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This is somewhat misleading as the initial part of their page says `BU meets 100% of demonstrated financial need for all admitted, first-year students who are U

This is somewhat misleading as the initial part of their page says `BU meets 100% of demonstrated financial need for all admitted, first-year students who are US citizens or permanent residents.` — BU is part of a small number (in the dozens maybe) of private US colleges/universities that are "need blind", which can basically be thought of as "price discrimination" from microeconomics. Wealthier families would pay full price, while less-advantaged students pay a more reasonable amount of money. At these schools the total out of pocket cost ends up being roughly comparable (if not less) than going to a state university would be. I went to a similar school and the out of pocket cost was far less than going to my state university as an in-state student would have been, and I got a much better education. Obviously $80k is still an obscene amount of money, but I don't really have an issue with kids of millionaires + billionaires having to pay that much to attend. I think that what this means in the long-run is that this small number of very highly resourced private colleges (Ivies, a lot of the small New England liberal arts schools, Duke, MIT, etc.) will be able to sustain "normal" people going there on the need-blind aid, and lower-ranked private institutions (out of the top 50-100 schools) will probably close if they can't afford to offer that level of aid.

jonchang 4y ago
> I think that what this means in the long-run is that this small number of very highly resourced private colleges (Ivies, a lot of the small New England liberal arts schools, Duke, MIT, etc.) will be able to sustain "normal" people going there on the need-blind aid, and lower-ranked private institutions (out of the top 50-100 schools) will probably close if they can't afford to offer that level of aid. The term here to look for is "tuition discount rate" which is how many students actually pay the full price. You are correct in suggesting that high discount rates mean that only the extremely well-resourced schools will be able to compete for students who aren't able to afford the full price of college. Here's IHE's summary of a study about 2020's numbers: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/05/20/private-colleges-cut-539-tuition-sticker-price-freshmen-average https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/05/20/private-colle... > “Tuition discounting strategies come at a heavy cost for many colleges and universities, especially those that forgo a significant amount of tuition revenue to expand educational affordability for students and/or to meet enrollment goals,” the study said.
seibelj 4y ago
The “demonstrated need” is quite suspicious https://www.bu.edu/admissions/tuition-aid/scholarships-financial-aid/ https://www.bu.edu/admissions/tuition-aid/scholarships-finan... BU is notoriously stingy and you should take their claims of waiving fees with several healthy shakes of salt.
- peanuty1 4y ago
  I was surprised to see they're need blind in the first place.
rdw 4y ago
Can someone explain to me how any schools are in danger of going out of business? Their expenses aren't going up, they're not paying professors more, they're not leveraging themselves into debt. What are the huge cost increases they're bearing that force them to raise tuition? The one institute I'm familiar with appears to have hired an absolute shitload of useless administrators, but that is an expense of choice that could be trimmed at any time.
- lumost 4y ago
  Any large organization with no competition ceases to understand what makes the money eventually. University administrators have been selling life experiences, liberal arts, sports, and research experiences to students for the last 2-3 decades. If you asked them which staff are necessary to keep students joining the school, they would likely have a vastly different answer than the one most people have.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  This submission is likely an outlier amongst outliers. It's a crazy expensive private university. So I have no answer for you. For public universities, the claim is that historically, tuition never covered expenses, and the difference was taken care of by the state and federal government. State support has dropped significantly in the last 40 years, and hence the significant increase in tuition. About a decade ago I know one nearby public university would be open with their expenses and showed that their expenses per capita/student hadn't changed in decades (adjusted for inflation), and that it wasn't bloat that was causing tuition to go up.
lumost 4y ago
This is beholden to BU's definition of need. Barring any transparency on what these definitions actually mean for the school, I'd assume it means the following. 1 - Students should pay the maximum that they and their family are able to, inclusive of student loans. If their parents have collateral in any form including home equity or retirement accounts, it should be assumed that this collateral can be used to secure loans or pay for the school. AND/OR 2 - BU gives preferential admissions to students who are able to pay the maximum, while telling everyone else that they don't. This can be done through multiple methods including A) offer admission but don't offer significant aid, B) offer admission preferentially based on signs of high income including expensive club participation, high cost achievements, or Geographic considerations. Schools have become adept at pretending to do something about the student loan crises, I don't see why we should take any non-quantified statement at face value. My Alma mater UMass Amherst, used to lead every tuition and fee increase with a statement on increased financial aid - Unfortunately a simple multiplication would always show that the magnitude of cost increase vastly outstripped the magnitude of the aid increase.
- smugma 4y ago
  They don’t do number two, that is not need blind (blind means admissions doesn’t look at financial need, and this makes sense because the applications are due before financial aid is filled out). But here’s what they do do: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/education/edlife/finaid-pappano-t.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/education/edlife/finaid-p... B.U. may be need-blind in admissions, but like many colleges, it is not talent-blind in financial aid. When the admissions office accepts a student, the file gets a rating before going to the financial aid office. That rating, Dr. Pohl says, is based on a holistic read of the application: factors like leadership, talent, motivation and personal character are weighed as well as grades and test scores.
  - chaostheory 4y ago
    > based on a holistic read of the application: factors like leadership, talent, motivation and personal character are weighed as well as grades and test scores This is another problem. Instead of primarily looking at things you can quantitatively measure, the arbitrary measures now have more weight, meaning they can now more easily discriminate against “boring” student applicants. https://priceonomics.com/do-elite-colleges-discriminate-against-asians/ https://priceonomics.com/do-elite-colleges-discriminate-agai...
