8 ms·

No offense, but your comment is a symptom of the very problem the article is highlighting. You say: "A rural kid who makes it to a university will almost certa

by davmre 14y ago

No offense, but your comment is a symptom of the very problem the article is highlighting. You say: "A rural kid who makes it to a university will almost certainly have to work an almost full-time job just to cover their living expenses, books, tuition, rent...etc." The point of the article is that this is not true and almost no one knows it! If you go to Harvard/Stanford/MIT/etc -- basically any of the Ivy League, top LACs, or a few other elite schools -- and your family makes under, say, $60k/year, your tuition/room/board/books will be absolutely free. All covered by the school. No crippling student loans, no expectation of you working a job while in school (except maybe 10hrs/wk of cushy work-study for spending money). Even if your family is a bit wealthier, it's still the case that for most middle-class families the cost of an Ivy League education works out to less than the cost of the local state school. Very few families know this. Is there culture shock? Sure, of course. That's part of the point -- for both the poor rural kids and the rich urban kids, and everyone in between. But at schools with the resources to do diversity right (which, sorry to hear, doesn't sound like it includes Virginia Tech), the shock is only cultural, not financial, so the full college experience really is accessible to students from any background.

rckrd 14y ago
After my freshman year at my state university, I transferred to an Ivy League school. My financial aid now covers more than tuition (housing/dining plan/etc). I owe more money for my freshman year at a state university than my 3 remaining years combined at an Ivy League school.
andrewchoi 14y ago
I know anecdotes != data, but I and a bunch of my friends at our Ivy League university applied through the QuestBridge program[0] and for the most part, davmre's comment is completely on point. I work more because I want to have more web dev on my resume before hitting the real world and also because I like being able to pay for some niceties that my mother wouldn't otherwise be able to afford, not because I need to to stay in school. [0] http://questbridge.org/ http://questbridge.org/
scarmig 14y ago
This is totally true: I ended up going to one of those top tier universities just because the economics worked out much better than virtually every other opportunity I had. Depending on how you account for things, actually ended up making a profit without working either a full or a part time job. The culture shock issue was huge, though: half the people in my freshman dorm read the New Yorker (or, more accurately, subscribed to it and prominently displayed it as an affectation), while I hadn't even heard of it. Learning how to ape upper class cultural cues was probably the most valuable thing I got out of college.
- ezequiel-garzon 14y ago
  And you just taught me that "ape" is a verb! I know, really off topic...
  - Someone 14y ago
    In English, you can verb any noun. http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/15473/is-it-possible-to-verb-anything-other-than-a-noun http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/15473/is-it-possi... even has an example of verbing an adjective in Calvin and Hobbes: http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25 http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25 (found via http://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/ http://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/)
    - dspeyer 14y ago
      The verb ape is not simply a verbed version of the noun. It means "shallowly imitate".
- sopooneo 14y ago
  I would have killed to be in a place where that many people read the New Yorker. My shock was the opposite. My fancy liberal arts school turned out to have very few people that read anything of quality unless they were forced to.
  - 14y ago
venus 14y ago
Interesting that "name" universities run their own little micro-cosms of wealth redistribution without the usual howls from the anti-welfare troupe. Indeed, it seems to be met with universal acclaim. Not making a judgement one way or the other; just interesting that this phenomenon seems to be exempt from politics.
- atonse 14y ago
  This is probably because a lot of those universities are private, and not publicly funded, and most of those scholarships are probably also privately funded.
  - venus 14y ago
    But how "private" are universities, really? Does the whim of a private company really get to determine if you get a scholarship or not - and thus profoundly influence your future career? Or are these universities really implicit public institutions? I don't think Stanford university is purely private in the same way that, say, the Coca-cola company is private.
    - notahacker 14y ago
      The scholarships may be privately funded, but 84% of Stanford research funding in 2012 was received "directly or indirectly from the Federal Government". That's a quarter of the University's overall income, according to its annual report[1], before you start accounting for tax breaks. I don't doubt the government gets a return on that strings-attached investment, but welfare has positive externalities too... [1]http://bondholder-information.stanford.edu/pdf/AR_FinancialReview_2012.pdf http://bondholder-information.stanford.edu/pdf/AR_FinancialR...
