In many developed countries higher education costs the same as high school.
Still, I've always been interested in science growing up. I was programming video games and building little robots before I was 10 and envisioned myself being a robotics engineer when I got older. I got into Johns Hopkins for a double major of physics and astronomy, I couldn't actually afford it, didn't win enough scholarships (they only awarded a very small subset), and my family didn't have the money.
In the end I ended up going to a local college for computer information systems, and while I love my IT job, it's well under six figures, and I'm $60,000 in student loan debt that I'm probably gonna be paying off for the rest of my life.
I recomend job hopping if you haven't in a while, that's the only way to really get those 20-40% raises from what you're making at the moment.
So they were rich enough that he didn't get exempt from tuition but still could only send one kid to an elite school?
I wonder if the guy was just pulling your leg.
https://www.goacta.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/The-Cost-o...
Just a note that for a lot of schools the sports programs (football especially) are actually a profit center, not a cost center. Situations obviously vary, but it's entirely plausible that a new sports center could be an investment that pays itself off rather than an extravagant expense.
Small businesses are allegedly the backbone of America, and I feel these tuition support programs overlook this segment of the middle-class.
For every type of business entity other than an S corp or an LLC electing to be taxed as one, the IRS either doesn't care about any notion of reasonable salary or - in the case of a C corp or an LLC electing to be taxed as one - actually wants it to be as low as possible (whereas the owner wants to maximize it).
You can't have it be 'insignificant' salary but you can do plenty of fringe benefits or long term profiteering via acquisition as mentioned.
I will say, ironically, the small business owners like that were great to work for, although they were paranoid, they were often generous to employees.
OTOH, at the computer shop there was a standing rule that if the CPA brought his computer in it was 100% priority and we treated him better than the one org that was 10-30% (depending on year) of our entire gross income...
EDIT: To be clear, it's complicated, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42199534 is a good explanation of where I sit overall.
That still seems like heavy handed overreach to me. Should they not instead contact you for clarifications about the ambiguity?
How many times were you audited before learning this valuable lesson?
You hear a lot of anecdotes both ways and it is quite hard to get a good picture of the real situation.
All business funds are re-invested without tax, this is actually a good thing. Also for the majority of business owners taking a loan against your assets to pay yourself is a terrible idea, yes it may defer taxation but that tax will still come due and now you have to pay interest.
> Someone who owns their own business could also easily drop their salary significantly for the year prior to applying to college.
This could be a problem but i think the amount of difference this would make would be negligible - most people don't plan like this. You could also emancipate your 17 year old or have them live independently for a period of time (my friend actually deferred his entry and worked for a year in order to get a full ride)
This is a pretty naive take. It is a $85k per year cost. If you can shift some money around and avoid $85k per year, you would absolutely do that.
> you could also emancipate your 17 year old.
This is complicated. Emancipation is not a “sign a form” kind of thing. The kid would have to be living completely independently (no support from the parents) and would have to convince a judge that they need to have rights and responsibilities otherwise given to adults. “Because the parents don’t want to pay for school” isn’t really a valid reason.
Paying tax and investing in your kid is also a good thing. Putting your income into the S&P 500 is also a good thing, but being wealthy enough to do so should exempt your children from this subsidy
When you say them living off the asset value of their stock, you mean the dividends from the stock?
Nor would they expect you to take a line of credit against the equity in property if you owned any, but stocks are always a rich person luxury that you can sell!
Kinda cemented that we’re rewarding a failure to save and rewarding a failure to save in something liquid.
I dont think this was an oversight or mistake. I think the expectation was that yes, people should sell assets if they have them .
I think the idea is that Yes, the expectation is for people to make actual sacrifice before they qualify.
It’s an all or nothing thing. The business needs all its assets to function, and shouldn’t be considered any more than for its income potential.
You have parents A, B and C.
- Parents A own a small business.
- Parents B sold their small business two years ago, and put the money in the stock market.
- Parents C just scrimped and scraped and over the years saved up money equal to parents A and B.
I’m not sure why you’re so hellbent on giving specifically parents A a free pass. Why the unequal treatment?
It's not equivalent to making all your income off one rental and having to sell it, but it is closer to that. If you sell it, you have no income now. But a small business also creates jobs and provides novel value to the community, so even more is lost than just a single income.
I claim we've had a lean few years, as we had to replace some aged equipment. I'm working all the hours god sends and only making $30,000 a year. There's also, uh, inflation. Market volatility. Climate change. Rising fuel prices. And I'm really worried labour costs are about to rise under this new government.
I also claim we can't sell any of the land without undermining the commercial viability of the farm; and the land would be difficult to sell profitably, because anyone except me and my immediate neighbours would have to travel a long way to farm it. And the remainder of our capital is tied up in crops, which obviously we can't sell until harvest.
On the other hand, it's an almighty coincidence that I needed to replace my tractor, my combine harvester, my skid steer, and my truck all at the same time, just as my kid turned 17. And that I just planted all those apple trees, hops and asparagus that I won't be able to harvest for a few years.
And yet - should MIT be in the business of second-guessing how farmers run their farms? Should my kid be denied a scholarship because some desk jockey in Cambridge thinks he knows the asparagus market better than I do?
If the business is worth enough then selling it can replace all the income you would have ever gotten from it. It's not as simple as "income goes away". The specific numbers make all the difference.