noisenotsignal 4y ago
Is it safe to characterize those who would pay full price as only the children of millionaires and billionaires? I filled out the FAFSA just to see and my EFC (when I first started college) was 91,000. I doubt my parents were millionaires; even an overestimate of assets (some of which weren’t really liquid as they were preparing to buy a house) would’ve been just barely over 1 million. It’s hard to see paying that as affordable.
- jefftk 4y ago
  How were they not millionaires if their net worth was over $1M?
  - noisenotsignal 4y ago
    Well, I couched it saying it was an overestimate. Besides, having $1,000,001 technically makes you a millionaire but I don’t think that’s what people are referring to when they’re talking about “millionaires and billionaires”. 4 years of $80,000 tuition is $320,000 - are we trying to say that 32% of a “millionaire’s” total assets is a cost of college we’re ok with as it only affects millionaires and billionaires? In addition, given an Expected Family Contribution (EFC) of $91k a year for assets == 1 million (plus other variables of course), there seems to be a decent amount of room to reduce the total assets <1 million and still pay the full price of $80k a year. Then even by strict definition, not only millionaires and billionaires are going to be paying full price.
    - bcrosby95 4y ago
      Yeah, its especially awkward now that people are having kids later in life. Being a millionaire at, say, 45 is way different than being a millionaire at 55 or 60. Heck, I have a friend who had a kid in her 50s - they won't be in college until she's in her 70s!
LigmaYC 4y ago
> Obviously $80k is still an obscene amount of money, but I don't really have an issue with kids of millionaires + billionaires having to pay that much to attend. There is a huge gap in between, that isn't addressed in your comment. 80k/year is still expensive to someone whose parents make 100k.
- hedora 4y ago
  I think it’s pretty easy to demonstrate you need financial support when your after tax pay for the whole family is less than the annual tuition cost.
  - LigmaYC 4y ago
    Depends on BUs decision, they might be one of those universities who believe parents should've been saving up for their childs education for 18 years and would still happily charge you the full amount.
    - jefftk 4y ago
      That's not how and of the "100% financial need meet" institutions work. It's all based on what they calculate your family can pay based off of current income and assets.
      - LigmaYC 4y ago
        View my calculator results in the parent comment
      - pclmulqdq 4y ago
        The "and assets" part of the equation is the bad part. If you have $100k annual income and a $1 million house plus $100k in a college savings plan, they're giving you the full sticker price. Never mind that you're several hundred thousand short, you have assets.
        4y ago
vineyardmike 4y ago
> I think that what this means in the long-run is that this small number of very highly resourced private colleges ... will be able to sustain "normal" people going there on the need-blind aid The issue with this is that prospective students need to know this is how it works. When I was in school (in a similar caliber school), most lower income students applied on a whim not knowing the school would handle aid. (Also I'm told the school did a bad job at handling aid, essentially giving people golden handcuffs to control additional factors of their life like housing).
bawolff 4y ago
> Obviously $80k is still an obscene amount of money, but I don't really have an issue with kids of millionaires Lets assume person is a milionaire. Having to pay 8% of your networth (including retirement and the value of your home [is that correct?]) so that one of your kids can go to uni (what if you have 2?) is silly.
- MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  Your kid is perfectly capable of taking out their own loans. One of the big problems with US schooling is that schools just expect parents to pay for their kids' schooling. They're adults. They can fund their own educations.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    At 320k a pop? Talk about being a debt slave. But my main point was, if the millionaires can't reasonably afford it, something is wrong.
    - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
      Why do you think BU costs 80K a year? It's not because the school costs that much to run. It's because private schools are a way for the rich to segregate their kids from the rank and file. The cost of attendance is a FEATURE. Also, people keep on tossing "millionaire" around as if that term has meaning anymore. Nowadays it means you're a homeowner with some retirement saved up. And while some mere millionaires are desperate for their kids to reach some sort of faux prestige by sending them to a second tier private school, most aren't going to do that. Again, that's the point of BU's tuition being so high in the first place. They don't want the mere upper middle class unless they are exceptional students. They want the rich kids for that sweet endowment money.
- listenallyall 4y ago
  8% times 4 years.
  - 4y ago
nashashmi 4y ago
https://www.google.com/search?q=harvard+attendance+cost https://www.google.com/search?q=harvard+attendance+cost Harvard attendance cost: $15k on avg after financial aid. But $60k on paper.
- deleted 4y ago
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ploxiln 4y ago
I'm a counter-example to that. My parents paid full-price tuition for me 4 years of university (CMU class of 2010) and 4 years of private high school (which has the same "need blind" admission policy). But, they were not millionaires, rather they had just enough saved. My mother is a "family doctor" in a small town, and my father was a stay-at-home dad, total pre-tax income around $120k-$150k at the time. House was around $250k, still paying the mortgage while I was in school. We actually knew of families that made more, and paid less, at the same schools. I have one younger sister, in her last couple of years at university she did finally get financial aid - the system/calculations did result in my parents paying off their mortgage but having zero savings left at the end. A couple years later I had some software engineer money, and helped my father buy a car when his old one broke down. We're all doing fine, we understood the system, we made good lives for ourselves, my parents do have retirement savings, I'm not complaining about that. But this narrative you push here, about only millionaires and billionaires paying the absurd sticker price for university so it's fine, it's wrong. The statistics don't make it right. Even though "the average american" lives paycheck to paycheck regardless of income level (even at our middle to upper-middle level of income), that doesn't make this system fair to the hard-working and fiscally responsible people out there. There were some big family fights each year when it was time to fill out the FAFSA like all the other middle-class families, my dad hated it, it was such a charade and a waste of time.

