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Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

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Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#111

Post by markcerqueira »

finolex1 wrote: post #29
bmcusick wrote: post #2

Not that loan-free educations are bad, but why is Brown raising $120M from alumni and the like, rather than lowering their tuition by $120M? The student loan crisis is only a crisis because Universities (lead by the Ivy League and similarly elite private colleges) are charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room, and board. This isn't charity or benevolent. This is just bilking a different class of people. Efforts to…

Keep in mind that these are Ivy League universities hoping to attract the best students they can in order to boost their prestige. If Princeton for instance decided to lower tuition fees by cutting down on 'luxuries' like smaller class sizes/ unrestricted enrollments in classes, then they'd lose out on the best students to Harvard or Yale. So the only way to reduce tuition fees would be to do it across the board at o…

Princeton went about it the way Brown is striving to do now: meet 100% of a student's financial need with grants and no loans. You don't need to lower tuition (and hurt "prestige") if you can do this.

> Richer universities have no incentive to do so because they can attract enough full-paying students and have a large enough endowment to pay for everyone else.

From personal experience, this statement is wrong. A lot of my classmates at Princeton were not paying the full sticker price. Princeton also has a need-blind admission process so admissions and financial aid are kept (on paper at least) separate.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#112

Post by zjaffee »

geebee wrote: post #80

I feel somewhat ambivalent about this. I'm glad that Brown wants to eliminate student debt, and I'm glad that low income students at ivies often pay no tuition. However, this doesn't change their essential model, which is to enroll a very small number of undergrads[1], deny admission to the vast majority of applicants, and generally lean toward affluent students. Compare this with an elite public research university…

UCLA is actually important to note, as from a NYTimes study, they turn the largest population of students who grew up in the bottom 20% to people who are in the top 20% of income earners.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#114

Post by zjaffee »

cphillips wrote: post #99
geebee wrote: post #80

I feel somewhat ambivalent about this. I'm glad that Brown wants to eliminate student debt, and I'm glad that low income students at ivies often pay no tuition. However, this doesn't change their essential model, which is to enroll a very small number of undergrads[1], deny admission to the vast majority of applicants, and generally lean toward affluent students. Compare this with an elite public research university…

Brown (and most likely all other Ivies) is need-blind (except for international students). So, unless you think they are lying, your point doesn't stand on limiting low-income students. You point on size of college is an altogether different issue. "Beginning with the Class of 2007, Brown implemented its need-blind admission policy. Need-blind admission simply means that an applicant's ability to pay for their educat…

Actually, this has stopped being true in at least some sense. All Universities that take a part in the coalition application are need aware at least for students applying in that way.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#115

Post by [deleted] »

cphillips wrote: post #99
geebee wrote: post #80

I feel somewhat ambivalent about this. I'm glad that Brown wants to eliminate student debt, and I'm glad that low income students at ivies often pay no tuition. However, this doesn't change their essential model, which is to enroll a very small number of undergrads[1], deny admission to the vast majority of applicants, and generally lean toward affluent students. Compare this with an elite public research university…

Brown (and most likely all other Ivies) is need-blind (except for international students). So, unless you think they are lying, your point doesn't stand on limiting low-income students. You point on size of college is an altogether different issue. "Beginning with the Class of 2007, Brown implemented its need-blind admission policy. Need-blind admission simply means that an applicant's ability to pay for their educat…

[deleted]

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#116

Post by zjaffee »

onwardly wrote: post #24
bmcusick wrote: post #2

Not that loan-free educations are bad, but why is Brown raising $120M from alumni and the like, rather than lowering their tuition by $120M? The student loan crisis is only a crisis because Universities (lead by the Ivy League and similarly elite private colleges) are charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room, and board. This isn't charity or benevolent. This is just bilking a different class of people. Efforts to…

Because they still want people that can afford to pay $50k/year to pay it. Lowering tuition lowers it for everyone. If your parents make $300k+/year, then you'll still be paying full tuition. But as their income is lower, currently you'll get some need-based financial aid. The problem is that this aid is a combination of "scholarship" and "loans". The goal here is to remove the loan component. The problem still is th…

