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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

#271

Post by rfergie »

Engineering-MD wrote: post #46
robnado wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, that wouldn’t be a bad way to fund education: education is free, but the university gets taxation power over you so they can tax you at x% of your income. It aligns incentives better than the current system.

In which case you may like how it’s done in the UK. it’s technically debt but in essence works as a graduate tax. The government pays for your education with a loan. You then only pay back 9% of your income over a certain income threshold. You do this until you pay back the loan or 30-40 years have passed. So in practice this is a graduate tax.

For most taxes you expect higher earners to pay more but this is not the case with student loans because high earners pay of their loans quickly whereas lower earners end up paying far more in interest.

An actual graduate tax would be far less regressive than the current system

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

#272

Post by kaitai »

TheJoeMan wrote: post #32

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…

Had the same problem (with MIT among others). Somehow I heard farmland was treated a bit more generously (a recognition that you can't just sell the land to pay for college & remain a going concern). For a small biz with 4 employees, though, the math was impossible. Good thing Caltech was cheaper.

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.

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

#273

Post by thfuran »

potato3732842 wrote: post #173
dragonwriter wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is because small business owners are often, by any measure that doesn’t explicitly discount ownership of the business, actually rich.

How so? I know a guy who has literally millions of dollars tied up in shit that moves dirt and rocks and another mil tied up in some gravel pits. 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…

A few million bucks is all you need to immediately retire with the expectation of being able to draw a us median income from your investments in perpetuity.

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

#274

Post by asdff »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #261
orangecat wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SF is already one of the most dense cities in the USA. If the government forbids people from building housing, they've historically done a poor job at it. They are the second most dense city in the USA after NYC, and no would accuse NYC of not being unaffordable either. 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 Hou…

Sf is 7 square miles. You can cut a swath out of that size out of other cities and find that density. Possibly more density. Koreatown in LA has like 45k people a square mile, over twice as dense as sf. Several other areas there clock in at a higher density too. Really you need to consider it as just a region in the greater Bay Area metro region. And given its prominence in position as a transit hub with billions invested over decades in just that effort, it makes sense to add density there.

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

#275

Post by asdff »

knowitnone wrote: post #14

Yeah, education should be free. Record all lectures and put them out there. Charge a small fee to view them if you must but lecturers repeating themselves is not my idea of a great use of their time. Yes, I know lots of lectures are already published.

Its not the lecture thats valuable. Its everything else. Particularly research opportunities. That’s how you get really solid in your domain. The difference between a student who only took class in the subject and a student who applied those concepts in a lab environment to make contributions is staggering. Its like the difference between someone who watched a video on engine maintenance and someone who has not only watched that but has been rebuilding engines themselves for 2-3 years.

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

#276

Post by fragmede »

potato3732842 wrote: post #173
dragonwriter wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is because small business owners are often, by any measure that doesn’t explicitly discount ownership of the business, actually rich.

How so? I know a guy who has literally millions of dollars tied up in shit that moves dirt and rocks and another mil tied up in some gravel pits. 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…

He could probably sell that business to the right buyer for a few million dollars and walk away. Just go sit on a beach somewhere, drinking Mai Tai s for a year, and then get bored of not working and then go back to working.

That you don't envy his current lifestyle doesn't mean he's not rich.

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

#277

Post by seanmcdirmid »

asdff wrote: post #274
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF is already one of the most dense cities in the USA. If the government forbids people from building housing, they've historically done a poor job at it. They are the second most dense city in the USA after NYC, and no would accuse NYC of not being unaffordable either. 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 Hou…

Sf is 7 square miles. You can cut a swath out of that size out of other cities and find that density. Possibly more density. Koreatown in LA has like 45k people a square mile, over twice as dense as sf. Several other areas there clock in at a higher density too. Really you need to consider it as just a region in the greater Bay Area metro region. And given its prominence in position as a transit hub with billions inv…

Yes, SF is only 7 square miles, so already you don't have much to work with. The Bay Area is the 4th most populated metro in the USA. So still not as dense as NY or even LA, but still denser than the vast majority of places in the USA.

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.

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

#278

Post by bluGill »

tinyhouse wrote: post #266
TheJoeMan wrote: post #32

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…

This is not a step in the right direction. 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.

Parents should not be allowed to support their kids in college. Make the kid like away from home buy thier car if they want one. work jobs not for the family. don't let them take loans for more than their yearly income.

That is prove the kids are really responsible.

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

#280

Post by relaxing »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #245
d2049 wrote: post #33

When I was touring colleges as a high school senior I met someone who had gotten into MIT but whose family could only afford to send one kid to an elite college, him or his sister. He decided to go to a state school which was a lot less expensive but whose academics weren't close to the same level. This stuff matters to people.

> I met someone who had gotten into MIT but whose family could only afford to send one kid to an elite college, him or his sister. 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.

His sister got in and he didn’t.
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