jonchang 4y ago

> I think that what this means in the long-run is that this small number of very highly resourced private colleges (Ivies, a lot of the small New England liberal arts schools, Duke, MIT, etc.) will be able to sustain "normal" people going there on the need-blind aid, and lower-ranked private institutions (out of the top 50-100 schools) will probably close if they can't afford to offer that level of aid. The term here to look for is "tuition discount rate" which is how many students actually pay the full price. You are correct in suggesting that high discount rates mean that only the extremely well-resourced schools will be able to compete for students who aren't able to afford the full price of college. Here's IHE's summary of a study about 2020's numbers: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/05/20/private-colleges-cut-539-tuition-sticker-price-freshmen-average https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/05/20/private-colle... > “Tuition discounting strategies come at a heavy cost for many colleges and universities, especially those that forgo a significant amount of tuition revenue to expand educational affordability for students and/or to meet enrollment goals,” the study said.

seibelj 4y ago

The “demonstrated need” is quite suspicious https://www.bu.edu/admissions/tuition-aid/scholarships-financial-aid/ https://www.bu.edu/admissions/tuition-aid/scholarships-finan... BU is notoriously stingy and you should take their claims of waiving fees with several healthy shakes of salt.

peanuty1 4y ago
I was surprised to see they're need blind in the first place.

rdw 4y ago

Can someone explain to me how any schools are in danger of going out of business? Their expenses aren't going up, they're not paying professors more, they're not leveraging themselves into debt. What are the huge cost increases they're bearing that force them to raise tuition? The one institute I'm familiar with appears to have hired an absolute shitload of useless administrators, but that is an expense of choice that could be trimmed at any time.