    - geebee 14y ago
      That's a great point, and you could also ask how "public" universities are as well. UC Berkeley now gets about 12% of its budget from the state. Its a little difficult to make direct comparisons to Stanford, as Stanford's numbers will include a medical research university while Berkeley and UCSF are considered separate campuses, and Med centers have huge budgets. But the state financial support for UC Berkeley has dropped dramatically (around 12%). It may be different for the smaller state schools that are not research universities. But if you line it up, private and public universities research universities are more similar than different in their sources of funding (grants, private donations, endowment income, etc). The things people believe distinguish these universities from private ones (tuition, state support) are actually a relatively minor part of the budget.
iblaine 14y ago
You assume financial aid puts students on par with those that do not need it. If you did go to college then you'll know that anyone working in the dorms or an on campus food court is a student who was on financial aid. And they worked those jobs because financial aid was not enough. Students that receive enough financial aid to avoid the need to work a job are the exception, not the norm. Financial aid helps upward mobility but does not guarantee it. To think otherwise is pretty naive.
- davmre 14y ago
  Yes and no. Obviously there are some rich kids whose parents give them spending money, and don't need to work at all during school. But plenty of parents, even from wealthy families, expect their kids to buy their own booze/gas/concert tickets/etc., and so, at least at my undergrad school (Williams), plenty of upper-class kids held work-study jobs and there was no stigma to it. I'm sure this varies by school, though. (as does the surrounding environment of what you can spend money on: big-city urban schools provide lots of opportunities for conspicuous consumption, whereas at small-town rural LACs like Williams everyone is equalized to some degree by living in the same dorms, eating in the same dining halls, and going to the same parties because there are no other options, so your work-study money really does go pretty far).
jiggy2011 14y ago
The economics of this might explain why it is not highly publicised and why they don't go out of their way to recruit lower class kids. They can probably afford to have x% poor kids every year because the rich kids who pay can make up the rest. If they got masses of applications from bright poor kids every year they would have to be more selective about offering aid.
- ceras 14y ago
  I thought they were very clear about this. I came from a low income family, and would never have applied to the Ivy League school I ended up attending if they weren't bragging so loudly of their "no loans" policy. Heck, at least one of the schools even cold called me (one that I didn't apply to -- not sure how they got my number) and started their pitch by saying "no loans policy." And just to add another point of data: I did in fact get more grants than the cost of attending, so I profited from attending school without having to work. These policies are very real, and at least to me, they were very transparent and are what made me apply. I don't think there is any attempt to hide it, either: I think the sad reality is that it's just harder for low income students to compete with upper middle class and wealthy kids who attend the nation's best K-12 schools and whose well-educated parents have pushed them academically as best they know how. Ivy League admissions policies try to correct for some of this, sure, but I'm sure it's extremely tough to balance that with penalizing kids who are well prepared due to their wealth. And these kids are astoundingly well-prepared, as I learned in college.
  - twoodfin 14y ago
    I thought they were very clear about this. I came from a low income family, and would never have applied to the Ivy League school I ended up attending if they weren't bragging so loudly of their "no loans" policy. Heck, at least one of the schools even cold called me (one that I didn't apply to -- not sure how they got my number) and started their pitch by saying "no loans policy." Why would you be worried about taking out a loan for an Ivy League education? Assuming you don't do something foolish like major in Medieval History, it's one of the safest, strongest investments in yourself you could possibly make, even purely from a financial point of view. I came out of MIT with something like $40,000 worth of loans, but the M.Eng. that paid for returned (and continues to return) a substantial multiple of that. It's nice that these elite institutions are now offering an essentially free education for lower middle-class households, but if you feel capable of exploiting the value of such an education, there's rarely a reason not to leverage yourself for it.
rxp 14y ago
