Hopkins was pretty generous with financial aid ca. 20 years ago when I was there - our household income was in the $80-90k range, putting us well above US avera

Hopkins was pretty generous with financial aid ca. 20 years ago when I was there - our household income was in the $80-90k range, putting us well above US average at the time, but still well below the average JHU student's family. We forked out a total of about $55k between tuition and living expenses for my whole 4 years, and I vaguely remember the “sticker price” being in the $30k/yr neighborhood. I maxed out on federal student loans ($16k total), and my parents made up another $24k in PLUS (Parental Loans for Undergraduate Students) that we had a tacit understanding that I’d take over after graduation (I even managed to pay them back for what they’d paid while I was in school!), and I worked summers, but that just went towards living expenses. Most of my aid was straight-up need-based, on top of $2k/yr National Merit and federal Work-Study, the latter of which had me running around doing desk-side support and learning a TON about end-user behavior. Graduating into the post-DotCom bubble was a little rough, but unlike some of my CS classmates from more prosperous backgrounds, I felt absolutely no shame taking a boring government contracting job that covered my loans and what I thought was a nice lifestyle.