the better-credentialed people anyway, regardless of debt status. On the other hand, perhaps some great minds choose to go into medicine rather than banking, or more important but lower-paying medical disciplines, because they know they won't be graduating with crippling debt. That seems like a big win.

DoubleCribble 8y ago
This. Specialties that have a high quality of life but are often impossibly underpaid relative to the student loan debt burden (eg Family Medicine / Rural Medicine) should see a boost in residency candidates.

dunpeal 8y ago

While "gaining admission to NYU medical school" is likely correlated with good socio-economic background (as do all accomplishment), the correlation is not 100%. You can get into NYU from a poor socio-economic background, if you work hard and attain academic excellence. And while all students will appreciate this discount, it will make more of a difference to those who are not "fine without it", i.e. those below the top richest and most privileged (for whom spending $200-300k on education is easily affordable). Finally, this isn't exactly pure charity out of the kindness of NYU's heart. It's a response to medical candidates choosing other fields due to cost and debt issues: https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-search-of-more-doctors-new-training-efforts-grow-1497021686 https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-search-of-more-doctors-new-t... These are the exact candidates this subsidy seeks to relieve.

felipemnoa 8y ago
>>You can get into NYU from a poor socio-economic background, if you work hard and attain academic excellence. Very true. Unfortunately many times the schools where a kid from a lower socio-economic background will attend will not prepare them for a school like NYU. In fact, sometimes it will probably be a net negative. Not necessarily the school itself, but the whole environment. Other students will be so disruptive to an entire class or school that they will drag down their piers down with them. And by this I'm talking about gangs, drugs, bullying. And if it is not their piers it may be their family themselves who will drag down the kids (alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence). And it is not like you can just say they should know better, because at that age they don't really know any better. Kids from crappy neighborhoods don't even start in the home base, many times they are not even allowed to play.
- oxide 8y ago
  Why does a socio-economic background disqualify someone from having drive? How about dreams? Should poor kids flush those for the good of the class? Because they MIGHT have bad apples in their social circle? For circumstances they don't control- we ought to prevent them from being able to change those circumstances via opportunity and hard work? How common do you think this is? I would bet it is no more common than other shitty circumstances regardless of socio-economic status. This entire sentiment is nonsenical IMO.

hackandtrip 8y ago

Completely different situation, but something like that is discussed in Italy too, where the majority and most prestigious university happen to be public: why should we make the tuition free for everyone, specially when it's so low here, refusing the moneys of more riches people that pay more? The natural solution is invest more in scholarships, at least here. I'm sure that the situation in US is fully different though.

monocasa 8y ago

IDK. The same thought process led me to not being able to complete college due to financial reasons. Despite being emancipated, FAFSA still considers you a dependent until you're 24. I was told that only with documentation of leaving an abusive household would a dependency exception grant be applied. So according to FAFSA I was supposed to use all this money that I didn't have to pay for college. By 24 I had dropped out and gotten a development job, now putting me outside of the income level where I'd get even federal loans (and quite frankly I still can't take on that debt load). Just make college free. Trying to make all of these complicated rules to make sure that a few people aren't "getting one over us" is just making more cracks for people to fall into. If you're concerned that the rich are going to somehow use the system without paying, structure the backing tax so that they pay their fair share. No one cares that high school is free for the rich too. Everyone pays in, everyone can participate.

kfrzcode 8y ago
> Just make college free. Sure, have some funding ideas?
- jeffreybaird 8y ago
  Raise the income tax, create a VAT, kill the mortgage-interest tax deduction, add a Financial transaction tax, tax capital gains like normal income, stop subsidizing fossil fuel extraction, add a carbon tax, and lower the threshold for the inheritance tax and raise the percentage.
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    All that for a worthless degree in antaractic penguin studies from Shady St Univ. You still graduate unemployed, unskilled, but instead of you paying the debt, someone else does. Also, with no skin in the game, I’m sure college will get even less serious.
    - thatfrenchguy 8y ago

perfmode 8y ago

I am the first person in my family to attend university. Stanford gave me a full ride to study CS and it has made a world of difference in my ability to access opportunities. I am an anecdote obviously. However, I want it to be known that at Stanford, people at the bottom of the economic ladder receive aid, but people in the middle still get squeezed. Making tuition free for all would actually be a net positive. Sure. There are people at the top who would benefit, but for the most part, financial aid is financed by the estates of people in that elite socioeconomic class. I don't really have a point here. This is just my experience of the system.

bootloop 8y ago
Yea but historically Stanford was tuition free for everyone. (Like the founders wished it to be.) So that's why they have such an extensive student aid program, properly not the same anywhere else. Edit: Actually more of a comment for the post before.
- tnecniv 8y ago
  This is pretty common at top schools. I know many of the Ivies also gives tons of aide to those who need it the most.
- perfmode 8y ago
  it’s definitely falling short of that ideal. i know too many people getting squeezed.

sotojuan 8y ago

To be so privileged that the free med school is something you can do without is to be in an almost insignificant percentage of the population. Even for the upper middle class med school costs are huge. Now less privileged people can see NYU med school as something to aspire to. I fail to see the problem here.

jakobegger 8y ago

On the other hand, subsidies that everyone gets are the best kind: they're a small help for people who don't need them, and a big help for people who do need them. And there's no bureaucrats who get to decide if you need them or not.

