alt Hacker NewsUndergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT
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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?
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.
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...
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?
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?
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.
The article claims 80% of American households meet this threshold. I wonder what % of their incoming class (say restricted to Americans) meets this threshold.
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...
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?
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.
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.
One more reason to select deferred comp!
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.
80% of American families... but what % of MIT students?
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?
UVA does this for households that make less $100K. Hopefully, they’ll follow suit and bump it to $200K as well.
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.
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.
Would have been lovely about 20 years ago. Oh well, no MIT for me.
wow that’s amazing
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.
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.