Normal US tax law that most people fall under says no, stock itself is not income. It's only taxed at the time of sale. If you ask for mark to market taxing then any increase in market value during the calendar year will count as income -- even if you didn't sell anything throughout the year. But usually those people are drawing a direct income from trading.
For someone not in your system, the expectations that seem normal to you sound absolutely insane to others.
Anyway no, they should not cut their kidneys out and sell them.
Education costs are out of control, but you can still get a degree elsewhere for 10% the MIT cost, and have it paid for entirely by the government if you are low income
Is it a small business netting the owner 100K a year with 500K in the bank?
That's different than a small business netting the owner 75K a year but the trucks and equipment for the landscaping business (easiest example, replace as needed) being worth 200K...
It's complicated.
That's the only fair way. Also, a set of well educated people pays itself back later in the form of mostly income and added value taxes, which provides money to keep studying for cheap for the next generation.
College in the US would be a lot cheaper if the government didn't inflate it. If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive.
We could do this in the USA also, or perhaps even bother with online universities, except those are generally considered not very useful as degrees.
I've had to submit weekly sheets that were graded in almost all courses and these qualify for the final exam (in STEM). There were two exercise groups with competent ta to ask questions..
What's missing is some kind of Disneyland experience, student unions also exist to some degree but it's more low key.
Not saying that German university is better or worse - I'm convinced it has it's own problems that only will get worse if nothing is changing but it's not like it's subpar and you are alone with your book.
This isn't due to staff shortages, it's more of a difference in tradition/philosophy of teaching
These administrators exist due to the influx of government money. As long as there is available money, the administration has every incentive to grow, and does. It's really very much like the government itself.
IOW - It's not that a larger administration causes costs and prices to go up - it's that more money coming in leads to a larger administration.
It's very much like the cost-plus model in the defense department as well: If I'm allowed to make more money when my costs are higher, then I will ensure that my costs continue to go up.
What timeframe are you looking at?
Back in 2011, registration fees at UC Berkeley were $7,230 per semester, with $813 allotted to health insurance (which could be waived if you provided proof of existing insurance from your family), so $6,417 ignoring health insurance. Meanwhile, last year, registration fees were an eye-popping $9,847 for new students, but cost of health insurance grew much faster to $1,929 ($7,918 ignoring health insurance). This is about a 23% increase, compared to CPI-measured inflation of about 35% between Sep 2011 and Sep 2023.
(The next biggest driver of the overall increase was the campus fee, which went from $253 to $820.)
Or, if you look at just tuition alone, that went from $5610 to $6261, or just barely above 10%.
https://registrar.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Fe...
https://registrar.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/fee_schedu...
If you look further back, in 1999, tuition was a mere $1543, but I posit that tuition at UCs has actually been fairly stable over the past decade.
I don't disagree, but they support my point that tuition has not changed meaningfully in the past decade (and then some), which is why I asked what timeframe you were looking at.
Inflation is perhaps not a good point of reference anyways, since in 2009, inflation per CPI was actually slightly negative. Cost of borrowing is not the same as cost of goods and services or cost of labor, for reasons such as the ones you point out (changes to banking regulations, increased risk aversion, etc).
Although, I'm a little surprised that cost of borrowing would have been much higher, seeing as that was the start of the zero interest-rate policy in the US. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate was hovering around 6-7% pre-crisis and 4-5% in the years immediately following it.
- UC Merced was established in 2005, so I buy the argument on that point regarding investment in infrastructure.
- In 2009, the state's general funds accounted for $2.6 billion, compared to just under $3 billion in 2006. Student fees in that timeframe rose from $1.55 billion to $2 billion, tracking fairly closely with the corresponding shortfall in state funding. [0, 1] Yes, these numbers are also cherrypicked as a representative budget right before the GFC and shortly after, but they represent neither peak funding nor the overall sharpness of the budget cuts. So, I reject the claim that the tuition hikes in the aftermath of the GFC was due to increased borrowing costs for the UC system. I think a more mundane explanation is that the state had a budgetary shortfall due to less taxes being collected (income, property), and made cuts across the board; the UC system raised student fees to compensate.
https://thebottomline.as.ucsb.edu/2017/10/a-brief-history-of... provides an overview of how tuition at UCs evolved up through 2017, although it gets the state funding amounts off by 3 orders of magnitude (since the linked governor's budget is measured in thousands of dollars).
[0] UC's 2009 budget is outlined in slide 3 of https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/documents/2010-...
[1] UC's 2006 budget is outlined in slide 9 of https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/rbudget/200607-...
...if you go back in time a few decades basically everything was about 1/10th as expensive.
e.g. "Adjusted for inflation, $1.00 in 1960 is equal to $10.43 in 2024" according to https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=1...
"The average annual cost of tuition at a public 4-year college is 40 times higher than tuition in 1963.
(...)
After adjusting for currency inflation, college tuition has increased 197.4% since 1963."
This here is where the money is... college degrees are a very effective dull-weeder for job applications. It filters out people of lower social classes (because they cannot afford college or effects of their social status like having to work jobs next to school to help their family make rent prevent them from getting good enough grades), it filters out people with unmanaged mental health issues, it filters out young parents (good luck managing to get a degree parallel to raising a child), it filters out people with disabilities... and all of that without violating a single anti-discrimination law.