But top schools like that admit (and I'm completely making this number up, based on average class size for a school like that) on the order of tens of thousands of students per year, combined, and most of those are not going to be "rural kids". For the kinds of kids the article is talking about, the price of tuition at Stanford is basically irrelevant. The more interesting question is, what kind of financial aid can they expect at your average state university?
mathattack 14y ago
Great point, though the caveat is this isn't true a level below. U of Chicago graduates poorer students near debt free. DePaul, perhaps not.
hysan 14y ago
"If you go to Harvard/Stanford/MIT/etc -- basically any of the Ivy League, top LACs, or a few other elite schools -- and your family makes under, say, $60k/year, your tuition/room/board/books will be absolutely free." Unless your family is paying for multiple children going to college at the same time. Mine was a lower middle class family paying for my older brother and I to go to college (with my younger brother going to college by time I was a senior). My parents combined made more than 60k but not by all that much. Combine this with the fact that Columbia's financial aid pool actually dried up when I entered the school (an alum eventually donated a hefty sum a couple years later but that was after I graduated) and my family ended up not meeting the harsh financial aid requirements. And my case wasn't unique either. My roommate, and eventual best friend, was in the same position but without a younger sibling. "Even if your family is a bit wealthier, it's still the case that for most middle-class families the cost of an Ivy League education works out to less than the cost of the local state school." This one isn't true in all states. In NY, if you had the type of grades that would get you into an Ivy, you would get some form of scholarship to most of the local state schools. My cousin (same year and school) wasn't good enough to get into an Ivy but he had good grades. He put his effort into showing a few choice state schools that he was really interested in them. This landed him a partial scholarship (with grade requirements that he easily hit). Combined with how easy commuting is in NY (so no dorm) and his total tuition came out to less than half of what I paid in a single year.
VLM 14y ago
"your tuition/room/board/books will be absolutely free." You do not know that. You simply do not. The kids/family are operating from a fear reaction. Some years ago there was a study about why more poor people have (pre-video on demand) cable TV than phone. The paper's conclusion was you could predict and budget the cable bill to the penny, other than traditional low yearly increases, but you can never predict next months phone bill, all you need is some 900 number calls or lots of long distance (back when that was expensive) and that means you literally cannot afford to pay the bill this month, hit to credit report, collectors calling, maybe disconnected (so why bother connecting to begin with...). Whoops. Plenty of poor families can survive a stable $25 cable bill every month for basic cable but not a phone bill that might semi-randomly be $10 this month and $125 next month. Therefore out of fear sign up for the devil you know rather than the devil you don't know. "No crippling student loans" You sure about that? Guarantee that no aid package to any poor kid in the country would contain loans as part of the package? That is definitely not how it used to be. In the old days you'd absolutely have loans as part of the package. If you get a $125K/yr software dev job, $20K of loans is small, but if you are one of the majority who drop out, or get a financially nonviable degree in a field with high new grad unemployment, that kind of loan could destroy you and your family. Much safer to go to state-U. What you meant to write is something like a $40K/yr family can send a kid to a $60K/yr school and get a completely unknown and utterly unpredictable but probably rather large amount of help which might even approach the total cost of attendance but you'll never know until you sign up and it might vary from year to year and certainly will vary from school to school. Its not unusual for a low income family to have roughly 100% of their income already budgeted and no substantial access to loans, so teasing the family with $57K of "help" at a $60K school is useless if the family can't scrape up $3K extra per year. If they could scrape up $3K/yr they would probably already spend it on health insurance, or maybe car insurance, or food, or dentistry, or ... So assuming there's an infinite pool of available cash is unrealistic. On the other hand if state-U wants $4K but guarantees loan availability, the kid seems infinitely better off going to state-U because the tuition bill can actually be paid (with a loan ... but paid nonetheless)
- mjn 14y ago
  How don't you know that? You get a fairly specific offer letter before you have to choose whether to attend. You can also read the policies ahead of time, which at some schools at least are specified in some detail. Harvard actually does give completely free tuition, room & board, and books—not structured as loans—to anyone whose family makes under $65k/year. Expected family contributions (which may come in the form of loans) only kick in above $65k. Admittedly, that's unusual, only possible because Harvard has a gigantic endowment.
