Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 487 posts

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

#451

Post by lolinder »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #447
lolinder wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

> it's not necessarily a conspiracy to build exclusive brands except that it is about branding and ranking; these top unis have the money and the capability to double their undergrad student size; they have no problem attracting top talent as far as professors are concerned I didn't just make this up[0] [0] https://www.nber.org/papers/w29309

> these top unis have the money and the capability to double their undergrad student size; they have no problem attracting top talent as far as professors are concerned

Professors are not the only bottleneck that the administration of MIT and company would be worried about. With more undergrads and professors comes more administration overhead, a need for more facilities (including land for those facilities that may not be contiguous with the rest of campus, which creates additional overhead of its own), and housing for the students (with the impact on the surrounding neighborhoods that that entails).

Additionally, allowing your school to grow from 8000 to 30000 undergrads dramatically changes the character of the school in ways that can't just be brushed off as "elitist".

And again: regardless of the reasons they don't want to change, I don't see any reason why we should expect any given school to so dramatically transform itself just because college became the default path for the middle class.

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

#452

Post by nuancebydefault »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #301
nuancebydefault wrote: post #100

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.

> We can have kids without fear of not being able to pay kindergarten. FYI: Public kindergarten is 100% paid for by gov't across the US. I don't think any public schools in the US have tuition. (That said, there is no magical money. It is paid for by local taxes.) Where did you hear about this myth? Also: In Belgium, can you really go to the dentist 20 times? Is there any good reason to allow this in a public healthc…

20 times is a bit exaggerated.

I estimate mostly [3]. That's the whole discussion here.

If you wear braces, you have to visit very frequently. Half the kids in secondary school get them at some point. If you have cavities, it's usually several visits.

Granted, it does not come for free but it will set you back hundreds rather than thousands a year.

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

#453

Post by nuancebydefault »

jltsiren wrote: post #349
throwaway2037 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can have kids without fear of not being able to pay kindergarten. FYI: Public kindergarten is 100% paid for by gov't across the US. I don't think any public schools in the US have tuition. (That said, there is no magical money. It is paid for by local taxes.) Where did you hear about this myth? Also: In Belgium, can you really go to the dentist 20 times? Is there any good reason to allow this in a public healthc…

Kindergarten means different things in different countries, and that's probably the source of confusion. In Europe, it usually means a program that gradually transitions from daycare to a proper pre-school as the kids get older. Starting ages vary, but it seems to be 2.5 years in Belgium.

Probably i used the wrong terminology. In fact i meant taking care if kids pre and post school hours in a publicly available care.

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

#454

Post by ndriscoll »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #444
ndriscoll wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they offered a million dollar education, I'd say the IRS should heavily scrutinize their budget, and if they did manage to stay within the letter of the law, it's likely that the law should be fixed because holistically, it's unlikely that they're truly spending over 20x what comparable universities do on educating students.

What laws are you worried about specifically? You could run a non-profit giving million dollar spa days.

You can't run a 501(c)(3) giving million dollar spa days though. If you're actually running e.g. a 501(c)(7) social club, then your investment income is taxable, and there are limits on unrelated business activities. If you're an educational nonprofit and your purported spending on education is wildly out of line with what it costs elsewhere, that should raise eyebrows as to whether that money is being spent on education.

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

#455

Post by baq »

linksnapzz wrote: post #448
baq wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dunno where you got this "ideal". I wonder if people like you just lack the imagination or system thinking or equate poor with useless or are just afraid of thinking people? From the perspective of the state and the society it’s beneficial to have an educated population, unless you think you won’t have enough stupid people to man the factories?

The track record over the past thirty years of sending more and more people to nominal "college" as "a way to have more thinking people" hasn't exactly done wonders, unless you're in the student loan servicing business.

if you have a "college" where "students" go to "learn" you get "thinking people".

what I'm saying is only relevant when you drop the /s quotes.

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

#456

Post by nuancebydefault »

shiroiushi wrote: post #210
nuancebydefault wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few weeks ago apparently, the 'promise less taxes->everybody happy' magic spell has once again worked.

