Rice University Says Middle-Class And Low-Income Students Won't Have To Pay
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I received full a full tuition scholarship when I matriculated in 2008; the number of students in a similar situation was in the dozens.
Potential attendees are accepted based on SAT scores; class rank; extracurricular activities; etc.; and if the applicants make it through all of those bandpass filters, they're awarded full-tuition scholarships.
> Our program requires no contribution from Harvard families with annual incomes below $65,000. About 20% of our families have no parent contribution.
Like most top universities Rice has a large endowment. It's upwards of $5 billion in their case. If we take a sub market interest rate of 5% that's $250 million a year. Their entire undergrad body is 4k. That's $62,500 per student per year on a conservative return rate. No top universities actually need tuition anymore, but even top universities are increasingly being run as businesses with growth in 'revenue' seen as a positive in and of itself, necessity aside.
And in this case, they'll likely see major returns on it anyhow. Come donation time, I expect those graduates who were able to find a better place in life thanks to a voluntarily free education are going to be quite quick to open their wallets especially knowing that those donations will in turn go to productively helping the next generation of graduates going through the same cycle.
> The original charter of Rice Institute dictated that the university admit and educate, tuition-free, "the white inhabitants of Houston, and the state of Texas". In 1963, the governing board of Rice University filed a lawsuit to allow the university to modify its charter to admit students of all races and to charge tuition.
They also have massive amounts of real-estate and stock grants.
1: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/09/harv...
2: http://www.ricethresher.org/article/2016/10/5-billion-rices-...
Above $130,000 is squarely in the top quantile of incomes, and folks in that bracket (between top 20% and top 1%) have increased their incomes dramatically over the last four decades: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2017/07... (see the second chart).
For example, in the US you have to pay your own health insurance, but in many other places it may be covered by taxes. Therefore your US on-paper salary it may be higher due to this fact because you would have to pay for health insurance.
That leaves about $11,500 for clothing, entertainment, emergency savings, vacation, education, etc.
Regardless, people and families do it all the time and do it on less.
You could argue that it is money that they could otherwise be paid as salary, but then they would either have to pay full cost for private insurance or be taxed more to pay for public health care.
What they are paying for that the average middle-class German may not be (at least not as much) is savings for educating their children and for their own retirement.
Scholarships do not exist for normal kids.
No cable? :P
Think about what it: you're asking about someone's love life. It is no business of yours. So if you're going to ask a question like that, please be respectful. For example, say "If you don't mind my asking, why did you have so many kids?"
Kids are super neat--it's just interesting seeing if that was from marrying into additional kids (have seen this with second and third marriage couples) or if they come from the marriage directly.
Honestly, this sounds harsh but in the US, if the scholarships don't exist (and are needed) then maybe those kids shouldn't go to (that? or any?) college. There is a perception that everyone needs to go to college that we clearly have to quash. There is nothing dishonorable or lowly about being a tradesma, the 'need to go to college' stigma needs to die.
> Another part of the program will help students whose family income surpasses the maximum: If their family's income is between $130,000 and $200,000, they can still get grants covering at least half of their tuition.
Presumably there're more nuanced factors to consider for families with incomes between $130k and $200k beyond what can be expressed by a simple equation.
If their family's income is between $130,000 and $200,000, they can still get grants covering at least half of their tuition.
No. From the article:
> Another part of the program will help students whose family income surpasses the maximum: If their family's income is between $130,000 and $200,000, they can still get grants covering at least half of their tuition.
This sort of horse trading happens everyday in our tax system.
FWIW, I took a game programming MOOC from Rice. (I knew nothing of game programming going in.) It turned out to be a great experience, I really enjoyed it.
Thanks, Rice!
Having access to meaningful, transferable and applicable education (one that can be equally applied without a huge saddle of student debt) is a life changer, less so for those who already enjoy privilege and access to opportunity.
