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

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

#411
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting education is like potatoes?

I would say it is more a service, like a massage or a week in a resort hotel.

If you are an education provider, yes. If you are receiving education, I'd say it's totally different due to expected value added over the student lifetime.

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

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Belgium, we earn quite a lot less on average indeed. However why would we need so much money? We can go to hospital, or even 20 times visit a dentist for that matter, without expensive insurance and without the fear of bankruptcy. We can have kids without fear of not being able to pay kintergarten.

Kindergarten is free in the US. Also the vast majority of people pay a relatively small amount of their income for health insurance (and of course it’s free for 65+ who are the primary consumers).

Kindergarten is preschool which means at least daycare, it's not free in the US , I think there's a confusion with elementary school, to which there's a public option. Also forgetting the fact there's no universal parent leave in the US compared with the very generous many months elsewhere, which also makes a huge difference to new parents. There's no possible comparison...

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

#414

I never like these hard cut-offs. We should establish a name/expression for all these rules a simple wording which represents 200k=0% and eg. 250k=100% or something. Otherwise we always have a situation where making more money suddenly leads to less net

Agreed. For the parents who make $200,001 in income, they're screwed.

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

#416

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 fami…

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

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Approximately 60% of American households earn less than $100K. That's quite a difference in relative size.

Households with earners in their 20's and early 30's don't tend to have a lot of children of university age. One would want to use the median income of households with university-aged children. (Median income by age rises sharply from 20->40, then flatlines... the median age of a mother is around 27?)

I'd also think you'd want to adjust by geography based on COL. A two earner family earning $200K in SF or NYC is different than one earning that in suburban Arkansas.

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

#420
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting education is like potatoes?

I would say it is more a service, like a massage or a week in a resort hotel.

Like a massage? You can't be serious. I would consider it a basic service like healthcare, power, or water, so it should be easily accessible, have certain quality standards and very affordable, basically a decision to go there shouldn't have any financial impact.. but surely that's ideal.
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