lumost 4y ago
Any large organization with no competition ceases to understand what makes the money eventually. University administrators have been selling life experiences, liberal arts, sports, and research experiences to students for the last 2-3 decades. If you asked them which staff are necessary to keep students joining the school, they would likely have a vastly different answer than the one most people have.
BeetleB 4y ago
This submission is likely an outlier amongst outliers. It's a crazy expensive private university. So I have no answer for you. For public universities, the claim is that historically, tuition never covered expenses, and the difference was taken care of by the state and federal government. State support has dropped significantly in the last 40 years, and hence the significant increase in tuition. About a decade ago I know one nearby public university would be open with their expenses and showed that their expenses per capita/student hadn't changed in decades (adjusted for inflation), and that it wasn't bloat that was causing tuition to go up.

lumost 4y ago

This is beholden to BU's definition of need. Barring any transparency on what these definitions actually mean for the school, I'd assume it means the following. 1 - Students should pay the maximum that they and their family are able to, inclusive of student loans. If their parents have collateral in any form including home equity or retirement accounts, it should be assumed that this collateral can be used to secure loans or pay for the school. AND/OR 2 - BU gives preferential admissions to students who are able to pay the maximum, while telling everyone else that they don't. This can be done through multiple methods including A) offer admission but don't offer significant aid, B) offer admission preferentially based on signs of high income including expensive club participation, high cost achievements, or Geographic considerations. Schools have become adept at pretending to do something about the student loan crises, I don't see why we should take any non-quantified statement at face value. My Alma mater UMass Amherst, used to lead every tuition and fee increase with a statement on increased financial aid - Unfortunately a simple multiplication would always show that the magnitude of cost increase vastly outstripped the magnitude of the aid increase.

smugma 4y ago
They don’t do number two, that is not need blind (blind means admissions doesn’t look at financial need, and this makes sense because the applications are due before financial aid is filled out). But here’s what they do do: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/education/edlife/finaid-pappano-t.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/education/edlife/finaid-p... B.U. may be need-blind in admissions, but like many colleges, it is not talent-blind in financial aid. When the admissions office accepts a student, the file gets a rating before going to the financial aid office. That rating, Dr. Pohl says, is based on a holistic read of the application: factors like leadership, talent, motivation and personal character are weighed as well as grades and test scores.
- chaostheory 4y ago
  > based on a holistic read of the application: factors like leadership, talent, motivation and personal character are weighed as well as grades and test scores This is another problem. Instead of primarily looking at things you can quantitatively measure, the arbitrary measures now have more weight, meaning they can now more easily discriminate against “boring” student applicants. https://priceonomics.com/do-elite-colleges-discriminate-against-asians/ https://priceonomics.com/do-elite-colleges-discriminate-agai...

noisenotsignal 4y ago

Is it safe to characterize those who would pay full price as only the children of millionaires and billionaires? I filled out the FAFSA just to see and my EFC (when I first started college) was 91,000. I doubt my parents were millionaires; even an overestimate of assets (some of which weren’t really liquid as they were preparing to buy a house) would’ve been just barely over 1 million. It’s hard to see paying that as affordable.

jefftk 4y ago
How were they not millionaires if their net worth was over $1M?
- noisenotsignal 4y ago
  Well, I couched it saying it was an overestimate. Besides, having $1,000,001 technically makes you a millionaire but I don’t think that’s what people are referring to when they’re talking about “millionaires and billionaires”. 4 years of $80,000 tuition is $320,000 - are we trying to say that 32% of a “millionaire’s” total assets is a cost of college we’re ok with as it only affects millionaires and billionaires? In addition, given an Expected Family Contribution (EFC) of $91k a year for assets == 1 million (plus other variables of course), there seems to be a decent amount of room to reduce the total assets <1 million and still pay the full price of $80k a year. Then even by strict definition, not only millionaires and billionaires are going to be paying full price.
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    Yeah, its especially awkward now that people are having kids later in life. Being a millionaire at, say, 45 is way different than being a millionaire at 55 or 60. Heck, I have a friend who had a kid in her 50s - they won't be in college until she's in her 70s!

