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

461–470 of 487 posts

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

#461

Post by insane_dreamer »

lolinder wrote: post #451
insane_dreamer wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

because most other schools, except the elitist schools, have

> just because college became the default path for the middle class

actually, that's not the case; college enrollment, as a percentage of high school grads, is the lowest it's been since 2006 and has only risen 10% in the past 50 years -- and that includes enrollment at community colleges

meanwhile the US population has grown 60% in the same period

US college age (20-24) population has grown from 16.5M in 1970 to 23M in 2022

so that means that elite colleges are serving an ever-shrinking share of the college population; and if you factor in the explosion in foreign undergrads in the past 50 years, top colleges share of US college population is even smaller

> 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)

have you taken a look at the endowments of elite colleges recently?

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

#462

Post by maxerickson »

mgoetzke wrote: post #395

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

They don't give a lot of details, but they cover a substantial portion of the tuition for families making $200,000 or even $225,000:

https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...

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

#463

Post by nurumaik »

jedberg wrote: post #252
nurumaik wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make this .5% go directly to the university. Will incentivize universities to teach more useful skills

It would incentivize them to only offer majors that lead to high incomes. By pooling the money it removes that issue.

If everyone gets major that leads to high income, market will become oversaturated quickly

.5% of income over lifetime of alumni is very long-term investement

Universities are well aware of that and obviously won't self-sabotage in such dumb way

More likely outcome is that universities will ensure that most talented students will get high income majors

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

#464

Post by lolinder »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #461
lolinder wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. because most other schools, except the elitist schools, have > just because college became the default path for the middle class actually, that's not the case; college enrollment, as a percentage of high school grads, is the lowest it's been since 2006 a…

We're talking in circles, so let me state my position in one sentence: the existence of demand for a service does not create a moral obligation to meet that demand.

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

#465

Post by araes »

mbil wrote: post #247
araes wrote: post #12

Started looking and found out there's some much worse, and far more obvious cases that need to implement these reforms. [1] 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. BTW, amazing site to be horrified by gun violence (and vaguely fascinated). Look upon the awfulness of Philadelphia. [2] Sitti…

Just want to point out that Philadelphia’s homicide count is down ~40% from last year. And Penn’s “haven” looks similar to the other affluent commercial corridors throughout the city.

That's actually fair. Philly's 2022 numbers were 503 murders / 1793 woundings, and 2023 numbers were 422 murders / 1376 woundings. 84% murders / 76.5% woundings. Definitely trending in a better direction. If the 2024 numbers arrive and Philly's still looking better than maybe things are changing for the positive in that area.

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

#466

Post by araes »

WitCanStain wrote: post #392
blackhawkC17 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They spend $9 billion annually on exactly that. This "hoard" can, checks notes, fund barely two years of operations. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/231...

Interestingly, according to the report in your link, UPenn pays over 3 billion dollars in salaries, but it has around 1,400 faculty for ~10,000 students. This means that either the instructors are fabulously well paid, or that the vast majority of money is going somewhere else. And indeed according to [0] just 4.64% of salaries are paid to instructional staff, with 23.9% or 2078 of paid employees being management sta…

Thanks. Had not actually looked at the numbers of Philly that in depth. Unfortunately, has personally started to be such cynicism it's often expected there's usually a massively lopsided overhead of administrators with moderately paid academics and money that appears to vanish.

Harvard really did a number on my belief in American academia, and then finding out that students in Columbia were complaining they had to read made me not want to look at those types of statistics very often.

Anyways, appreciate the work of actually delving into the payscales, teacher / administrator ratios, and allocation of funding. Also, the https://datausa.io/ site's another interesting one to add to the list of public available dataset visualization, plotting, and summarization websites.

Actually, quick check from a different direction at least seems to support some of the Philly issues. Violent Crime rate per county on datausa.io: https://datausa.io/map?measure=E1cxD&groups%5B0%5D=24yFSi%7C...

Death by Homicide is also interesting lateral, although Mississippi apparently has a huge issue all over the state. Many 25+ / 100,000 areas: https://datausa.io/map?measure=ZfwdDB&groups%5B0%5D=24yFSi%7...

Unfortunately, website seems to trigger alot of Network Errors on the map portion of the site.

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

#467

Post by lippihom »

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.

Tons of middle class folks are too "rich" to qualify for aid, but not quite wealthy enough to avoid going into severe debt. There's a lose-lose sweet spot that's larger than you think.

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

#468

Post by shiroiushi »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #456
shiroiushi wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As an American expat, this is exactly the mentality of the large majority of Americans in my view. They're a bunch of spoiled brats who think they're entitled to a life of luxury just because of their nationality. They got this view because of the huge economic boom after WWII, when America was the only industrial power standing and profited massively from rebuilding. Now that other economies have risen and are seriously competing with them, they're mad that life isn't so easy now and will vote for anyone who promises to make their gasoline cheap again.

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

#469

Post by shiroiushi »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #459
shiroiushi wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Largely because of cost-of-living differences. America is an enormously expensive place to live, between housing costs, healthcare costs, the lack of a social safety net, the car-based society, and more.

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

#470

Post by ponector »

1dontknow_ wrote: post #420
ponector wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet whoever works in education is not appreciated all around the world. For some reason whoever teach children lives on small salary(often minimal wage) but with high requirements.
Post reply on HN