What's the logic for choosing 200k
More than 100k but less than 300k
Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT
331–340 of 487 posts
Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT
#332This is only tuition though. Using their estimates you would still be expected to spend $30k/yr
https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...
Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT
#333that's nice, but it's become nearly as difficult to get into MIT as winning the lottery
The MIT undergraduate student body is about the same as it was in 1960, but the number of applications rose from around 4000 in 1960 to 11000 in 2000, to 20000 in 2024.
This isn't just an MIT problem. The undergrad populations of the top universities (Ivy league and similar) have hardly grown over the decades despite a large increase in student population overall in the US, not to mention the very large increase in foreign students over the past 25 years. This is by design to create increasingly exclusive brands.
Deep dive into this: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-university-of-impossibl...
Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT
#334I saw a similar headline just today (albeit on a much smaller scale) for Carnegie Mellon University: https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/carnegie-mellon-univ... I feel like the timing is too close to be a coincidence—does anyone know if there's a link?
It's not really something new; most top universities like CMU already have a similar policy. MIT has had it as well, they just raised the threshold for qualification.
Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the US government will loan people very large sums to attend, which allows the universities to raise prices at will. The buyers are price-inelastic, which means that they want to go regardless of price, because they are surrounded by people that tell them that going to college is the right thing to do - and the more prestigious the better. College in the US would be a lot cheaper if the government didn't infl…
European colleges are incredibly thrifty, though. German universities for example can lack dorms, student unions, and professors lack TAs to grade homework (so homework isn't graded) and your entire grade depends on one final. We could do this in the USA also, or perhaps even bother with online universities, except those are generally considered not very useful as degrees.
> your entire grade depends on one final
This isn't due to staff shortages, it's more of a difference in tradition/philosophy of teaching
Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT
#336While I think this is well meaning, I’d be much more impressed by institutions actually cutting costs, The ratio of administrators to students is insane as is the faculty ratio at most universities, not to mention the outlays for extravagant projects like sports centers and student centers.
Thank you for this comment; articles on the rising costs of college almost always uncritically treat it like a law of nature, and rarely have I seen articles that attempt to study in-depth the extent to which college administrations have become bloated, self-perpetuating jobs programs. All while at the same time departments are cut, professors are expected to do more with less, and more and more classes are pushed on to adjunct faculty who get paid a pittance. Until this is addressed, any efforts to improve the ways in which students finance their education is just a band-aid.
Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT
#337When 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.
I met him when I was at MIT for Campus Preview Weekend when accepted students visit the school. Is it necessary to assume things in such a cynical fashion?
Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 /…
> Tokyo, where a country-wide baby bust coupled with anemic local wages and a huge 1980s housing boom hang over, keeps things reasonably priced.
Nope. Tokyo's population is still growing, and 1980s housing in Tokyo is deeply undesirable. The reason Tokyo has sane housing prices is that it continuously builds large amounts of housing, because they haven't made it de facto illegal the way too many places have. Sometimes that's all it takes.
Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT
#339When I was touring colleges as a high school senior I met someone who had gotten into MIT but whose family could only afford to send one kid to an elite college, him or his sister. He decided to go to a state school which was a lot less expensive but whose academics weren't close to the same level. This stuff matters to people.
When was this? MIT's financial aid was already very generous when I was applying (in 2008); IIRC the no-tuition threshold was 100 k$ back then
This was more than several years prior to that, I just tried to look up the financial aid of previous years and for some reason couldn't find it. If someone else finds it, I'd be curious to take a look.
Re: Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT
#340that's nice, but it's become nearly as difficult to get into MIT as winning the lottery The MIT undergraduate student body is about the same as it was in 1960, but the number of applications rose from around 4000 in 1960 to 11000 in 2000, to 20000 in 2024. This isn't just an MIT problem. The undergrad populations of the top universities (Ivy league and similar) have hardly grown over the decades despite a large incre…
> The undergrad populations of the top universities (Ivy league and similar) have hardly grown over the decades despite a large increase in student population overall in the US
Why should we expect individual universities to scale up their class sizes proportional to the student population in the US? Some universities may choose to, and new universities could spin up to serve the increased student body, but I don't see a compelling reason to argue that any given university should scale up just because college has (somewhat arbitrarily) become the default path for the entire middle class.
There's nothing wrong with MIT wanting to stay small, and it's not necessarily a conspiracy to build exclusive brands. They could also just recognize that their system won't scale up to an order of magnitude more students.