geebee 14y ago
You make a good point, but you went too far in saying that this is not true. The universities you describe here enroll very few undergraduates and tend to have a low percentage of low income students. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings_2012/national_university_rank.php http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings_2012... UC Berkeley, for instance, enrolls more low income students than the entire ivy league combined. 44% of UC San Diego undergraduates qualify for Pell grants. I knew people at UCSD who were trying to major in computer science while working 20+ hours a week at Nordstrom or the Tie Rack at the local mall to pay the rent. There was some financial aid available, but not enough to cover the gap. There are plenty of rich kids at UCSD as well, but there's a big mix. I understand that when two high seniors in a wealthy school district bump into each other in the hallway and get out their measuring tapes -er- acceptance letters, UCSD isn't considered especially elite. But if we lose a computer science student who got into UCSD because he couldn't keep up with the need to survive financially while passing compilers, vector calculus, physics, and a GE elective, we have lost an elite student. I'm glad I saw this up close and understood the problems it causes. I actually think that it may be a problem at Ivy League schools that students are so far removed from this problem - they meet fewer low income students, and those they do meet are well funded. Do they meet the student who is struggling with the financial aid application because her father is claiming her as a dependent but isn't actually giving her any financial support? I know two young women in this spot, one who gave up on pre-med at least in part because of tough financial problems. Going to college with a large number of low income students at a school that is not quite as capable of funding them as an Ivy League opened my eyes to a lot. In particular, I'm galled by the claims of large silicon valley companies that there is an engineer shortage. I'm all for skilled immigration, but how does it strike you that a government and corporate elite bleating about a skills shortage is willing to watch a talented young student get bounced from a compacted CS department while working 30 hours a week at nordstrom? All while state funding is dramatically reduced?
- Crake 14y ago
  " Do they meet the student who is struggling with the financial aid application because her father is claiming her as a dependent but isn't actually giving her any financial support?" Having been in a situation similar to this, I can say that this sucks. A lot. Thank you for understanding. Most people just look down on and blame people who can't afford school, because they'd prefer to think that they got their own degrees through nothing but hard work, when it's instead partly to highly dependent on what sort of parents you have, these days.
scott_s 14y ago
It may not be true for the elite schools, but getting into those schools is winning a lottery, even for kids from rich families. Consider that in 2011, 6.2% of the applicants were admitted into Harvard (http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/3/31/percent-class-students-year/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/3/31/percent-class-st...). There were certainly lots of extremely bright, hard working, likely-to-be-successful kids in the 93.8% who were rejected. The article's point is interesting, but looked at through this light, it's basically saying "I did not realize I could enter this lottery." The parent commenter is pointing out that most kids from rural areas will end up at public state schools which do not have the resources of these elite private schools.
pnathan 14y ago
No offense, but you're divorced from the mentality of the poor. Unless you have been taught that you can get into any school - unless you have been taught what grad school is - unless you have been taught the differences between schools - unless you've been given the context to grasp many of a wide variety of things relating to the educated class - You're going to assume that (1) they are just saying that because Marketers Are Liars, (2) you're not smart enough - those schools are only for smart people, and (3) you can't afford it anyway. I know someone who didn't know the difference between an Associate's and a PhD when they were in high school, and didn't even really conceptualize the idea that college was a real possibility when they were a teen. My point is, you have to shift your entire cultural context when talking about the poor and the uneducated: you - anyone who's not deal with them - has to get the narrative context they live in before you can dismiss their non-attendance at the top schools.
- davmre 14y ago
  I don't think we disagree? My claim was that many bright low-income kids don't know about or understand the opportunities available to them. Obviously it's not because they're stupid -- we're talking about kids smart enough to go to Harvard -- so yes, I think the majority of the reasons are cultural and/or stem from lack of information.
  - pnathan 14y ago
    Okay. In that case, I quite definitely misread. My sincerest apologies, davmre.