High cost and exclusivity is the entire point.
A university open to all with a fraction of the price would be a poorly ranked one in every competitive measure.
I like to call this "resort-style education".
I don't want to say Europe is without problems, but I think this kind of legislation, together with social security in general, is a clear example of how it can be handled more efficient and fair for most people.
My understanding is that most universities in Europe look more like US bare bones commuter schools, opposed to an all inclusive recreational experience.
The top ranked university in Europe is Oxford, which educates more than twice as many students as MIT with half the budget. I doubt this is because Oxford is cutting corners on educational curriculum.
Most other British and EU universities suffer from the same issues. For more information, see this article at The Guardian, which generated lots of debate: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/no.... In a nutshell the article states that "[...] I no longer believe that early-career positions at Oxbridge universities are viable for individuals without independent financial means." Also "[...] the median non-professorial academic salary at Oxbridge is £45,000."
> MIT is a huge outlier in terms of R&D
Maybe, maybe not. It could just be from cost-of-living differences: salaries for many jobs (particularly highly-educated ones) pay a fraction outside the US what they do inside the US. How much are Oxford professors and staff getting paid compared to the ones at MIT (which is Boston, which is a very high cost-of-living city for the US)?
> According to ZipRecruiter, the average salary for a professor at MIT is $114,792 per year, with a range of $94,500 to $179,500.
> A professor's salary at the University of Oxford can range from around £89,429 to £122,261 per year, with an average of £104,347
When I worked in UK academia the hierarchy for permanent academic posts was something like: lecturer, senior lecturer, reader, professor.
Perhaps high professor and admin salaries in the US are a problem with US education.
This is exactly my point. And not just professor and admin salaries, the salaries and costs for everything.
It's not about "cutting corners", it's that if you compare the cost of something in the US to something in another country, the US usually is much more expensive; this doesn't mean the other country is cutting corners, it means the US is just too damn expensive.
Also, it’s not exactly what I would call open enrolment as it’s only open to Swiss students who are accepted into and pass a Matura program or similar in grade school while other students typically require applications or minimum exam scores depending on the program.
I'll go out on a limb and bet people in your country earn much less than the average American, too. Why? Why don't companies just pay these people more? IT all comes back in income and value added taxes.
> We can have kids without fear of not being able to pay kindergarten.
Also: In Belgium, can you really go to the dentist 20 times? Is there any good reason to allow this in a public healthcare system? If the barrier to entry for healthcare services is very low, then there must be (1) a lot of abuse... or (2) long waiting times... or (3) very high taxes. My guess in Belgium: A combination of (2) and (3).
I estimate mostly [3]. That's the whole discussion here.
If you wear braces, you have to visit very frequently. Half the kids in secondary school get them at some point. If you have cavities, it's usually several visits.
Granted, it does not come for free but it will set you back hundreds rather than thousands a year.
I work in Massachusetts, but I live in New Hampshire. I pay more than double this on both Social Security fees & Massachusetts income taxes, which are non-deductible since New Hampshire has no income tax and makes up for that with higher property taxes (housing is cheaper though). Filtered to just health related services I can easily identify, in total I pay for Social Security, Medicare, and indirectly Massachusett's state healthcare (which I can only gain access to under limited conditions). Of these, only the private insurance fee directly benefits me, and I have little faith social security will actually pay out when I reach the qualifying age.
In terms of investment my HSA, and 401k are a much better dollar for dollar investment for my future finances than any government service, so I find it extremely unlikely I would ever truly benefit from public healthcare.
Despite my tone here, I'm more annoyed than upset about this. Due to the overall societal benefit, I'm not entirely against public healthcare depending on the details, I'm just under no illusion that it would be to my benefit, and I'm not much of an outlier. I'm also mostly convinced the root issue here is the inflated cost of healthcare rather than just the insurance aspect, public healthcare naively implemented would likely turn into yet another government subsidy for hospitals to devour imo.
Having just filled my annual benefits selections tonight, here's my data point: health insurance is $3000/month on the company plan (36K/year).
Yes, the company "pays" for a percentage of that. But of course the entire $3K/month is part of my total compensation cost to the company. If healthcare wasn't so ludicrously expensive in the US, they could afford to pay me more, instead of funneling all this money to insurance company profits.
Insurance companies usually (maybe it's always, not certain) are regulated to a percentage cap spent on categories. What is the result? They are incentivized to push prices ever higher as much and as fast as possible because a % of higher price is more profit for them.
> Insurance companies are an easy target though, since no one wants to go after the doctors and hospitals for charging too much.
Doctors and hospitals actually provide a valuable service, they provide health care. They deserve to be paid.
Insurance companies provide no value whatsoever, they are just a middleman siphoning off profits off the work of doctors (and nurses and everyone else doing the actual work).
Also, doctors don't actually charge that much. When I get billed $980 for a 15 minute doctor visit (as I just was last month), it is most certainly not because the doctor is earning ~$4000/hr. That doctor isn't paid more than your average senior software engineer (in Silicon Valley anyway), all the rest of the money is lost to middlemen who didn't contribute anything.
No doubt, Switzerland's healthcare is cheaper (American doctors and hospitals are some of the most expensive in the world), but the data I linked to is already adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP).
But how about if I ask "And after paying for mortgage?"