I don't understand why it's not a continuous scale that just approaches zero at a certain point, rather than these hard cut-offs.
edit: just saw that someone else made a similar comment. Mine is referring to education in general and not the article specifically, and in fact I have personally run into this situation. It seems that educational institutions would be by definition smarter about how they handle this.
[your income]/[maxincome] * [MaxFinancialAid]
But then you would end up with situations where people can borrow $500 which is useless. So they just allow it up to 150k and then make it a hard cut off as they feel that anybody who makes that much should absolutely be able to pay, and the administration costs of loaning < 10k could be a waste of time lets say.
This article from the NYTimes really drove it home: Top Colleges are Cheaper Than You Think (Unless You're Rich).
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/05/opinion/colum...
The data is very interesting. They analysis breaks down family income into different socioeconomic categories, poor, lower-middle, middle, upper-middle, affluent, and very affluent.
Well, it turns out the analysis is largely correct - there is substantial reduction in costs for all but the last two categories, "affluent" and "very affluent."
But look at the graph - it's fascinating. There's a meaningful break for every income, but very little difference between what the "Affluent" (family income $186k) and "Very Affluent" ($246k a year).
If you look at the graph, there's a big drop in what you pay below affluent, but "affluent" and "very affluent" pay roughly the same amount.
Here's the thing - that's true at publics as well as privates, but top publics max out at about half the rate of a private (the only one considered here is university of Virginia, UC schools are left off, not sure why). In other words, even if you pay full freight, there's a limiting factor to total costs. The pattern of what various economic groups pay as a percentage of max is the same for UVA and more expensive privates like the ivies, it's just that the whole thing is compressed into a 0-30K/year range instead of a 0-75k/range.
I think that this upper limit appeals immensely to people in the "affluent" but not "very affluent" category. Because they'll be paying "full costs", but are still limited in resources compared to the "very affluent" group, the actual upper limit ends up mattering a great deal.
I grew up in that economic band (affluent but not very affluent), and want to be sure I'm clear on this, "Affluent" as defined here is most definitely not an oppressive place to be from. Actually, it's harder now, in my day (grew up in the 1970s), the equivalent of affluent had no trouble buying a pleasant 3-4 br house in nice if unfashionable part of San Francisco (now: no)
But it does mean 3 kids at an ivy may be cost prohibitive, even for an "Affluent" family. UC schools (or UVA or others), on the other hand, have an upper limit (we were all in state) that makes it more possible. In short, state schools work as equalizers between the affluent and very affluent.
Under the current system, if the most meritorious student's family makes over $130K, he/she is saddled with debt, regardless of how good he/she is.
True equal opportunity would grant aid on a merit system. Unless your argument is that familial wealth impacts merit, which I'd like to see evidence of, it's the fairer way to administer aid.
There's just assloads of studies showing high correlations between familial wealth and pretty much every measure of academic success we have ("merit", in your parlance).
I mean just searching "wealth impact test scores" on Google returns like 20 results that'll give you the evidence you're looking for.
Or are you saying your definition of "best" includes familial fiances of the applicant? Why doesn't https://www.headlightlabs.com/ include applicant's finances as a parameter?
Definitely feel free to point me to the studies showing familial wealth has no effect on whatever "merit" might mean to you, though. I've shown you how to find plenty to the contrary.
"[L]anguage variation may increase the cognitive load on students who speak AAE and thereby affect their understanding of and the speed with which they work through STEM texts. They examined the relationship between the linguistic complexity of math word problems and success in carrying out the computation for 75 African American second graders. They found a statistically significant effect for possessive –s (e.g., ‘my mama house’ vs. ‘my mama’s house’) and 3rd singular –s (‘He eat a lot’ vs. ‘He eats a lot’) on the students’ math performance: for students who were highly affected by linguistic differences, about 15% of them would have answered 94 more questions correctly (about 9% of the total) if these linguistic features had been removed. Terry et al. suggest that some AAE-speaking students face an added cognitive load on their working memory when they read and process math word problems, due to language variation – and time spent ‘translating’ while taking standardized tests is time lost."
It says nothing about the merits of knowing a second language.
