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Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

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Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#81

Post by okaram »

paulus_magnus2 wrote: post #54

Time for market disruption? How about free online MOOC that ends with a widely recognized (accredited) diploma. Lectures are free, same for notes. Exams are paid for. You learn on your own or in groups. With additional paid tutoring on request. Technology allows everyone to get MIT grade education for free.

I always advocated for this when I was in academia ... Make proctored 'exams' (including oral presentations, projects, or whatever faculty thinks demonstrates knowledge), so that uni recoups, or even makes money (probably about $250 now, which is what most industry certification exams cost)

Probably wouldn't work, since prices would still be higher than community colleges, but ...

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#82

Post by dv_dt »

ben_jones wrote: post #41
onwardly wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they still want people that can afford to pay $50k/year to pay it. Lowering tuition lowers it for everyone. If your parents make $300k+/year, then you'll still be paying full tuition. But as their income is lower, currently you'll get some need-based financial aid. The problem is that this aid is a combination of "scholarship" and "loans". The goal here is to remove the loan component. The problem still is th…

While the process sounds good in theory there is an ever increasing gap that people fall into between parents making too much money and parents not making enough. I'm bias because I fell right into the middle of the gap - my parents inherited an illiquid share of real estate that on paper is worth about a million dollars, in reality after taxes it yields maybe 40k/yr that my parents live off of (60+, no college). Bec…

Yup, and it leads to this perverse economic effect of middle class families that scrape together enough wealth to make a very positive situation, then get it all pulled back pretty hard because of outrageous tuition fees. Not that low-income students have it easy either. Sometimes it just feels like the rules of our society are lined up to keep the middle and lower classes in their place instead of supporting general prosperity.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#83

Post by chimeracoder »

junkscience2017 wrote: post #22
mac01021 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the purpose of the 120M is to create an endowment from which ~5% can be taken to provide financial aid every year. If their investments perform as hoped, it should last quite some time.

six million dollars a year, of which some is gobbled up by fees. Brown has 6500 undergrads...at their current full tuition just the incoming class exceeds that

> Brown has 6500 undergrads...at their current full tuition just the incoming class exceeds that

Well, then they should be able to afford this easily with the size of the fund, because they're not going to be covering 100% of the tuition for 100% of the students. They're just (aiming to) eliminate the portion that would be covered by loans.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#84

Post by tryingagainbro »

dm3730 wrote: post #35
reverend_gonzo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still have to pay market rate for professors, executives, maintenance, etc, if you want to stay relevant. You can't just decide to reduce your income and expect nothing else to change. They're changing where their getting the income from, probably with the idea that former students of Brown who are now doing very well, will be willing to pay it forward to a new student who is in a similar position as they used to…

> You still have to pay market rate for professors, executives, maintenance, etc, if you want to stay relevant. I'll venture that it's the executives who are pulling in the big bucks. Looking at the glassdoor numbers, profs are peaking at under $200k, the vast majority well under $100k. Contrast that with Comms directors making $250k.

>>Profs are peaking at under $200k, the vast majority well under $100k. Contrast that with Comms directors making $250k.

Comms directors provide more immediate returns, namely fundraising and spinning. However, top professors can write their ticket just to say they're there and earn a fortune on the side.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#85

Post by fra »

paulus_magnus2 wrote: post #54

Time for market disruption? How about free online MOOC that ends with a widely recognized (accredited) diploma. Lectures are free, same for notes. Exams are paid for. You learn on your own or in groups. With additional paid tutoring on request. Technology allows everyone to get MIT grade education for free.

You assume, wrongly in my opinion, that the main value of a prestigious university is the classes that they provide. From my experience (n=1) there are great instructors to be found at many (most?) universities. Indeed you will likely get better bang for your buck at your state’s public universities. The value of an Ivy League education is in the ressources available to you (e.g. funding for entrepreneurship or to go work in a foreign country during the summer), and access to the network.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#86

Post by Retric »

bmcusick wrote: post #13
Retric wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your pulling in ~10,000$ per person in tuition, and the average person takes 5 classes with a class size of 30 that's. 60,000$ per professor per year if they teach 4 classes, 75,000$ per professor if they teach 5 and 90k & 6 classes before expenses per class. So, the only way for that to work out is some other subsidies. However, lectures allow you to use TA's to more cheaply expand class sizes and might make it p…

Why even use TAs for lectures? There's YouTube. There's automated software for quizzes and testing. Textbooks should be open source documentation, printed-on-demand. I'm not saying remove the human element entirely, but there's a lot of low hanging fruit in education to consider where technological automation can help improve the productivity of educators. Check out how Georgia Institute of Technology is offering a r…

Their is some evidence this simply does not work as well. MOOC's demonstrate you can perhaps get ~80% of the benefit of an introductory lecture online, but they don't carry as well into more interactive styles.

Really face time with a professor is not directly the huge cost you might think. Class participation and helping students during office hours don't scale very well. On top of that it's much simpler to cheat in an online only environment.

Honestly, I think High school is probably a better place for this kind of automation. Setting up a rotation where you have say both a small and double sized classroom seems very possible.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#87

Post by ams6110 »

bmcusick wrote: post #2

Not that loan-free educations are bad, but why is Brown raising $120M from alumni and the like, rather than lowering their tuition by $120M? The student loan crisis is only a crisis because Universities (lead by the Ivy League and similarly elite private colleges) are charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room, and board. This isn't charity or benevolent. This is just bilking a different class of people. Efforts to…

I'm not sure the Ivy schools "lead" in price gouging. They've always been very expensive. I wonder what a comparison of tuition from 20 years ago would look like, compared to a typical public university? The tuition at public universities I know of has gone from something an in-state kid could probably manange by "working his way through school" to something you better hope your parents have been saving for since you were born. And during the same time there's been an explosion of administrative staff, new buildings, extravagant landscaping and green space, brick sidewalks, etc.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#89

Post by ams6110 »

ktta wrote: post #76
CalChris wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you explain this to the financial aid office? Generally, elite schools are in the business of finding elite students first and then dealing with FA second. But you have to make your situation clear to them. They offered you admission or you wouldn't be dealing with FA. So they wanted you. But FA is a negotiation even especially if you're in the gap and then you have to negotiate hard because otherwise you pay sti…

Often financial aid is given out to very needy students (don't even have anything as collateral for loan), and there's sometimes a quota.

There's no collateral on a student loan.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#90

Post by madengr »

ben_jones wrote: post #41
onwardly wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they still want people that can afford to pay $50k/year to pay it. Lowering tuition lowers it for everyone. If your parents make $300k+/year, then you'll still be paying full tuition. But as their income is lower, currently you'll get some need-based financial aid. The problem is that this aid is a combination of "scholarship" and "loans". The goal here is to remove the loan component. The problem still is th…

While the process sounds good in theory there is an ever increasing gap that people fall into between parents making too much money and parents not making enough. I'm bias because I fell right into the middle of the gap - my parents inherited an illiquid share of real estate that on paper is worth about a million dollars, in reality after taxes it yields maybe 40k/yr that my parents live off of (60+, no college). Bec…

Yep. My wife would like to be stay-at-home-mom, but she works so we can save $2k/month for two kids college expenses, currently in elementary school. Goal is to have $160k over next 10 years. So by saving, I'm screwing myself. It's equivalent to another mortgage.
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