As for amenities, back in Europe, many universities don't even have a campus, just a scattering of buildings all around the city, acquired randomly as the school grew (that includes dorm buildings, often quite far from one another). You will spend some extra time commuting among them, but the university saves money - and, indirectly, you too.
Getting from dorm to lectures usually took me about 30 minutes each way - on foot, then subway, then on foot again.
One of Ronald Reagan's campaign promises was dismantling or breaking the department of education, similar to what he had done to California's state universities by limiting their budgets and moving the burden of tuition to students.
At the time this was quite popular as it lowered taxes.
The only pro Trump reasoning I read was along the line of 'I don't care about all this guns/abortion/woke/climate stuff, I just want my taxes to be lower.' To me that sounds like a little child crying: I just want to go to bed late and eat candy all day. No one is going to take away those candy rights written in the xxth amendment.
american universities get closer to this ideal than you might expect. the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away, at least for undergraduate degrees.
it would make more sense to do this redistribution through taxes if possible, but many US institutions are private so that doesn’t really work. so the colleges basically have their own privately-run means testing programs, and like all such programs there are flaws and loopholes.
this is partly true. it is cheap / free for very low income -- if you qualify for a Pell grant you can usually get additional financial aid from your state university that can bring your cost down to zero.
But if you are above the low income line, but by no means wealthy -- so if you're a household making say $100K a year, then college is extremely expensive and unaffordable especially if you have several kids. You're not poor enough to qualify for substantial financial aid, and you're not wealthy enough to afford tuition. Yeah, your kid can get into Harvard or Stanford for free, but the chances of them being accepted are vanishingly small no matter how smart they are.
The saving grace is community college -- enroll at the local CC for 2 years and then transfer to the state school.
The money for funding public and quasi-private (universities and hospitals) institutions has to come from somewhere. Making it equally affordable for everybody doesn't raise enough money to maintain operations. Same for funding the government.
Granted, I think all of those institutions are due for reforms, which have little chance of happening right now, but still, I think the basic funding equation can't be eliminated.
That's what taxes are for: you take proportionally more from people with more assets. I find the entire conversation about "not wanting my tax dollars to pay for some millionaire's kids' education", because those millionaires would end up paying the difference in taxes (under a fair system) than they do now.
That's without even considering the perverse incentives at play when a wealthy parent can use the payment or withholding of payment for education as a way to control their kids. Just because a parent is wealthy it doesn't necessarily mean that the kid would have access to those funds, or that explicit or implicit requirements that could be imposed to access those funds would be reasonable.
> the ideal is that college should be very expensive for rich people and cheap, free, or at least more affordable, for less wealthy people.
Dunno where you got this "ideal".
the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away
..."fading away", to the tune of (at last glance ) one and three quarters of a trillion dollars in outstanding student loan debt.
it would make more sense to do this redistribution through taxes if possible
The ability of US higher ed to raise tuition prices will always overwhelm the ability of US taxpayers to meet those prices. The phrase "utility monster" comes to mind.
but many US institutions are private so that doesn’t really work.
Private, in the sense that nobody who answers to someone who must win an election is directly in charge of running them, but, who operate as charities for the purpose of donations, pay no taxes on either capital gains or real estate, and are permitted to act as government contractors skimming up to 85% of grant money they're tasked with administrating.
so the colleges basically have their own privately-run means testing programs, and like all such programs there are flaws and loopholes.
The flaw being that...the school is allowed to have total knowledge of a customer's ability to pay before it chooses to do business with them. Imagine if you had to give three years of your tax returns to the person you were trying to buy a house from.
I wonder if people like you just lack the imagination or system thinking or equate poor with useless or are just afraid of thinking people? From the perspective of the state and the society it’s beneficial to have an educated population, unless you think you won’t have enough stupid people to man the factories?
what I'm saying is only relevant when you drop the /s quotes.
Sorry for my ranting, I just cannot believe what is still happening.
The expensive schools are for the richest people to say they went to school next to the best students who get in free.And for the best students to meet rich people.
Just looked up our main state schools and cost of attendance is $31K - $35K for in-state residents. So that's $120K - $140K for 4 years (not counting increases). And these aren't top-100 schools either.
What I was talking about what you expect to pay if 1) you don't have scholarships, and 2) you're not low income enough to qualify for a lot of financial aid (Pell Grant and matching grants from state schools)
If you're there on a need-based scholarship, you need both kinds, but neither of them need you.
That's a "happy accident". The college educated bureaucrats who joined hands with academia to create these programs were perfectly fine omitting the plumber's children. They sure weren't gonna do a huge amount of work to find away to avoid an edge case they were ok with.
Specifically, what percent of the business would have to be sold off? My reaction is very different for 5% versus 50%.
s1artibartfast below is saying that it seems intentional. But how can someone with a small business sell the assets, eliminating their own income in the process, and provide for the remaining children/themselves/etc? Sacrifice is one thing; killing the job you created is another and far too short-sighted.
If your parents run a struggling corner store then you should be eligible, but if they own a successful chain of stores, maybe not.
Why not just say Income of 200K, or if you own a business then income + pre tax profits <=200K and book assets <500K or something?
Looking around me I see the effects. Year over year small businesses continue to disappear.
Tuition for undergraduate studies should be affordable. Not for a small number of very rich universities that can afford it. But to all universities, as it is in most of the world.
