Dartmouth Eliminates Student Loans for Undergraduates
calltolead.dartmouth.edu
calltolead.dartmouth.edu
My child applied to a school that had a similar policy that students would only graduate with $15k in student loans.
Tuition was $40k back when kid applied. We filled out financial aid package with my income of like $150k and no assets outside of retirement savings.
We got a letter with “congrats total amount each year is $47k including room and board, work study is $1500, grant is $1500, expected parental contribution is $44k/year. You don’t need student loans.”
It was really frustrating. So the wording on what financial contributions should be, like in this article, has lots of wiggle room. It seems Dartmouth is covering tuition for families making $65k or less. But a single year’s tuition is $60k, so good luck to families making $70k.
I think these legacy universities don’t want to lower tuition because they still admit lots of rich people who just pay. But the middle class is really squeezed out. Of course the lower class is squeezed as well since it’s hard to get accepted if parents can’t afford tutors, coaches, etc.
Presumably, the willingness of the family to make sacrifices for their child is a positive indicator for how driven the child will be.
They use weasel words
"Dartmouth is now removing the loan requirement for undergraduates from families with annual income of more than $125,000 who receive need-based financial aid."
Most students coming from families earning 125k+ won't actually qualify for any aid.
The entire financial aid system is broken. Have a domestic violence situation at home, so your parents don't want to fill your FASA out, no aid for you !
Still live with your supportive parents at 24, you automatically get the max amount.
If I ran the world, I would give everyone aid for up to 6 years, and get rid of affirmative action completely.
I'd argue the vast vast majority of students are better served going to a community college first. Figure out if college is even something you want to do , and if it is, get yourself a part-time job or better yet a full-time one so you understand how to manage money.
Good?
Great way to make sure that the children of the professional class of people who make that sort of money (lawyers, engineers, nurses) not work as hard as possible and use their upbringing to contribute to the future of the country. Putrid take.
Giving poor kids a leg up over upper middle class kids is a win regardless of what you do with rich kids. That’s a separate issue.
> Great way to make sure that the children of the professional class of people who make that sort of money (lawyers, engineers, nurses) not work as hard as possible and use their upbringing to contribute to the future of the country.
The upper middle class has been instrumental in the last few decades in driving inequality. Behind every factory that’s shut down in Milwaukee and outsourced to China there’s lawyers and consultants and even logistical engineers making that happen. See: https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/jul/15/how-us-mi...
Your second point doesn't make any sense - we should be punishing children because of the amorphous negative externalities of every professional in the United States economy? They're to blame as opposed to the leadership of modern corporations that vote themselves multi million dollar bonuses each year while offshoring business and keeping worker pay down?
Hopefully, American making $150k/year heard about savings, and can also predict the expense of college, and can plan for it in advance.
First, the $150k is at the time of child’s application, not over their entire life.
Second, college tuition has been increasing at highly variable rates so I doubt anyone would have guessed that tuition would increase 8%/year for 18 years.
Third, four years of Dartmouth tuition is $300k. Let’s graciously say the average income over the kid’s 18 years is $100k. That means that that parents would need to save $16k/year or 16%. There’s no tax deferred program that allows $16k/year so factor in tax dollars.
Fourth, families frequently have multiple children. So if they have two, you think parents should save 30% of their income for college? Or if 3, 45%?
It’s funny how people imagine $150k is some massive amount of money. And it’s a decent living, but it’s not something that paying an extra $6k per month is possible.
And many more.
Although I don’t know a fix because if you had special situations for people like me, people would abuse it. I had a friend with divorced parents. The dad was pretty wealthy making like $500/year and paying the mom $100k/year in child support so the mom didn’t work and had like $3k tax returns from some part time job. She swore an affidavit that she received zero income from the dad and that the son was estranged from the dad. So the friend got a 100% needs based scholarship. It’s not like schools have an investigative arm to test claims.
If you read around, there is an epidemic of college freshman whose parents have the ambition, and will do whatever to force their kid into the college and even the major they choose…(sample: https://www.amazon.com/How-Raise-Adult-Overparenting-Prepare..., these are students entering Stanford whose can’t make their own decisions).
Who ended up stuck with the loans for these degrees that the kids may not want or have the independence to take advantage of? Not the parents… the students are the ones suffering for their parents’ ambition.
Obviously not the whole picture, and maybe it’s not completely right yet, but I think this particular direction will help some of those students.
I make a good amount too, and I don't have a spare 3k per month.
Let's just say you have a rough time after 2 years.
At community college , you're out maybe 2 or 3k total. Using your own numbers, that would be 70k spent without a degree.
IMHO, income from college endowments that are larger than one billion dollars should be taxed at 110%.
That's the point.
This is a non-change. They've always accepted a few poor people and dolled out scholarships under the unspoken guise of "economic diversity". If you don't fall into that category you either need to be rich or exceed the typical admissions requirements by enough to warrant an exception. The university is just patting itself on the back for something it's always been doing.
A friend of mine wanted to go to school after working for over a decade. She went to the University of Miami, got to the Continuing Education department and noticed not a single person on duty but a taped piece of paper saying everyone was working remotely due to CoVid. In 2022! Headed on to the location for Undergrad Admissions and was given a website where she could get more info. For a school that charges $65K+ a year.
