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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.
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Why are such things in the US so complicated? Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone! 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.
Because education is largely an afterthought, and universities primarily compete on entertainment and prestige. 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 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.
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.
Where are you seeing this?
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.
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It’s incredibly difficult to structure these rules in a way that doesn’t discriminate against small businesses while not opening a giant loophole for the rich.
Why is the price you have to pay for something dependent on how much money your parents make? Feels so unfair
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.
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> They were given land and money specifically to serve the public good. Their duty is to deliver education. It's not solving political problems meant for elected officials (and the population at large).
If their duty is to deliver education, why are they sitting on a $20B hoard? Presumably they could spend a little bit of that to deliver some more education, couldn’t they?
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 Bumpi…
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> purpose of the university is ostensibly to provide an education One of the purposes. They’re also centres for learning and research and repositories of knowledge.
If they were spending the money on those things, this might be an argument. But they're not spending it; they're hoarding it.
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.
The article claims 80% of American households meet this threshold. I wonder what % of their incoming class (say restricted to Americans) meets this threshold.
Use College Navigator for these types of questions: 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.
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> Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone! 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.
I don't know where the OP lives. But in Switzerland, where world-class univeristies like the ETH cost something like $ 1.5k a year in tuition, I'm pretty certain that people earn more on average than in the USA.