That is prove the kids are really responsible.
The free cash he has, the house he lives in, the lifestyle he can afford is on par with "normal" white collar professionals (i.e. not people who get a bajillion monopoly bucks to implement linked list traversals for faang). He works 60hr weeks during construction season and has government agencies up his ass regularly (MHSA regulates him like he's running a pit mine, it's a huge f-ing farce). If you don't place insane value on being your own boss it's kind of a shitty life.
Not as much of a farce as getting silicosis and dying at 50 because your idiot gravel pit boss refuses to maintain a sprinkler system.
That you don't envy his current lifestyle doesn't mean he's not rich.
Having literally millions of dollars in productive assets is rich by any reasonable standard.
> The free cash he has, the house he lives in, the lifestyle he can afford is on par with "normal" white collar professionals
And he has decades of support at that level of wealth in and realizable from the assets. Choosing to use it to generate a a “normal white collar professional” (i.e., reasonably well off to start with) income doesn't change that it is an enormous store of value that he owns.
> MHSA regulates him like he's running a pit mine
Sounds like he does? As per your own comment.
Yes, students who's parents have money but choose not to spend it get a rough deal. You can make a pretty strong case that it is their parents screwing them over, not the school. The school doesn't owe a discount to prospective students.
No you can't. The school is the one choosing to set their prices based on the parents, who might or might not have anything to do with the student's school budget. That is the school's faulty assumption, and they, not the parents, are the ones screwing over those students.
I dont see how that follows at all. They spend more on students than they receive in tuition funds. Who would they be scamming? What if they offered a million dollar education? I still dont see how that would impact their non-profit status.
Either way, I dont see the educational requirements for costs in line with other institutions, especially when the institutions can easily showing they are spending more on the students than they are charging. Discounting a $100k educational experience to 85k is still a benefit to the public. Someone offering a different educational experience for $20k doesn't negate that.
If we want more cheaper universities and education as a society, we should think about creating them, not trying to force expensive universities to be cheaper.
The challenge is that people don't actually want cheap accessible education, they want luxury too.
What if I said: the price is the same for everyone, but people with less access to money get proportionally more assistance paying that price?
If by “price” you mean, “net price after available subsidies”, then, yeah: healthcare, housing, and food, among others.
The difference is that the subsidies are usually public, whereas the education subsidies are by the seller—but the seller is also a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the entire premise of which, and the reason donations to them are tax deductible to the donor on top of the nonprofit being tax exempt, is that the nonprofit functions serves social needs in lieu of the government doing so.
Those examples are varied and are not the same thing as purchasing a concrete product, yet I believe they are relevant to your question - education is a service that supports society, not a concrete product for your personal use and enjoyment. How and if you get it, relies not entirely on you at that point in your life, but heavily on your parents and in general on your family as a single economic unit to which you belong.
(E.g. you hear about college dropouts starting businesses all the time. You barely ever hear that about people who haven’t attended college at all.)
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...
Also Northwestern is in Evanston, not Chicago. Two different cities.
The US has the philosophical stance that this is accepted. However, history shows that is is a balance that will collapse into civil war eventually if allowed to skew to far.
Why is it UPENN's responsibility to solve these issues? This is Philadelphia's problem, the university is just a business operating in the city.
American Universities, historically, are supposed to improve not just their students’ lives but also society as a whole, especially as serving as boosters for the city they’re in and their immediate neighbors. That’s why they’re nonprofits. That’s also likely their strongest lifeline to remain relevant in the future rather than as the hollow alumni clubs and gatekeepers their critics say they are, with AI/the internet/online schooling/topic of the day breaking down socioeconomic barriers to knowledge access
That’s why the Carnegies and Mellons built libraries, museums, and the very literally named Carnegie-Mellon university, back then. Now it seems like the first thing billionaires today do is isolate themselves and their wealth from the masses as much as possible.
Historically speaking, wealth accumulation was borderline impossible because the incentive to steal it was so large. You had to become a king, and then constantly murder people trying to take the throne, because everyone had the attitude that the only way to acquire wealth was to steal it from others. And that never really worked out well since the king was always threatened by death (the Sword of Damocles).
This stopped when the upper classes realized it was cheaper and more effective to raise the living standard of everyone else than it is to prevent everyone else from stealing their wealth. When you create wealth, you share some of it with others.
In other words, create a society where everyone has salt and pepper, rather than try to hoard salt/pepper for financial gain.
That's true of schooling as well. In the Middle Ages, only the rich and powerful could read and write. Now that everyone knows how to read, Facebook has a trillion-dollar business selling words.
This mentality is present in FOSS to some extent, but it isn't present for education anymore. Everyone seems to think good universities are a perpetually limited good, so we fight over limited admissions spots rather than figure out a way to deliver high quality education to the masses.
It's stupid, because bumping up the difficulty is how we make education worthwhile.
There’s a bit more to it than that. There’s a reason Xi Jinping doesn’t need to murder members of his cabinet all the time. A stable government has a winning coalition which keeps the leader in power. The leader has to keep them happy which in small enough governments he can do by paying them directly.
In a democracy, the winning coalition is way too large to simply pay supporters. The government has to fund public works which are more cost effective. A larger winning coalition is better for the median person for this reason.