LigmaYC 4y ago

> Obviously $80k is still an obscene amount of money, but I don't really have an issue with kids of millionaires + billionaires having to pay that much to attend. There is a huge gap in between, that isn't addressed in your comment. 80k/year is still expensive to someone whose parents make 100k.

hedora 4y ago
I think it’s pretty easy to demonstrate you need financial support when your after tax pay for the whole family is less than the annual tuition cost.
- LigmaYC 4y ago
  Depends on BUs decision, they might be one of those universities who believe parents should've been saving up for their childs education for 18 years and would still happily charge you the full amount.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    That's not how and of the "100% financial need meet" institutions work. It's all based on what they calculate your family can pay based off of current income and assets.
    - LigmaYC 4y ago
      View my calculator results in the parent comment
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      The "and assets" part of the equation is the bad part. If you have $100k annual income and a $1 million house plus $100k in a college savings plan, they're giving you the full sticker price. Never mind that you're several hundred thousand short, you have assets.
      - 4y ago

vineyardmike 4y ago

> I think that what this means in the long-run is that this small number of very highly resourced private colleges ... will be able to sustain "normal" people going there on the need-blind aid The issue with this is that prospective students need to know this is how it works. When I was in school (in a similar caliber school), most lower income students applied on a whim not knowing the school would handle aid. (Also I'm told the school did a bad job at handling aid, essentially giving people golden handcuffs to control additional factors of their life like housing).

bawolff 4y ago

> Obviously $80k is still an obscene amount of money, but I don't really have an issue with kids of millionaires Lets assume person is a milionaire. Having to pay 8% of your networth (including retirement and the value of your home [is that correct?]) so that one of your kids can go to uni (what if you have 2?) is silly.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago
Your kid is perfectly capable of taking out their own loans. One of the big problems with US schooling is that schools just expect parents to pay for their kids' schooling. They're adults. They can fund their own educations.
- bawolff 4y ago
  At 320k a pop? Talk about being a debt slave. But my main point was, if the millionaires can't reasonably afford it, something is wrong.
  - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
    Why do you think BU costs 80K a year? It's not because the school costs that much to run. It's because private schools are a way for the rich to segregate their kids from the rank and file. The cost of attendance is a FEATURE. Also, people keep on tossing "millionaire" around as if that term has meaning anymore. Nowadays it means you're a homeowner with some retirement saved up. And while some mere millionaires are desperate for their kids to reach some sort of faux prestige by sending them to a second tier private school, most aren't going to do that. Again, that's the point of BU's tuition being so high in the first place. They don't want the mere upper middle class unless they are exceptional students. They want the rich kids for that sweet endowment money.
listenallyall 4y ago
8% times 4 years.
- 4y ago

nashashmi 4y ago

https://www.google.com/search?q=harvard+attendance+cost https://www.google.com/search?q=harvard+attendance+cost Harvard attendance cost: $15k on avg after financial aid. But $60k on paper.

deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago

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ploxiln 4y ago

I'm a counter-example to that. My parents paid full-price tuition for me 4 years of university (CMU class of 2010) and 4 years of private high school (which has the same "need blind" admission policy). But, they were not millionaires, rather they had just enough saved. My mother is a "family doctor" in a small town, and my father was a stay-at-home dad, total pre-tax income around $120k-$150k at the time. House was around $250k, still paying the mortgage while I was in school. We actually knew of families that made more, and paid less, at the same schools. I have one younger sister, in her last couple of years at university she did finally get financial aid - the system/calculations did result in my parents paying off their mortgage but having zero savings left at the end. A couple years later I had some software engineer money, and helped my father buy a car when his old one broke down. We're all doing fine, we understood the system, we made good lives for ourselves, my parents do have retirement savings, I'm not complaining about that. But this narrative you push here, about only millionaires and billionaires paying the absurd sticker price for university so it's fine, it's wrong. The statistics don't make it right. Even though "the average american" lives paycheck to paycheck regardless of income level (even at our middle to upper-middle level of income), that doesn't make this system fair to the hard-working and fiscally responsible people out there. There were some big family fights each year when it was time to fill out the FAFSA like all the other middle-class families, my dad hated it, it was such a charade and a waste of time.