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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's really true anymore. Pretty much all the elite schools charge tuition on a sliding scale based on family income. No one that gets admitted to Yale "can't" afford it. With can't in quotations because the systems not perfect, but for the most part money is not going to stop you.

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How this correlate with multiple anecdotal claims in this thread from users saying that they were accepted into positions that didn't offer them scholarships at all, nor lowered their tuition?

When you get off the waitlist it's common to receive substantially less financial aid. There might be some other causes too.

It's a relatively recent trend so the anecdotes could be from before the elite universities started doing it.

Those anecdotes must be from over a decade ago.

They often don’t offer either.

They only offer financial aid. It is a distinct application process (at least was was I applied). But that financial aid is extremely generous. I.e. you can have family income of over 100K and still qualify.

A high school friend who went to an Ivy missed this part. She thought that not offering merit scholarships meant you couldn’t get any money to reduce the cost.

That's good to hear, I had heard that this is not true for all Ivy, and especially not for other high-tier ones without significantly big endowments or merit scholarship funds though. Just wanted to check up on what the opinion here was.

Need-blind admissions only exists for a very small fraction of schools -- those that are in maybe the top 20? (I don't know the exact number). Also, it often leaves out middle class students, whose parents make too much to get substantial amount of aid, but don't make enough to pay the tuition out right without being buried in loans.

Because of this, high achieving, middle class students often go to state schools, which often give merit scholarships (top-20 schools don't), and have much lower tuition.

Every Gen X person I know who took out loans for professional school at top tier universities is richer than even people who were in technology in the early 2000s. They’re the ones who bought houses in all the gentrifying neighborhoods, they’re the ones with two or more kids, and they bought index funds with all that money, so the effects of going to a top tier university massively compounded.

Some people have already pointed out that top tier universities have been discounted for the last decade. But even in 2000, Harvard college cost less than half of what it does now. Taking out loans to pay for Havard in 2000 would be the best investment you could ever make in your life, just considering that same inflation that partly raised Harvard’s tuition price also reduced the real cost of your debt.

I believe the underlying problem is not financial literacy though.

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