It happened again at a college in DC where all that she could get was a website versus speaking to an admissions counselor, getting a group tour on some particular date, etc.
Even though about half of the university employees encountered were college students, their attitude of just cashing a paycheck and keeping the seats warm is both a cost and a reflection of the quality of administration.
So much of University tuition now seems to be going to maintain salaries and perks for layers upon layers of employees and administrators versus student benefits.
Wait, wasn’t that essentially what promissory notes were for prior to the department of education originating loans to the student directly?
Hundreds of millions of donor dollars to the endowment are not going to the people. They probably just eliminated some jobs from their financial aid department and are now announcing that they don’t even have the capacity to serve loans to students.
Dartmouth can eat my fafsa.
the bottom line is always squeezing the middle classes.
And I would think that if there _is_ loan forgiveness… that is essentially a back door to a increased government grant, they can’t just tell private companies to eat the losses, the government (i.e. taxpayers :) would have to cover them…
Sure they can. The poor widdle loan sharks might not like that, but tough shit.
Sure they can. And just as sure they'd be sued. Fifth Amendment, or something.
If not, then a subsidy that provides universities only charge 5% of income to $50k, 10% of annual net income per year if making up to $150k, then 20% of any net income exceeding $150k. Add a break to deduct from taxable income the tuition donated to a blind trust scholarship up to a certain amount. That scholarship is then used to offset high achievers for whom college tuition might still be a burden. That gives universities a fair share of money while still allowing everyone to go to college.
If it keeps going the way it's going, the only people who will be able to go to anything other than a community college are those whose parents are making in excess of $200k per year. Mind you community college is often a great education, but you don't get the extra opportunity benefits you would at a university: increased networking, professors who can demand a higher salary (come of these will work at community colleges because they want to), wider range of curriculum, more research opportunities, easier to get published.
Yup, they increased tuition without increasing tuition by making every student pay an additional fee which, in my case, added roughly 10% (not to mention the other fees) to help pay for a stadium we didn't need. They literally funded the stadium in part by students taking out non-dischargable loans.
Since then, administrative and real estate bloat has only gotten worse. The whole system needs a drastic re-think if it is to become a public good.
Maybe something where students cannot graduate until they achieve a successful score on a test in their profession. Annual tuition is set by, and split among, the professors of the classes they take. A 10% overhead on the tuition would go to the school. The professors who best enabled passing the test would be able to demand the most money. I look at what I wrote and realize this is sounding like the model of Coursera, Udacity, etc.
If someone wants to go to a college to learn to play a sport then there should be a college for that sport. I think perhaps that is what's perceived to be missing.
Lots of colleges have mixed curriculums. So if you go to college to major in some sport and minor in mathematics then... shouldn't the college have all of the tools to allow you to learn your major? And if you go to college to major in mathematics and minor in some sport then... shouldn't the college have all of the tools to allow you to learn your minor?
Perhaps the real problem is a college that has their own tools -- their own sports complex, their own stadium, their own laboratory, their own microscopes. A college shouldn't be able to opt-out of using government-owned stadiums or government-owned laboratories. Except... how will the schedule of the college work with the public? It seems like there could be a lot of conflicting schedules and events; public stadiums need to be available to the public and not monopolized by the college. Public laboratories need to be available to the public and... wait do we even have public laboratories?
There's lots of problems with our education system. This is just a symptom :)
What I don't care one bit for is the professionalization and commercialisation of collegiate athletics. It becomes a detraction, a purpose unto itself which should be made separate from the school.
Why? Such a policy is either regressive, or inefficient. If you do like the Germans do and limit college enrollment to what the economy really needs (1/4 of the population, maybe less than that), then you have middle class people subsidizing upper middle class and rich people. If you open up college to everyone like America is trying to do, then you generate huge amounts of waste. In America, half of bartenders have a college degree, and that's without free tuition!
limits are based on the capacities of each university. if the demand grows then capacities need to be expanded.
the big difference is that universities do not decide who qualifies. anyone with a highschool diploma qualifies automatically. but not every student enters high school. many students instead learn a trade after middle school.
The root of the problem is that a career is treated like a product. It's a product that you won't know whether it's good or bad until you graduate four years later or more. The job market changes faster than this, and a lot students find themselves changing careers later to adjust to market demand, and in some cases they just can't get a job in the field at all.
One potential solution here, is have companies pay for schools. The way it would work is that companies hire new grads and they pay some form of education insurance. If you can't get a job within a certain time period, the school should take the loss, until you get the job later. This would force schools to rethink what they're offering.
Ideally, tuition shouldn't exist in the first place. Certainly not for ostensibly "public" schools.
Since September they received $120M, divide by 70,000 and that’s full tuition for 1714 students, more than the freshman class. In the “campaign” it’s over $500M covering everyone for a year.
In 2021 the endowment was $8.5B. A 4% yearly return on the endowment could fund every single undergraduate and then some in perpetuity. As mentioned above, they’re raking in massive donations on top of that so the endowment is growing faster than it can be spent.