The University of Pennsylvania is one of the nine colonial colleges founded before the United States existed. It predates land grant institutions by over a century. I think you are confusing it with Pennsylvania State University, which is a land grant institution.
Their duty is to deliver education. It's not solving political problems meant for elected officials (and the population at large).
Presumably they could spend a little bit of that to deliver some more education, couldn’t they?
Rich alumni, patents, etc. Also, it is a warchest for innovation and expansion. Same thing as other businesses, you have a surplus of cash for reinvestment.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/231...
[0] https://datausa.io/profile/university/university-of-pennsylv...
Harvard really did a number on my belief in American academia, and then finding out that students in Columbia were complaining they had to read made me not want to look at those types of statistics very often.
Anyways, appreciate the work of actually delving into the payscales, teacher / administrator ratios, and allocation of funding. Also, the https://datausa.io/ site's another interesting one to add to the list of public available dataset visualization, plotting, and summarization websites.
Actually, quick check from a different direction at least seems to support some of the Philly issues. Violent Crime rate per county on datausa.io: https://datausa.io/map?measure=E1cxD&groups%5B0%5D=24yFSi%7C...
Death by Homicide is also interesting lateral, although Mississippi apparently has a huge issue all over the state. Many 25+ / 100,000 areas: https://datausa.io/map?measure=ZfwdDB&groups%5B0%5D=24yFSi%7...
Unfortunately, website seems to trigger alot of Network Errors on the map portion of the site.
It isn't.
Despite the name, it's actually a private university.
Penn State is Pennsylvania's land grant university.
Who's responsibility is it? Have you seen how the government operates? Why wouldn't UPENN want to help solve it?
How much have you contributed to Philly's woes?
Probably nothing, because it doesn't benefit you.
To resolve Philly's woes?
> Probably nothing, because it doesn't benefit you.
If they pay taxes...
If, over the long term, an endowment isn’t growing, it’s being mismanaged.
(Drugs) https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/mexico-depicts-phi...
Endowments have strings attached that limits the use of funds, the endowed money isn’t just a general slush fund: https://www.acenet.edu/Documents/Understanding-College-and-U...
Also, an endowment is meant to be perpetual, so only a small fraction of it is spent every year to ensure the principal amount doesn’t go down. “Don’t kill the golden goose” in other words.
If you don't have guns, you won't have gun violence, but I guess the second amendment won't be changed any time soon.
Not an unreasonable proposition. The purpose of the university is ostensibly to provide an education, not to continue hoarding more and more money.
One of the purposes. They’re also centres for learning and research and repositories of knowledge.
Without research there would be nothing new to teach, Without research diseases wouldn't be cured. A lot of amazing things we have came from universities.
Cool. This isn't how the word works in practice. More importantly, it isn't how the trustees of the people who gave those universities the money asked for it to be used. (Nor the government or the granting agencies.)
> if an organization only did research but didn't teach I would not say they get to call themselves a university any more
Again, cool. This isn't true in reality. Research universities famously put research first, which is why they can attract top faculty.
The point of an endowment is to provide long term support for whatever the purpose is of that endowment. That is done by investing it and using the investment earnings for that purpose.
There is something ironic about people who work in start-ups arguing for endowments to be spent down. Who do you think gives money to the VC funds?
1- https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/231...
UPenn’s revenue includes “sales of assets” and “investment income,” i.e., taking some part of the endowment annually to fund their operations.
It's not a pile of gold sitting in a vault on campus. It's an account which is productively invested and generating returns which are what's actually used for funding operations. A $20 billion endowment would be expected to produce about $1 billion per year, or around 20% of the annual operating budget. They need to bring in about $4 Billion more dollars per year to keep the lights on.
No. There are non-teaching research universities. Many universities have non-teaching faculty. Learning != teaching != education.
For the federal government, they can choose how they allocate grants. Withholding grants from greedy schools is one option.
At that point, stop writing grants. Sending money to sub-optimal grantees to effect an education/investment policy is wasteful.
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.
Graduates pay roughly 9% of their income above £27k towards debt repayment, and the remaining balance is written off after 30 years. Typical tuition fees are just over £9k per year.
This strikes a nice balance between encouraging people to carefully consider alternative non-university careers whilst also not preventing too many people from not being able to afford it.
Note my numbers are approximate because they can vary depending on when & where a person went to university a couple of other factors. Also I do think the system could be slightly improved (especially around maintenance loans) but on the whole has a good structure.
There's been some issues with it, but no system is perfect and the thrust of it is aligned with the dual public-private structure that Australia seems to prefer (see also: medicare vs private health insurance).
Why would we not want universities to respond to that signal?
People make fun of English and Art majors, but yet the majority of people consume art and writing as their primary activities outside of work (watching TV and movies).
The world would be a sad, boring place without those majors.
why?
> yet the majority of people consume art and writing as their primary activities outside of work (watching TV and movies).
yes... but we don't need many of those skills, which is why you typically see 'winner take all' situations with a single person servicing this need for millions.
We don't need universities to pump out 10,000s of English and Art managers if a 100 artists can service the entire population.
.5% of income over lifetime of alumni is very long-term investement
Universities are well aware of that and obviously won't self-sabotage in such dumb way
More likely outcome is that universities will ensure that most talented students will get high income majors
[0] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2024/03/29/princeton-trustees... (go tigers)
(Median income by age rises sharply from 20->40, then flatlines... the median age of a mother is around 27?)
