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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

My daughter is at Yale. They basically say: "How much do you make? Give us 20%". While painful, I do think it is the most fair approach.

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Only for this year? Or for your net assets? Because I'm totally willing to go on a four year sabbatical to get free tuition for my kid :)

Believe you me - I am VERY tempted. I suggested that to my wife more than once.

So thanks for sending me down this rabbit hole :)

Assuming Yale uses the IM calculation for financial aid, the problem isn't current income: it is savings and home equity. The financial aid formula actively penalizes savings in any form, as well as home ownership. If you have a meaningful nest egg in, say, the 1M+ range, you are guaranteed to have to pay full sticker price.

Therefore, in addition to being unemployed when my kids make it to college in 2035-36, I'll either have to blow our retirement funds before we turn 50, or persuade my kids that the Ivies just aren't worth it. Given my slacker tendencies, they'll pick up on the latter course of action via osmosis; never before have I rooted so much for nurture over nature!

Probably cheaper to marry then off. Students with spouses don't have their parent's income considered.

Of course my wife won't let me try this at home.

I'm from Bangladesh -- arranged marriages are still an option!

(not really)

A friend and I considered getting married for a similar reason. We actually both were receiving Pell Grants, but married students are allowed to live off campus and drop the meal plan, which would have saved us another ~$7,000 each (mostly in loans).

As far as bad plans go, it wasn't exceptionally terrible, because we actually had an exit plan. Wisconsin allows you to annul a marriage if you haven't consummated it after a year. (I might not be 100% correct on that point, but the law was something like that.)

Pretty glad I didn't go through with that plan.

I've always wondered why they don't use this to price discriminate even more. They always say the "actual value" of the education is way more than $55k per year or whatever, because the endowment contributes significantly to the operating budget as well.

So why not make the list price $100k? If your example is correct, this would only affect those who make between $250k and $500k (where 20% of their income is between $50k and $100k).

The additional income isn't worth the Sanders activists screaming about college tuition costing X years of minimum wage.

The need to make the price low enough that graduates who do well feel an inclination to make $10m contributions back.

The list price is darn close to $100K.

I don't think your analysis is quite correct. Assuming is $100K and they ask for 20%. If I make more than $500K, then I pay $100K. If I make $50K then I pay $10K.

But please note that I'm GREATLY simplifying things here. It's not simple "Give us 20%". If it was, it would be like PA income tax - one page - give us 4%. It's more like NY income tax - dozens of pages with lots of special cases and loopholes.

For the same reason I like PA taxes, I like Yale financial aid. It's closer to the PA model than to the NY model. I don't approve of thresholds like "Income less than $100K - you pay nothing". I could even argue that an Ivy is such a privilege that the "give us 20%" should have no upper bounds ;)

o.o why is it the parent's responsibilities to pay for the child's tertiary education?

This is America

Whose else should it be? Going to an ultra-elite country club university whose operating expenses are on the order of 50-100k per student per year is a luxury, not a necessity or some sort of human right.

Very few other countries in the world have schools this prestigious, by the way, so it's not necessarily valid to compare them.

Edit: by the way, I highly doubt that there is any country in the world with universities that operate completely independently, with virtually no State oversight over budget, admissions decisions, curriculum, or degrees granted, and which can charge students however much they want, such that the State also pays the education bill for students.

Usually the student takes out a loan for themselves.

Ah okay, I assumed you were implying it should be the responsibility of the State.

IMO the state should pay (up to) a fixed amount per student (say, $5k a year). Anything above that needs to come out of the student's own money/loans/strings to pull.

My concern is with bringing in parental income to the situation.

You don't pay - but you do contribute.

Having multiple children sure is expensive.

Typically in a need-blind financial aid model, the family's expected contribution is all-in. Your kid's twin sibling would hence be 'free'. At least in theory.

It should be exponentially more expensive per child. Not specifically in relation to college, but in relation to taxation in general.

We want to encourage the population to grow in sustainable ways, not only in some families that make having lots of kids a priority.

You posture that an effective policy to put downward pressure on fertility is to deny access to education. A policy whose effects specifically target individuals who didn't make the decisions you want to disincentivize. I think you might want to re-think your policy positions :) In general, I don't think inhibiting access to quality education is ever an appropriate response to any situation.

I meant precisely what I stated. A child doesn't have a choice about where it is brought in to being. Unstated: all children should have a good education/etc.

Now, the /parents/. They do have a choice. The general system outlined in Larry Nivin's science fiction universe where exponentially higher costs were associated with children past the first free one (there were also lotteries to fairly distribute most of the rest of the population sustenance quota, as well as the option of emigrating off of earth to unrestricted colonies).

Mostly, however, is the issue that today there are many who do not /have/ children because the imbalances in today's society make them feel unworthy or simply unable to do so.

You mean sending multiple children to Yale is expensive.

The entitlement in this thread to ultra-elite luxury goods is insane.

It actually cost significantly less (almost half) for me to attend an Ivy League than both nearby state universities, given the Ivys' excellent financial aid.

Penn State wouldn't even give me a merit scholarship, regardless of my (rather stellar) high school academic credentials, community service and social work, and extracurriculars (worthy of Ivy League admissions), so I was looking at the full 25k/year sticker price. IIRC, their honors college had even more tuition fees than the regular college.

UPitt also gave me a meager financial aid package and initially refused to honor their own UPitt Science Fair merit scholarship that they awarded me while I was still in high school for winning first place (they insisted it was already included in the "federal grant money"-only financial aid package that they gave me, though it seemed suspect, it felt like they "forgot" about it entirely until I called the right people; THEN I got my scholarship included as additional financial aid).

Especially in the latter case, I'm not sure where the entitlement was; I won a merit scholarship awarded by the state school, and then the state school "forgot" about it and then tried to substitute it with federal grant money.

I went to the Ivy.

EDIT: Staying on topic, on the note of the expense of having multiple children: My sister went to the state school, and it effectively tripled the amount of money my parents and I were paying per year to go to school (and it put all four of us in debt; I helped my sister out because I graduated before she did and managed to land a great software engineering job right out of school with a starting salary significantly higher than my parents' income -- I'm still paying off student loans four years later now).

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