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Comment by dragoon | Hacker News Reader

In fact, they offer incredibly good financial aid packages to people not even remotely poor (families earning over 100k still get discounts). Thus, very few end up paying the sticker price.

I wouldn't say it's "incredibly good financial aid", especially in light of the nightmarishly high tuitions universities now charge and the fact that an inordinately high percentage of people have to take on nondischargeable debt. It's price discrimination. I'm not saying this is a bad thing; it's arguably for the better that colleges do this, because if they didn't, poor students would have no hope of attending, but price discrimination is still what's happening.

Also, only a token number of low-income students are admitted to the top schools, due to "extracurricular" admissions criteria that are socioeconomic by design. This is why these universities can fearlessly offer need-blind admissions; poor kids rarely pass the extracurricular hurdles.

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What I'm getting out of this is that you prefer the term "price discrimination" to "financial aid." The specific choice of words doesn't really matter to me if they're describing the same phenomenon.

> Also, only a token number of low-income students are admitted to the top schools, due to "extracurricular" admissions criteria that are socioeconomic by design. This is why these universities can fearlessly offer need-blind admissions; poor kids rarely pass the extracurricular hurdles.

Since we're talking about top schools, let's focus on Yale. Enough people with some degree of need are passing the "extracurricular hurdles" that 55% of Yalies receive financial aid. Yale spends nearly $100 million annually on financial aid. And this is up from roughly $32 million in 2001. This is not just a "token" expenditure, nor is it a token growth in spending.

Enough people with some degree of need are passing the "extracurricular hurdles" that 55% of Yalies receive financial aid.

The vast, vast, vast majority of people in that 55% are not even remotely poor. Most are of upper-middle income and of even higher socioeconomic status (e.g. progeny of diplomats, famous art gallery owners, and esteemed professors who make a merely upper-middle income but are higher in social status).

Yale spends nearly $100 million annually on financial aid. And this is up from roughly $32 million in 2001. This is not just a "token" expenditure, nor is it a token growth in spending.

It "spends" that money by giving aid packages that can only be redeemed by purchasing their extremely expensive product. Don't get me wrong; I think it's better for universities to price discriminate in this case than for them not to do so. However, it's not accurate to claim that they're bending over backward to provide equal access to the poor, as they're demonstrably not doing this.

Looking at this specific example, Yale is free if you earn less than $60,000, and admissions is need blind. What more do you exactly want them to do?

The real systemic problem is in our primary and secondary education systems. Equality of opportunity does not exist at those levels, and this hurts people thereafter. I see no reason why elite universities should be the vehicle by which we purport to "correct" this glaring defect in our educational system. The problem is much too large for that.

I can tell you from experience: people making upper-middle income don't get much aid from the ivies. If you're poor, it's free, and if you're rich, who cares, but if your family's income is in the low six figures, you're looking at big loans.

I know that. I was saying that in reference to his claim that 55% of Yale students receive financial aid, which is a bit of a red herring, because the vast majority of Americans qualify for some (but often not much) aid.

Why does the fact that most Americans qualify for some aid make the Yale's 55%-on-financial-aid stat a red herring?

(I suspect that, in what I write below below, I must not be responding to your actual point, but can you clarify what your point is?)

It's not like Yale is giving lip service to aid - it's giving $92,000,000 annually. This means that, on average, each Yale student gets $17,700 per year.

But since we know that 55% receive financial aid, it means that among those who do receive aid, the average package is $31,000 per year.

55% of Yale students get almost their entire tuition paid for by the university. This is not counting outside scholarships, etc. This isn't just "some" aid - this is a huge amount of aid on an annual per-individual basis.

Good parsing of the numbers here.

The stat that is traditionally used to show socioeconomic diversity (or lack thereof) is the % of students receiving Pell Grants, and in this department Yale remains weak, but it's not for lack of effort...

While median / average family income at Yale remains fairly high, financial aid is huge. I'm someone who gets crushed in the fuzzy middle range, but I still appreciate its generous policies. Wish that they were more generous, or that the cost of living in the greater Boston area was lower so that my family income was lower and aid was correspondingly higher. That's one big bummer - something reasonable in one part of the country might make you rich in Oklahoma, but that can't be, or isn't, taken into account.

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