by davmre 14y ago

rckrd 14y ago

After my freshman year at my state university, I transferred to an Ivy League school. My financial aid now covers more than tuition (housing/dining plan/etc). I owe more money for my freshman year at a state university than my 3 remaining years combined at an Ivy League school.

andrewchoi 14y ago

I know anecdotes != data, but I and a bunch of my friends at our Ivy League university applied through the QuestBridge program[0] and for the most part, davmre's comment is completely on point. I work more because I want to have more web dev on my resume before hitting the real world and also because I like being able to pay for some niceties that my mother wouldn't otherwise be able to afford, not because I need to to stay in school. [0] http://questbridge.org/ http://questbridge.org/

scarmig 14y ago

This is totally true: I ended up going to one of those top tier universities just because the economics worked out much better than virtually every other opportunity I had. Depending on how you account for things, actually ended up making a profit without working either a full or a part time job. The culture shock issue was huge, though: half the people in my freshman dorm read the New Yorker (or, more accurately, subscribed to it and prominently displayed it as an affectation), while I hadn't even heard of it. Learning how to ape upper class cultural cues was probably the most valuable thing I got out of college.

ezequiel-garzon 14y ago
And you just taught me that "ape" is a verb! I know, really off topic...
- Someone 14y ago
  In English, you can verb any noun. http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/15473/is-it-possible-to-verb-anything-other-than-a-noun http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/15473/is-it-possi... even has an example of verbing an adjective in Calvin and Hobbes: http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25 http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25 (found via http://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/ http://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/)
  - dspeyer 14y ago
    The verb ape is not simply a verbed version of the noun. It means "shallowly imitate".
sopooneo 14y ago
I would have killed to be in a place where that many people read the New Yorker. My shock was the opposite. My fancy liberal arts school turned out to have very few people that read anything of quality unless they were forced to.
- 14y ago

venus 14y ago

Interesting that "name" universities run their own little micro-cosms of wealth redistribution without the usual howls from the anti-welfare troupe. Indeed, it seems to be met with universal acclaim. Not making a judgement one way or the other; just interesting that this phenomenon seems to be exempt from politics.

atonse 14y ago
This is probably because a lot of those universities are private, and not publicly funded, and most of those scholarships are probably also privately funded.
- venus 14y ago
  But how "private" are universities, really? Does the whim of a private company really get to determine if you get a scholarship or not - and thus profoundly influence your future career? Or are these universities really implicit public institutions? I don't think Stanford university is purely private in the same way that, say, the Coca-cola company is private.
  - notahacker 14y ago
    The scholarships may be privately funded, but 84% of Stanford research funding in 2012 was received "directly or indirectly from the Federal Government". That's a quarter of the University's overall income, according to its annual report[1], before you start accounting for tax breaks. I don't doubt the government gets a return on that strings-attached investment, but welfare has positive externalities too... [1]http://bondholder-information.stanford.edu/pdf/AR_FinancialReview_2012.pdf http://bondholder-information.stanford.edu/pdf/AR_FinancialR...
  - geebee 14y ago
    That's a great point, and you could also ask how "public" universities are as well. UC Berkeley now gets about 12% of its budget from the state. Its a little difficult to make direct comparisons to Stanford, as Stanford's numbers will include a medical research university while Berkeley and UCSF are considered separate campuses, and Med centers have huge budgets. But the state financial support for UC Berkeley has dropped dramatically (around 12%). It may be different for the smaller state schools that are not research universities. But if you line it up, private and public universities research universities are more similar than different in their sources of funding (grants, private donations, endowment income, etc). The things people believe distinguish these universities from private ones (tuition, state support) are actually a relatively minor part of the budget.

iblaine 14y ago

You assume financial aid puts students on par with those that do not need it. If you did go to college then you'll know that anyone working in the dorms or an on campus food court is a student who was on financial aid. And they worked those jobs because financial aid was not enough. Students that receive enough financial aid to avoid the need to work a job are the exception, not the norm. Financial aid helps upward mobility but does not guarantee it. To think otherwise is pretty naive.

davmre 14y ago
Yes and no. Obviously there are some rich kids whose parents give them spending money, and don't need to work at all during school. But plenty of parents, even from wealthy families, expect their kids to buy their own booze/gas/concert tickets/etc., and so, at least at my undergrad school (Williams), plenty of upper-class kids held work-study jobs and there was no stigma to it. I'm sure this varies by school, though. (as does the surrounding environment of what you can spend money on: big-city urban schools provide lots of opportunities for conspicuous consumption, whereas at small-town rural LACs like Williams everyone is equalized to some degree by living in the same dorms, eating in the same dining halls, and going to the same parties because there are no other options, so your work-study money really does go pretty far).

jiggy2011 14y ago

The economics of this might explain why it is not highly publicised and why they don't go out of their way to recruit lower class kids. They can probably afford to have x% poor kids every year because the rich kids who pay can make up the rest. If they got masses of applications from bright poor kids every year they would have to be more selective about offering aid.

ceras 14y ago
I thought they were very clear about this. I came from a low income family, and would never have applied to the Ivy League school I ended up attending if they weren't bragging so loudly of their "no loans" policy. Heck, at least one of the schools even cold called me (one that I didn't apply to -- not sure how they got my number) and started their pitch by saying "no loans policy." And just to add another point of data: I did in fact get more grants than the cost of attending, so I profited from attending school without having to work. These policies are very real, and at least to me, they were very transparent and are what made me apply. I don't think there is any attempt to hide it, either: I think the sad reality is that it's just harder for low income students to compete with upper middle class and wealthy kids who attend the nation's best K-12 schools and whose well-educated parents have pushed them academically as best they know how. Ivy League admissions policies try to correct for some of this, sure, but I'm sure it's extremely tough to balance that with penalizing kids who are well prepared due to their wealth. And these kids are astoundingly well-prepared, as I learned in college.
- twoodfin 14y ago
  I thought they were very clear about this. I came from a low income family, and would never have applied to the Ivy League school I ended up attending if they weren't bragging so loudly of their "no loans" policy. Heck, at least one of the schools even cold called me (one that I didn't apply to -- not sure how they got my number) and started their pitch by saying "no loans policy." Why would you be worried about taking out a loan for an Ivy League education? Assuming you don't do something foolish like major in Medieval History, it's one of the safest, strongest investments in yourself you could possibly make, even purely from a financial point of view. I came out of MIT with something like $40,000 worth of loans, but the M.Eng. that paid for returned (and continues to return) a substantial multiple of that. It's nice that these elite institutions are now offering an essentially free education for lower middle-class households, but if you feel capable of exploiting the value of such an education, there's rarely a reason not to leverage yourself for it.