The truth is that they should evaluate need not based on your parents income, but on their net worth - the price of their home. If you struggled to make ends meet for 15 years at the beginning of your child life but then suddenly started making 200k a year, you likely don't have the savings you need to pay 200k over 4 years to send your kid to college.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#117

Post by icebraining »

krull10 wrote: post #95
okaram wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brown (and all other Ivy League-ish universities) are non-profit; they do not seek (or have) profit

Most universities are run like a business. They are "non-profit" but essentially they are trying to generate "profits" that raise their endowment. Larger endowments mean more $ per year to spend on faculty, admin/staff, and student services/housing. Having more faculty and better student services/housing helps recruit more and stronger students...

Humphrey: Bernard, you know perfectly well there has to be some way to measure success in the Civil Service. British Leyland measure their success by the size of their profits. Or, to be more accurate, they measure the size of their failure by the size of their losses. But, we don’t have profits and losses. We have to measure our success by the size of our staff and our budget. By definition a big department is more successful than a small one.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#118

Post by rohunati »

zjaffee wrote: post #112
geebee wrote: post #80

I feel somewhat ambivalent about this. I'm glad that Brown wants to eliminate student debt, and I'm glad that low income students at ivies often pay no tuition. However, this doesn't change their essential model, which is to enroll a very small number of undergrads[1], deny admission to the vast majority of applicants, and generally lean toward affluent students. Compare this with an elite public research university…

UCLA is actually important to note, as from a NYTimes study, they turn the largest population of students who grew up in the bottom 20% to people who are in the top 20% of income earners.

Do you have a source? this is really interesting, would love to read more.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#119

Post by pratyushag2 »

okaram wrote: post #60
bmcusick wrote: post #2

Not that loan-free educations are bad, but why is Brown raising $120M from alumni and the like, rather than lowering their tuition by $120M? The student loan crisis is only a crisis because Universities (lead by the Ivy League and similarly elite private colleges) are charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room, and board. This isn't charity or benevolent. This is just bilking a different class of people. Efforts to…

Actually ... they are probably NOT charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room and board, when you look at their costs; good education is expensive. Room and board is about $13K, or slightly more than 1K/month, which seems pretty reasonable. Rate-card Tuition is 52K, but they have a 7:1 teacher-student ratio ; If you assume each teacher makes 100K/year (not unreasonable for PhDs), that's about 13K just in teacher sa…

Maybe I’m understanding incorrectly: 13k in teacher salaries would be per course taught by a teacher right? Which really means cost should be 1/4th.

52k per student for a 5,000 student college is 260m per year of claimed expenditure. That is quite a lot money for a faculty of 700, even after subtracting boarding and scholarships, no? I do not know where money is going, although the Bain research does seem to support the evidence for concluding that admin is a benefactor of it.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#120

Post by bmcusick »

onwardly wrote: post #24
bmcusick wrote: post #2

Not that loan-free educations are bad, but why is Brown raising $120M from alumni and the like, rather than lowering their tuition by $120M? The student loan crisis is only a crisis because Universities (lead by the Ivy League and similarly elite private colleges) are charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room, and board. This isn't charity or benevolent. This is just bilking a different class of people. Efforts to…

Because they still want people that can afford to pay $50k/year to pay it. Lowering tuition lowers it for everyone. If your parents make $300k+/year, then you'll still be paying full tuition. But as their income is lower, currently you'll get some need-based financial aid. The problem is that this aid is a combination of "scholarship" and "loans". The goal here is to remove the loan component. The problem still is th…

>> Because they still want people that can afford to pay $50k/year to pay it.

That's not quite what I was getting at. My question is: Why are they making alumni find the $120M in grants, when they could just forgive the loan directly?

There's nothing that says a lender has to collect on its debt. It can choose to forgive the debt.

So it's possible for Brown to charge $50K/year generally, collect it from the rich kids, and then forgive the debt incurred by the poor kids.

But that's not what they're doing. They're keeping the money, and asking alumni and other charitable institutions to pay them.

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