When I was touring colleges as a high school senior I met someone who had gotten into MIT but whose family could only afford to send one kid to an elite college, him or his sister. He decided to go to a state school which was a lot less expensive but whose academics weren't close to the same level. This stuff matters to people.
While I think this is well meaning, I’d be much more impressed by institutions actually cutting costs, The ratio of administrators to students is insane as is the faculty ratio at most universities, not to mention the outlays for extravagant projects like sports centers and student centers.
I saw a similar headline just today (albeit on a much smaller scale) for Carnegie Mellon University: https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/carnegie-mellon-univ...
I feel like the timing is too close to be a coincidence—does anyone know if there's a link?
Started looking and found out there's some much worse, and far more obvious cases that need to implement these reforms. [1]
UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.
BTW, amazing site to be horrified by gun violence (and vaguely fascinated). Look upon the awfulness of Philadelphia. [2] Sitting in their safe little haven while East and South is wounding murder land with overlapping murder / wounding statistics. (12k from 2014-2023, 190/100000 urban) [3] Northwestern and the violence everywhere South in Chi-town is maybe a personal second choice. ($13,700,000,000, +74%, 26.9k, 280/100000 urban) [4][5]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...
[2] (Guns, Philadelphia) https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...
[3] (Location, UPenn) https://www.google.com/maps/place/University+of+Pennsylvania...
[4] (Guns, Chicago) https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...
[5] (Location, Northwestern) https://www.google.com/maps/place/Northwestern+University/@4...
This is only tuition though. Using their estimates you would still be expected to spend $30k/yr
https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...
A sham marriage (get a prenup if you want) is sufficient to have parents' income not counted by FAFSA.
Is this going to create some weird incentive for me, a parent of a college kid, to go 4 years unemployed traveling the world?
The decrease of buying power, post Covid, makes this pretty much moot at best. It’s sort of depressing to think that even if I had children, or magically qualified to attend a prestigious school like MIT, I’d still be surely priced out. Just like I am buying a house. Making $200k a year ensures I’ll never own a home unless I want to move to an area I don’t feel safe in. I imagine having children make that trade off better, but not without substantial intrinsic costs to one’s self and one’s children. If someone makes $199k at this point, they’re likely unable to afford a home in any major metropolitan area. While being able to have your gifted children receive a free education is great, I imagine many folks will push ever so slightly past that, assuming two years working parents, by the time their children would be of age to go to school.
It’s just depressing. Sorry, I’ll go back into my hole.
that's nice, but it's become nearly as difficult to get into MIT as winning the lottery
The MIT undergraduate student body is about the same as it was in 1960, but the number of applications rose from around 4000 in 1960 to 11000 in 2000, to 20000 in 2024.
This isn't just an MIT problem. The undergrad populations of the top universities (Ivy league and similar) have hardly grown over the decades despite a large increase in student population overall in the US, not to mention the very large increase in foreign students over the past 25 years. This is by design to create increasingly exclusive brands.
Deep dive into this: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-university-of-impossibl...
The article claims 80% of American households meet this threshold. I wonder what % of their incoming class (say restricted to Americans) meets this threshold.
Or, crazy idea, have the government pay all tuition up front for everyone and then collect an extra .5% on your income tax for every semester you attend (or .33% for every quarter). Obviously you'd have to put some limits on what colleges can charge to get paid from that pool of money.
Then you can't go broke from debt because it's a percent of your income, but it's also not "free" to address those who have concerns with that.
You could apply it to all outstanding school loan balances too. Get your loans paid off in exchange for an extra 4% income tax.
Is this age dependent? For example I'm in my 40s and make a good salary, but am under this limit. If I got accepted would that apply?
I knew a student at my high school whose parents earned enough to be able to both take simultaneous sabbaticals for a year so that their child could avoid tuition at a school with a similar program.
MIT is a great financial investment. There is financing already available (federal and private) so presumably if someone wanted to go they likely could. They may leave with debt however.