rxp 14y ago

But top schools like that admit (and I'm completely making this number up, based on average class size for a school like that) on the order of tens of thousands of students per year, combined, and most of those are not going to be "rural kids". For the kinds of kids the article is talking about, the price of tuition at Stanford is basically irrelevant. The more interesting question is, what kind of financial aid can they expect at your average state university?

mathattack 14y ago

Great point, though the caveat is this isn't true a level below. U of Chicago graduates poorer students near debt free. DePaul, perhaps not.

hysan 14y ago

"If you go to Harvard/Stanford/MIT/etc -- basically any of the Ivy League, top LACs, or a few other elite schools -- and your family makes under, say, $60k/year, your tuition/room/board/books will be absolutely free." Unless your family is paying for multiple children going to college at the same time. Mine was a lower middle class family paying for my older brother and I to go to college (with my younger brother going to college by time I was a senior). My parents combined made more than 60k but not by all that much. Combine this with the fact that Columbia's financial aid pool actually dried up when I entered the school (an alum eventually donated a hefty sum a couple years later but that was after I graduated) and my family ended up not meeting the harsh financial aid requirements. And my case wasn't unique either. My roommate, and eventual best friend, was in the same position but without a younger sibling. "Even if your family is a bit wealthier, it's still the case that for most middle-class families the cost of an Ivy League education works out to less than the cost of the local state school." This one isn't true in all states. In NY, if you had the type of grades that would get you into an Ivy, you would get some form of scholarship to most of the local state schools. My cousin (same year and school) wasn't good enough to get into an Ivy but he had good grades. He put his effort into showing a few choice state schools that he was really interested in them. This landed him a partial scholarship (with grade requirements that he easily hit). Combined with how easy commuting is in NY (so no dorm) and his total tuition came out to less than half of what I paid in a single year.

VLM 14y ago

"your tuition/room/board/books will be absolutely free." You do not know that. You simply do not. The kids/family are operating from a fear reaction. Some years ago there was a study about why more poor people have (pre-video on demand) cable TV than phone. The paper's conclusion was you could predict and budget the cable bill to the penny, other than traditional low yearly increases, but you can never predict next months phone bill, all you need is some 900 number calls or lots of long distance (back when that was expensive) and that means you literally cannot afford to pay the bill this month, hit to credit report, collectors calling, maybe disconnected (so why bother connecting to begin with...). Whoops. Plenty of poor families can survive a stable $25 cable bill every month for basic cable but not a phone bill that might semi-randomly be $10 this month and $125 next month. Therefore out of fear sign up for the devil you know rather than the devil you don't know. "No crippling student loans" You sure about that? Guarantee that no aid package to any poor kid in the country would contain loans as part of the package? That is definitely not how it used to be. In the old days you'd absolutely have loans as part of the package. If you get a $125K/yr software dev job, $20K of loans is small, but if you are one of the majority who drop out, or get a financially nonviable degree in a field with high new grad unemployment, that kind of loan could destroy you and your family. Much safer to go to state-U. What you meant to write is something like a $40K/yr family can send a kid to a $60K/yr school and get a completely unknown and utterly unpredictable but probably rather large amount of help which might even approach the total cost of attendance but you'll never know until you sign up and it might vary from year to year and certainly will vary from school to school. Its not unusual for a low income family to have roughly 100% of their income already budgeted and no substantial access to loans, so teasing the family with $57K of "help" at a $60K school is useless if the family can't scrape up $3K extra per year. If they could scrape up $3K/yr they would probably already spend it on health insurance, or maybe car insurance, or food, or dentistry, or ... So assuming there's an infinite pool of available cash is unrealistic. On the other hand if state-U wants $4K but guarantees loan availability, the kid seems infinitely better off going to state-U because the tuition bill can actually be paid (with a loan ... but paid nonetheless)

mjn 14y ago
How don't you know that? You get a fairly specific offer letter before you have to choose whether to attend. You can also read the policies ahead of time, which at some schools at least are specified in some detail. Harvard actually does give completely free tuition, room & board, and books—not structured as loans—to anyone whose family makes under $65k/year. Expected family contributions (which may come in the form of loans) only kick in above $65k. Admittedly, that's unusual, only possible because Harvard has a gigantic endowment.