Spooks 8y ago

I would say it is pretty hard to determine who would be fine without it. Just because a student is from a wealthy family does not mean that the family will pay for their kids tuition.

samirillian 8y ago

Just out of curiosity, would you(r family) have been able to afford medical school anyway? This isn't just for the poor, it's also for the well-educated, solidly middle-class people who still can't afford med school, or have to go deep in debt, thus leading to them being forced to prioritize high-earning careers over those they might otherwise be inclined towards, medical careers that might have a more positive social impact.

Afforess 8y ago

>I'll probably be downvoted on a forum like this, but I worry about the most successful universities using their funds to subsidize those who would be fine without it. This is the definition of "means-testing" and it is bad. Testing and "checking" that the recipients of social welfare is complicated and doomed to create a group of excluded people who believe they should have merited it. Means-testing introduces fiscal cliffs, creates a separate of haves and have-nots, and lots of other unnecessary anxieties between classes of peoples. The savings means-testing produces is tiny in aggregate and the harm to culture is large. Moreover, means-testing becomes the fulcrum that anti-social welfare reformists use to destroy programs. Means-testing introduces an additional point of failure, brittleness that can be exploited. It's hard to rip away a program that is granted to all comers, but if there is a clear line between haves and have-nots, they you can just move the line. This has happened multiple times to the Affordable Care Act, and states regularly do this to medicaid and food stamp programs, to their detriment. The most successful social programs have no means testing: social security, medicare. If you value social welfare programs, you will not inflict means-testing on them.

salimmadjd 8y ago

I decided against doing an MD degree at USC because I was shocked by how much money I would have owned at the end of it. So this is a great news for many people like me. I wish this was around when I was applying.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

Graduates of mid/low tier universities seem more and more likely to have to compete with better credentialed people with lower debt. Or maybe it starts a trend that if you apply yourself and make sure you do really well at X, you can graduate without a lot of debt. Maybe this leads to a world where we get better at helping people find the thing they can excel at so they can qualify for the free ride and then be awesome at their profession after they graduation. And maybe this becomes a trend where other universities decide a full ride is the only thing that makes sense. There is an S curve where rich people, who can afford to take risks, try new things. They get to winnow out what doesn't work. The things that succeed become popular and this makes them affordable to the masses. But, first, someone needs to give it a shot. And that someone is usually pretty well-heeled. I'm okay with that.

bob_marley2 8y ago
How many Billion dollar companies haven't been started because a brilliant but poor entrepreneur was unable to take the risk? How enormous is the societal loss because of this? Frankly I find your position disturbing.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

viburnum 8y ago

You mean parents. All this money you're talking about comes from old people. If you're worried about inequality, you need to take the money away from the rich people, not worry about this or that little thing.

colek42 8y ago

University may be affordable without loans if it were not for all of the capex expenditures every year and needless administration. Education has a huge HR problem. Lots of people doing nothing and it is sucking our young dry.

fma 8y ago

I don't believe it will lower medical costs, but would drive students to consider the much needed general practitioner which generally pays less.

bayesian_horse 8y ago

That would presuppose that admission at schools like Stanford is more skewed towards wealthy students than the "lesser" schools. Which I doubt. But even if, then that would be the problem to address, rather than cutting the assistance programs.

bob_marley2 8y ago
It's not even remotely controversial that students at top schools are overwhelmingly more well off than average. At Stanford theres roughly the same number of students whose families are in the top 1% of income as those in the bottom 60%. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-the-bottom-60.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-c...
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  But isn't that a tremendous endorsement of Stanford? That they have recruited so well and changed their cost structure so effectively that even the poor can attend? How do other top-level schools compare?
  - bob_marley2 8y ago
    Not really? Yes there are other schools that are worse than Stanford, sometimes significantly more but take a top public school like University of Texas which has 5x as many students from the bottom 60% as from the top 1% (5.4% and 27.7%) Stanford is at 17.5% and 18.6%. For comparison Harvard is better, MIT is significantly better, on par with Texas, Yale and Princeton are slightly worse.
    - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
      But do they charge tuition to their bottom 60%? Stanford has a tuition program where its no-cost if your family income is low.
    - bayesian_horse 8y ago

bradleyjg 8y ago

I agree. The system is set to means test in a backwards looking fashion rather than a forward looking one. I don’t think that makes much sense. I don’t especially see why a future-hedge-fund worker ought to get free tuition even if his parents don’t make much money. That said, insane cost growth is obviously the overwhelming issue in education over everything else. Almost any system that reins that in is going to be superior to one that doesn’t—-even if it is otherwise less fair.