Well hopefully Trump and his DoGE head Musk will eliminate the Department of Education soon, so that most public universities will have to shut their doors and Americans can stop wasting money on college education. Then all the college students can go to work at meatpacking plants and farms to replace all the illegal immigrants that are about to be deported. This will definitely help America re-assert itself as a wor…

To me it is totally incomprehensible what happened.

The only pro Trump reasoning I read was along the line of 'I don't care about all this guns/abortion/woke/climate stuff, I just want my taxes to be lower.' To me that sounds like a little child crying: I just want to go to bed late and eat candy all day. No one is going to take away those candy rights written in the xxth amendment.

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

#457

Post by s1artibartfast »

ndriscoll wrote: post #454
s1artibartfast wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What laws are you worried about specifically? You could run a non-profit giving million dollar spa days.

You can't run a 501(c)(3) giving million dollar spa days though. If you're actually running e.g. a 501(c)(7) social club, then your investment income is taxable, and there are limits on unrelated business activities. If you're an educational nonprofit and your purported spending on education is wildly out of line with what it costs elsewhere, that should raise eyebrows as to whether that money is being spent on educa…

I dont think it is as clear as that. My understanding is much of the distinction between those two comes down to who the beneficiary is and if it is a self serving private membership, or serving the public.

Either way, I dont see the educational requirements for costs in line with other institutions, especially when the institutions can easily showing they are spending more on the students than they are charging. Discounting a $100k educational experience to 85k is still a benefit to the public. Someone offering a different educational experience for $20k doesn't negate that.

If we want more cheaper universities and education as a society, we should think about creating them, not trying to force expensive universities to be cheaper.

The challenge is that people don't actually want cheap accessible education, they want luxury too.

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

#458

Post by jjav »

sgerenser wrote: post #439
jjav wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To throw in a data point on this for reference, as an American I pay around ~$220 a month (~$2,640 per year) on health insurance Having just filled my annual benefits selections tonight, here's my data point: health insurance is $3000/month on the company plan (36K/year). Yes, the company "pays" for a percentage of that. But of course the entire $3K/month is part of my total compensation cost to the company. If hea…

Insurance companies don’t actually make very much profit. I don’t recall the exact number, but something like 80-90% of premiums taken in are paid out in claims. Insurance companies are an easy target though, since no one wants to go after the doctors and hospitals for charging too much.

> Insurance companies don’t actually make very much profit.

Insurance companies usually (maybe it's always, not certain) are regulated to a percentage cap spent on categories. What is the result? They are incentivized to push prices ever higher as much and as fast as possible because a % of higher price is more profit for them.

> Insurance companies are an easy target though, since no one wants to go after the doctors and hospitals for charging too much.

Doctors and hospitals actually provide a valuable service, they provide health care. They deserve to be paid.

Insurance companies provide no value whatsoever, they are just a middleman siphoning off profits off the work of doctors (and nurses and everyone else doing the actual work).

Also, doctors don't actually charge that much. When I get billed $980 for a 15 minute doctor visit (as I just was last month), it is most certainly not because the doctor is earning ~$4000/hr. That doctor isn't paid more than your average senior software engineer (in Silicon Valley anyway), all the rest of the money is lost to middlemen who didn't contribute anything.

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

#459

Post by s1artibartfast »

shiroiushi wrote: post #313
s1artibartfast wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not sure what you mean by maybe not. If oxford is cutting corners, it still has the top rank in Europe, so I suppose they are the correct corners to cut. Perhaps high professor and admin salaries in the US are a problem with US education.

>Perhaps high professor and admin salaries in the US are a problem with US education. This is exactly my point. And not just professor and admin salaries, the salaries and costs for everything . It's not about "cutting corners", it's that if you compare the cost of something in the US to something in another country, the US usually is much more expensive; this doesn't mean the other country is cutting corners, it mea…

I feel like that is circular logic. We started with the idea that the US is more expensive. That isn't an explanation for why it is more expensive. Why do we have so many more admins, and why do we pay them so well compared to median income, while Europe does not?

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

#460

Post by barfingclouds »

projectileboy wrote: post #336
balderdash wrote: post #259

While 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…

Very much this
Post reply on HN