The median salary of an MIT graduate is 120k and the median debt is 12k, and less for lower income families (2023-2024):
$0 - $30,000 family income: $6,866
$30,001 - $75,000 family income: $9,132
$75,000+ family income: $12,500
Bumping this up to families making $200k seems really unnecessary and helps people that don't really need to help.
https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...
Yes but the algorithm also is that they take 5% of your assets each year. So if you've saved $1M (not much for a $200K a year couple in their 50s), that's $50K a year out the door.
that means if the parents earn 300K a year, one can just quit his/her job and take the free ride?
One couple, both PhDs, when their daughter went to Harvard, the mom quit her job to qualify for the free tuition.
What about if someone has a large net asset? will the 200K still apply?
Awesome. Now let’s lower the bar further and do it everywhere. And then let’s keep doing more until students can pay their tuition with a summer job, like they could when our elders went to school.
I’ll hold off on asking for higher education to be free, as the culture still pushes back on that. But a return to the former model would be most welcome.
What about wealthy people with low AGI but lots of assets?
On a related note, why does an institution so commendably progressive as Harvard charge tuition at all?
>Newly expanded financial aid will cover tuition costs for admitted students from 80 percent of U.S. families.
What percentage of MIT students...
Two teachers in a HCOL city are going to be above 200k.
What's the logic for choosing 200k
80% of American families... but what % of MIT students?
UVA does this for households that make less $100K. Hopefully, they’ll follow suit and bump it to $200K as well.
Is there a term for doing beneficial things for a tiny fraction of people and coasting off of the PR for it?
What's this going to do for people that aren't good enough to be in the top .1% of merit? Why do we care?
This may have unintended consequences on chances of a successful application. Now, as a high school senior, you have to compete against an additional pool of strong students who aren't especially interested in MIT's offerings, but have parents pushing them toward the least expensive of all top universities.
One more reason to select deferred comp!
Would have been lovely about 20 years ago. Oh well, no MIT for me.
I'm sure this causes pause for more than a few people who always wanted to go to MIT, knew they could, and didn't. Tuition wasn't appetizing even 20 years ago.
In addition to pioneering Open Courses that were of high enough quality that you'd want to take them, this is hopefully the start of another trend/wave.
Please tell us that counts for the Micro-Masters certs like Data Science. That would open up a lot of opportunities for people who can’t put in as much time due to working to pay bills.
This part seems to be getting overlooked -
> And for the 50 percent of American families with income below $100,000, parents can expect to pay nothing at all toward the full cost of their students’ MIT education, which includes tuition as well as housing, dining, fees, and an allowance for books and personal expenses.
> This $100,000 threshold is up from $75,000 this year, while next year’s $200,000 threshold for tuition-free attendance will increase from its current level of $140,000.
- even though that's the article's 2nd and 3rd paragraph.
wow that’s amazing
Just read an adjacent banger that interrogates the underlying reasons why our (US) education system is broken, how it got that way, how it's influenced culture beyond our (individual) control, insinuates why these institutions are so preposterously expensive, and proposes thoughts on how to fix it (TL;DR prolly won't get fixed)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/meritoc...
Yeah, education should be free. Record all lectures and put them out there. Charge a small fee to view them if you must but lecturers repeating themselves is not my idea of a great use of their time. Yes, I know lots of lectures are already published.
Sorry, but this is peanuts for MIT and merely a performative stunt.
Time to tax these endowments.
This is a great step in the right direction. I can't speak directly for MIT, but there are issues with how these programs don't apply to parents with small family businesses. My parents had a small business, with my father taking home a salary of $XX,XXX. Duke University used the business assets to determine the EFC (expected family contribution) of literally 90% of the salary. Essentially saying to sell off the family business for the college fund, which was a non-starter.
Small businesses are allegedly the backbone of America, and I feel these tuition support programs overlook this segment of the middle-class.