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Comment by Hydraulix989 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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).

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.

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