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=MIT&s=all&id=166683#...
That link says 72% of incoming freshman in 2022-2023 received financial aid. Also has a full-time beginning net cost average of just under $22,000 in 2022-2023.
It's not a perfect source of data, but there is enough on College Navigator to let you dig into it a bit and compare to other schools.
> Last year, the median annual cost paid by an MIT undergraduate receiving financial aid was $12,938 , allowing 87 percent of students in the Class of 2024 to graduate debt-free. Those who did borrow graduated with median debt of $14,844.
I feel like the timing is too close to be a coincidence—does anyone know if there's a link?
> 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.
[0] https://alum.mit.edu/slice/what-50000-i-better-practice-more
An actual graduate tax would be far less regressive than the current system
That would mean people that get great paying jobs right out of college would pay more than they even borrowed, but it would be justified because the degree would likely have had a big impact if it was so soon after finishing the degree.
For all of you younger folks just starting your families, expect to pay full price for college if you are anywhere near the top 25% of earners (most of this site presumably). Any scholarship money is a bonus but aid probably isn't going to be forthcoming.
The subtext of this MIT announcement is that any family making more than $200,000 will be paying full price to subsidize the poorer students.
https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...
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...
My household income is right around $200k, and my daughter (still a few years from college) would definitely consider e.g. UC Berkeley, which (including housing) is half the cost of MIT for an in-state student. Free tuition would certainly make her look at MIT more closely, so if the goal is to draw the best students (and helping poor students is a side-effect), then it's a good idea.
Also, it's headline-grabbing. There's at least one poor kid somewhere in the US who will read this headline and consider MIT, when they previously didn't (even though they probably already would have qualified for free, or nearly-free tuition).
As a young teen, I applied for financial aid, to a state school, and got a nonviable response, since my parents of 6 kids could afford to contribute zero, but some bureaucracy thought otherwise.
So I went to Community College part time, while working at a store, and then was a co-op student, and worked my way up from there. After working in industry, I went to grad school, at an Ivy and MIT, and only then did I learn what successful undergrad applications tend to look like, and also that there's various financial assistance available (including some not advertised).
My story is not of the system working. I've seen so much systemic class nonsense and rigging (and sometimes bad behavior by people who feel entitled to whatever they can grab). Being at a disadvantage in those games doesn't stop once you're nominally in. But the relatively recent need-blind admissions, and family income thresholds for tuition, help a lot, especially if we can pair that with getting the information/advising about successful applications to everyone.
MIT is a great financial investment.
families making $200k seems really unnecessary and helps people that don't really need to help
More than twice my parents mortgage. I'm sure it's worse, now.
The linked article says not.
Loans are not included in our financial aid offers because we believe your financial aid will cover your expenses. We do not expect any undergraduate to take out a loan. Rather than borrow, most students opt to work during the academic year. At MIT, this work often provides students not only a way to help pay for college but also with world-class research experience.
Otherwise we always have a situation where making more money suddenly leads to less net
https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...
i.e. in a progressive fee structure, your marginal fee if your family earns 250k would be whatever%, but that would only be due on the amount over 200k.
Follow up question - what is a “family” here? A single parent with 3 kids? A married couple with one child?
It’s just depressing. Sorry, I’ll go back into my hole.
You need to look outside your immediate area. Or at another state. Most of the USA is nothing like that.
thanks to purchasing power parity and exchange ratio gap, i was already from a broke family that would meet the cutoff for most universities a decade ago. however, the act of paying hundreds of dollars for application fees was enough to not make it like you lose nothing by trying. to put things to perspective, a few hundred dollars, which could cover a handful of applications, were equivalent to the take-home salary for a month during that time.
maybe i was unaware of some concessions or perhaps there has been improvements on this front, but i wonder if some applications might still be this hard pressed despite these initiatives.
The answer to your question is it depends. Some assets like your primary home and retirements can be shielded from expected family contribution. If you've got assets sitting in a taxable account....
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.
Maintaining national parks? Helping support inner city? Tutoring and improving public education? Imagine having the majority of American college students contributing to these worthy causes AND getting a strong education.
https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/forgiveness-cancellation...
Get rid of government loans, bring us back to how universities used to operate, and education will once again be something you can pay for with a summer job.
All we're doing with these government loans is transferring the wealth of society to the universities.
or like it is currently for EU citizens in any EU country. Americans are getting ripped off from all sides.
Maybe if I had found data for a wide range of schools instead of just a couple of hard to get into schools there would have been a more noticeable effect.
Not that I think lowering the cost of education is a bad effort but appeals to some prior culture like they are apples to apples comparison is dishonest.
Yes, please. Students learned just fine without all the fancy facilities. Perks are great and all, but I would trade them for a low cost of education in a second.
I do t know that they are disinterested parties in this that can be trusted uncritically but there is a community college near me that has nicer gym facilities for their students than my big 10 Alma matter had for its “student” athletes when I was in school. Something drives that.
Free would be fine if we could expect actual return on the investment instead of extended high school, delaying adulthood, and channeling people from useful vocations within their grasp.
Just the idea that parents in the US are expected to pay for their children's education is so wrong.
This is about MIT, which along with their Ivy League peers probably represent symbolism and no more than a dent into the total number of education programmes carried out in the US.