You'll have a few outliers who kill it in secondary/middle/high school, but for the most part, people who are less well-to-do perform less effectively, and there's more and more research pointing to the likelihood that survival pressures negatively affect academic performance. Maybe not alone, but they're likely connected. (Edit: tylerho references this here—https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18018383)
Good starting point: https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/widening-academic-achievem...
Basically, if the goal is fairness, merit only fulfills this when other pressures are relieved. This includes racial and income inequality.
"Hey why is your school almost 100% white when they are only 40% of the city's population? Why are they no black people? Implement a merit based system, of the color-blind variety!"
result
"Hey, your school still has no black people and its 70% asian!" Asian population represents 10% of NYC.
Always an entertaining case study.
Nice to see some studies into possibly more inclusive and holistic solutions
I grew up dirt poor. By the time I was in high school I had figured out I needed to do honors classes etc, but kids in families with resources started doing those classes in 7th or 8th grade. A doctor or lawyer understands the value of education for their 12 year old far more than a janitor. Many schools weigh GPAs more heavily for those in honors classes, so even if you're on even footing intellectually, you can't catch up. In other words, we're talking about the merit of the parents' involvement, not the merit of the student.
Now if we can redefine merit to be a raw IQ test at age 16, I'm all for it.
> Under the current system, if the most meritorious student's family makes over $130K, he/she is saddled with debt
Family income probably also speaks to how much they could contribute to the education cost. While in high school they likely had nicer cars and clothes and phones than the kid whose family made $30k.
How do you define merit?
A family with a higher income are in a better position to leverage their means into a better education and conductive environment. From a systems point of view, you want to balance this out by boosting families or persons of lower means to equalize the opportunity to actually engage in the meritocracy. Subsidizing purely on test scores or similar tends to favor families that already have a high income.
>if the most meritorious student's family makes over $130K, he/she is saddled with debt, regardless of how good he/she is.
No. It means they won't qualify for this tuition break however they will have access to merit-based scholarships.
I live in the Rice U neighborhood. (Museum District). I'm very familiar with Rice. Believe me, if your hypothetical student really were the "most meritorious" student at Rice University, she would already have a full ride scholarship.
And if your "most meritorious" student at Rice University does NOT have a full ride scholarship, then she is not the "most meritorious" student at Rice.
The types of financial programs in question are for students who are qualified enough to get into Rice, but whose families are not well resourced enough to pay for Rice. These sorts of programs are laudable, and they are exactly what we need to be doing. There are "country bumpkins" from Angleton and Nacogdoches who are as ready to enter Rice as the sheltered kids behind the gates down Sunset in Houston. It's a GOOD thing that Rice is affording those less privileged children that opportunity.
What is your recommendation to companies that go to Rice for hiring? Hire the best - whatever their objective definition of best is (which I presume doesn't have a privilege filter)?
If it's for CS, don't bother. The kids're mainly set on FANG and while they're somewhat skilled the ones that show up at fairs are pretty milquetoast.
If you want the smart ones who aren't risk-averse, look at who's drinking at Valhalla. Also, look for graduates of Wong's 410/415 sequence if it's still offered.
True.
If it's for CS... get an Uber or Lyft from Rice University to Hobby Airport and get on a plane to San Fran so you can go interview the Stanford grads instead. Those guys are second to none.
It's more that, as a hiring fair thing, you're gonna be running up against the folks that are looking for enterprisey (say, Schlumberger) or FANG jobs. The culture there isn't one that is super startup-friendly.
???
Who cares?
The object here is to get talented people an education. What they do with that education is their decision. The owners of your hypothetical company can do whatever they please with the educations they have obtained over the course of their lifetimes. And the students, who now have an opportunity at a cost free education, can similarly do whatever they please with the educations they obtained.
It's called freedom. Take all the educations we've been providing and go out and enjoy all the freedoms you have.
Maybe I'm not understanding your view correctly? What, exactly, is the problem with allowing poor or middle class students into Rice at a reduced rate? (Or even free in most cases)?