geebee 14y ago

You make a good point, but you went too far in saying that this is not true. The universities you describe here enroll very few undergraduates and tend to have a low percentage of low income students. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings_2012/national_university_rank.php http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/rankings_2012... UC Berkeley, for instance, enrolls more low income students than the entire ivy league combined. 44% of UC San Diego undergraduates qualify for Pell grants. I knew people at UCSD who were trying to major in computer science while working 20+ hours a week at Nordstrom or the Tie Rack at the local mall to pay the rent. There was some financial aid available, but not enough to cover the gap. There are plenty of rich kids at UCSD as well, but there's a big mix. I understand that when two high seniors in a wealthy school district bump into each other in the hallway and get out their measuring tapes -er- acceptance letters, UCSD isn't considered especially elite. But if we lose a computer science student who got into UCSD because he couldn't keep up with the need to survive financially while passing compilers, vector calculus, physics, and a GE elective, we have lost an elite student. I'm glad I saw this up close and understood the problems it causes. I actually think that it may be a problem at Ivy League schools that students are so far removed from this problem - they meet fewer low income students, and those they do meet are well funded. Do they meet the student who is struggling with the financial aid application because her father is claiming her as a dependent but isn't actually giving her any financial support? I know two young women in this spot, one who gave up on pre-med at least in part because of tough financial problems. Going to college with a large number of low income students at a school that is not quite as capable of funding them as an Ivy League opened my eyes to a lot. In particular, I'm galled by the claims of large silicon valley companies that there is an engineer shortage. I'm all for skilled immigration, but how does it strike you that a government and corporate elite bleating about a skills shortage is willing to watch a talented young student get bounced from a compacted CS department while working 30 hours a week at nordstrom? All while state funding is dramatically reduced?

Crake 14y ago
" Do they meet the student who is struggling with the financial aid application because her father is claiming her as a dependent but isn't actually giving her any financial support?" Having been in a situation similar to this, I can say that this sucks. A lot. Thank you for understanding. Most people just look down on and blame people who can't afford school, because they'd prefer to think that they got their own degrees through nothing but hard work, when it's instead partly to highly dependent on what sort of parents you have, these days.

scott_s 14y ago

It may not be true for the elite schools, but getting into those schools is winning a lottery, even for kids from rich families. Consider that in 2011, 6.2% of the applicants were admitted into Harvard (http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/3/31/percent-class-students-year/ http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/3/31/percent-class-st...). There were certainly lots of extremely bright, hard working, likely-to-be-successful kids in the 93.8% who were rejected. The article's point is interesting, but looked at through this light, it's basically saying "I did not realize I could enter this lottery." The parent commenter is pointing out that most kids from rural areas will end up at public state schools which do not have the resources of these elite private schools.

pnathan 14y ago

No offense, but you're divorced from the mentality of the poor. Unless you have been taught that you can get into any school - unless you have been taught what grad school is - unless you have been taught the differences between schools - unless you've been given the context to grasp many of a wide variety of things relating to the educated class - You're going to assume that (1) they are just saying that because Marketers Are Liars, (2) you're not smart enough - those schools are only for smart people, and (3) you can't afford it anyway. I know someone who didn't know the difference between an Associate's and a PhD when they were in high school, and didn't even really conceptualize the idea that college was a real possibility when they were a teen. My point is, you have to shift your entire cultural context when talking about the poor and the uneducated: you - anyone who's not deal with them - has to get the narrative context they live in before you can dismiss their non-attendance at the top schools.

davmre 14y ago
I don't think we disagree? My claim was that many bright low-income kids don't know about or understand the opportunities available to them. Obviously it's not because they're stupid -- we're talking about kids smart enough to go to Harvard -- so yes, I think the majority of the reasons are cultural and/or stem from lack of information.
- pnathan 14y ago
  Okay. In that case, I quite definitely misread. My sincerest apologies, davmre.