But again, hearing advisors on personal finance talking about saving for your kids education as a high priority is so insane for me and is completely contrary to what I would expect from a meritocratic society (which I know the US aspires to be).
This 'free education' is a great argument for MIT to persuade Wealthy Lefties to donate/leave them their inheritence. And do the senior people get any bonuses related to number of applicants/places?
But regardless, the increase to the current thresholds are great!
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.
Tuition isn't the only problem here. If we want a country with social mobility, our higher ed institutions should reflect this and not create artificial scarcity.
What percentage of MIT students...
Two teachers in a HCOL city are going to be above 200k.
> 58% of full-time undergraduates received [some form of] MIT Scholarship [but not necessarily a full one] during the 2023–2024 academic year.
San Francisco + older bay area cities are a prime example of being a bastion of free market capitalism in the guise of progressivism.
The main reason SF is unaffordable is that the city government forbids people from building housing, which is the exact opposite of a free market.
The real problem is that more people want to live in SF than they have allowed housing to be built for. But it isn't clear that if they went with Houston-style "anything goes", would they still be that desirable? Or only as desirable as less popular Houston?
1. 2,251.1/sq mi Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA / 12,828,837 2. 2,156.5/sq mi New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA / 19,865,045 3. 1,614.4/sq mi Trenton-Ewing, NJ / 369,526 4. 1,303.6/sq mi San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA / 4,466,251
Bay Area density fairly well correlates to SF's density, actually (yes, not as dense, but neither are the metros around the other dense cities).
More housing is always great, but I think it is really idealistic to think that building more housing in a hot area is going to bring prices down much, if at all. Literally, anywhere in the world, that simply doesn't happen. At best, we get a place like Berlin that has a nice economic bust that brings housing prices down for awhile (and then they start ticking up again as the economy improves), or Tokyo, where a country-wide baby bust coupled with anemic local wages and a huge 1980s housing boom hang over, keeps things reasonably priced.
Nope. Tokyo's population is still growing, and 1980s housing in Tokyo is deeply undesirable. The reason Tokyo has sane housing prices is that it continuously builds large amounts of housing, because they haven't made it de facto illegal the way too many places have. Sometimes that's all it takes.
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?
The other side of this is saying the status quo is; as a high school senior with wealthy parents, you don't have to compete against as many strong students if you apply for MIT because it has high barriers to entry (that aren't based on merit), and so you should apply even if you aren't particularly interested in their offering.
Also, the reality is most kids will be applying for all of the schools. MIT might want to improve their yield rate.
This doesn’t solve all of those problems but it’s a start.
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...
Why should we expect individual universities to scale up their class sizes proportional to the student population in the US? Some universities may choose to, and new universities could spin up to serve the increased student body, but I don't see a compelling reason to argue that any given university should scale up just because college has (somewhat arbitrarily) become the default path for the entire middle class.
There's nothing wrong with MIT wanting to stay small, and it's not necessarily a conspiracy to build exclusive brands. They could also just recognize that their system won't scale up to an order of magnitude more students.
except that it is about branding and ranking; these top unis have the money and the capability to double their undergrad student size; they have no problem attracting top talent as far as professors are concerned
I didn't just make this up[0]
Professors are not the only bottleneck that the administration of MIT and company would be worried about. With more undergrads and professors comes more administration overhead, a need for more facilities (including land for those facilities that may not be contiguous with the rest of campus, which creates additional overhead of its own), and housing for the students (with the impact on the surrounding neighborhoods that that entails).
Additionally, allowing your school to grow from 8000 to 30000 undergrads dramatically changes the character of the school in ways that can't just be brushed off as "elitist".
And again: regardless of the reasons they don't want to change, I don't see any reason why we should expect any given school to so dramatically transform itself just because college became the default path for the middle class.
because most other schools, except the elitist schools, have
> just because college became the default path for the middle class
actually, that's not the case; college enrollment, as a percentage of high school grads, is the lowest it's been since 2006 and has only risen 10% in the past 50 years -- and that includes enrollment at community colleges
meanwhile the US population has grown 60% in the same period
US college age (20-24) population has grown from 16.5M in 1970 to 23M in 2022
so that means that elite colleges are serving an ever-shrinking share of the college population; and if you factor in the explosion in foreign undergrads in the past 50 years, top colleges share of US college population is even smaller
> a need for more facilities (including land for those facilities that may not be contiguous with the rest of campus, which creates additional overhead of its own)
have you taken a look at the endowments of elite colleges recently?
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?
However, as a professor myself in a rapidly evolving STEM field adjacent to AI, I update at least 20% of my course materials each year to keep pace with new developments. As it happens, about a third of the new content is derived from my research group's latest work. Recording lectures isn't a one-time effort; it would require constant updates to remain relevant (and let me tell you, if you want to get the voice-over right, it is a lot more time-consuming and soul-crushing than simply turning up in class and giving a live lecture).
The value of live lectures goes beyond just "transmitting" content. They offer real-time interaction, immediate feedback, and dynamic discussions that adapt to the students' understanding. This level of interaction devilishly difficult to replicate in recorded formats.
I would ramble on more, but I need to return to the lecture materials I am developing for this Friday on Vision-Language Models :P
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/meritoc...
Time to tax these endowments.