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Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

news.mit.edu

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Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

#151

Post by ndriscoll »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #94
changoplatanero wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the price you have to pay for something dependent on how much money your parents make? Feels so unfair

Because it is really a discount to the parents, not the student. It is understood that few 17 year olds have saved enough money to pay MIT's tuition of $85k/year for 4 years and parents are usually footing the bill. 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…

You can't make that case at all. The price these name-brand schools ask is pretty much "how much do you(r parents) have?", and your kids could instead go to state school (if they can get into MIT, they probably qualify for a full ride scholarship or at least close) and have that tuition go to an ~80% down payment on their first house.

Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

#152

Post by bb88 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #127
xboxnolifes wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "mistake" is that the assets themselves are the source of income. Sell them off, and the income goes away too. It's the equivalent of expecting the parents to use 100% of their income to put their kids into college, which is impossible.

A bunch of stock is a source of income too, but it wouldn't be wrong to use some of it. 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.

> A bunch of stock is a source of income too, but it wouldn't be wrong to use some of it.

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.

Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

#153

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #128
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I disagree. I think teaching is the sole purpose of a university. Research is ancillary to that, and if an organization only did research but didn't teach I would not say they get to call themselves a university any more.

> I think teaching is the sole purpose of a university

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.

Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

#154

Post by jjmarr »

bradchris wrote: post #45
rs999gti wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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.

I think that speaks to the low bar we have come to expect from our endowed institutions today more than anything else. 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 releva…

> 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.

Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

#155

Post by JumpCrisscross »

tdeck wrote: post #67
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> If they were spending the money on those things, this might be an argument. But they're not spending it; they're hoarding it

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?

Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

#156

Post by roenxi »

colechristensen wrote: post #150
technothrasher wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an owner of a small family business, I have to pay close attention to making sure my salary and that of my other family members involved is "generally commensurate with our duties" or the IRS will be up my backside pretty quick. I obviously try to minimize it as much as possible, but if you drop it to something insignificant and the IRS notices, they'll adjust your income and expenses reported to reflect your non-…

Will they actually though? You hear a lot of anecdotes both ways and it is quite hard to get a good picture of the real situation.

Keep a weather eye out with that line of scepticism. One of the opinions down that path is that MIT should adjust its admission procedures to filter out the children of honest businesspersons.

Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

#157

Post by AwGeezeRick »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #128
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I disagree. I think teaching is the sole purpose of a university. Research is ancillary to that, and if an organization only did research but didn't teach I would not say they get to call themselves a university any more.

You can disagree but that doesn't change anything. Most major universities are research institutions that also teach people, and hopefully bring up some through the ranks to further research/academia/human 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.

Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

#158

Post by JumpCrisscross »

janalsncm wrote: post #85
ciupicri wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if a university has money, learning there should be free? 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.

For a private school, they can choose how to spend their money. Hoarding it is one option. For the federal government, they can choose how they allocate grants. Withholding grants from greedy schools is one option.

> 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.

Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

#159

Post by wholinator2 »

sunshowers wrote: post #137
nuancebydefault wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Education in the US isn't cheap but those are elite colleges. The price tag is mostly for the networking.

I will say though, that pretending there isn't a difference in education is just untrue sadly. I've had to come to terms with this, going from a very small state college to a more prestigious private school for graduate studies. Nearly everyone around me is from a large, more expensive school, literally everyone else in my program is significantly better educated than me. Of course you can find good programs at small schools, they try very hard. But there's just a difference between a school that can afford to run classical mechanics 2 and one that cannot, a school that can afford to pick and choose a good professor for their classes and one that cannot. And that gap is vastly wider than i had imagined

Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

#160

Post by s1artibartfast »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #122
s1artibartfast wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is really a discount to the parents, not the student. It is understood that few 17 year olds have saved enough money to pay MIT's tuition of $85k/year for 4 years and parents are usually footing the bill. 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…

> 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. 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…

My point is that the school has zero obligation to a prospective student. If the parents have the means to pay, but dont want to, that seems to be a bigger question of responsibility and obligation.
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