Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

What if I said: the price is the same for everyone, but people with less access to money get proportionally more assistance paying that price?

Yes, students who's parents have money but choose not to spend it get a rough deal. You can make a pretty strong case that it is their parents screwing them over, not the school. The school doesn't owe a discount to prospective students.

The free cash he has, the house he lives in, the lifestyle he can afford is on par with "normal" white collar professionals (i.e. not people who get a bajillion monopoly bucks to implement linked list traversals for faang). He works 60hr weeks during construction season and has government agencies up his ass regularly (MHSA regulates him like he's running a pit mine, it's a huge f-ing farce). If you don't place insane value on being your own boss it's kind of a shitty life.

I like to call this "resort-style education".

I don't want to say Europe is without problems, but I think this kind of legislation, together with social security in general, is a clear example of how it can be handled more efficient and fair for most people.

Sorry for my ranting, I just cannot believe what is still happening.

Dunno where you got this "ideal".

the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away

..."fading away", to the tune of (at last glance ) one and three quarters of a trillion dollars in outstanding student loan debt.

it would make more sense to do this redistribution through taxes if possible

The ability of US higher ed to raise tuition prices will always overwhelm the ability of US taxpayers to meet those prices. The phrase "utility monster" comes to mind.

but many US institutions are private so that doesn’t really work.

Private, in the sense that nobody who answers to someone who must win an election is directly in charge of running them, but, who operate as charities for the purpose of donations, pay no taxes on either capital gains or real estate, and are permitted to act as government contractors skimming up to 85% of grant money they're tasked with administrating.

so the colleges basically have their own privately-run means testing programs, and like all such programs there are flaws and loopholes.

The flaw being that...the school is allowed to have total knowledge of a customer's ability to pay before it chooses to do business with them. Imagine if you had to give three years of your tax returns to the person you were trying to buy a house from.

    > the ideal is that college should be very expensive for rich people and cheap, free, or at least more affordable, for less wealthy people.

this is partly true. it is cheap / free for very low income -- if you qualify for a Pell grant you can usually get additional financial aid from your state university that can bring your cost down to zero.

But if you are above the low income line, but by no means wealthy -- so if you're a household making say $100K a year, then college is extremely expensive and unaffordable especially if you have several kids. You're not poor enough to qualify for substantial financial aid, and you're not wealthy enough to afford tuition. Yeah, your kid can get into Harvard or Stanford for free, but the chances of them being accepted are vanishingly small no matter how smart they are.

The saving grace is community college -- enroll at the local CC for 2 years and then transfer to the state school.

Just looked up our main state schools and cost of attendance is $31K - $35K for in-state residents. So that's $120K - $140K for 4 years (not counting increases). And these aren't top-100 schools either.

...if you go back in time a few decades basically everything was about 1/10th as expensive.

e.g. "Adjusted for inflation, $1.00 in 1960 is equal to $10.43 in 2024" according to https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=1...

We could do this in the USA also, or perhaps even bother with online universities, except those are generally considered not very useful as degrees.

This here is where the money is... college degrees are a very effective dull-weeder for job applications. It filters out people of lower social classes (because they cannot afford college or effects of their social status like having to work jobs next to school to help their family make rent prevent them from getting good enough grades), it filters out people with unmanaged mental health issues, it filters out young parents (good luck managing to get a degree parallel to raising a child), it filters out people with disabilities... and all of that without violating a single anti-discrimination law.

You hear a lot of anecdotes both ways and it is quite hard to get a good picture of the real situation.

How many times were you audited before learning this valuable lesson?

For every type of business entity other than an S corp or an LLC electing to be taxed as one, the IRS either doesn't care about any notion of reasonable salary or - in the case of a C corp or an LLC electing to be taxed as one - actually wants it to be as low as possible (whereas the owner wants to maximize it).

You can't have it be 'insignificant' salary but you can do plenty of fringe benefits or long term profiteering via acquisition as mentioned.

I will say, ironically, the small business owners like that were great to work for, although they were paranoid, they were often generous to employees.

OTOH, at the computer shop there was a standing rule that if the CPA brought his computer in it was 100% priority and we treated him better than the one org that was 10-30% (depending on year) of our entire gross income...

EDIT: To be clear, it's complicated, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42199534 is a good explanation of where I sit overall.

That still seems like heavy handed overreach to me. Should they not instead contact you for clarifications about the ambiguity?

This is a pretty naive take. It is a $85k per year cost. If you can shift some money around and avoid $85k per year, you would absolutely do that.

> you could also emancipate your 17 year old.

This is complicated. Emancipation is not a “sign a form” kind of thing. The kid would have to be living completely independently (no support from the parents) and would have to convince a judge that they need to have rights and responsibilities otherwise given to adults. “Because the parents don’t want to pay for school” isn’t really a valid reason.

Paying tax and investing in your kid is also a good thing. Putting your income into the S&P 500 is also a good thing, but being wealthy enough to do so should exempt your children from this subsidy

If the business is worth enough then selling it can replace all the income you would have ever gotten from it. It's not as simple as "income goes away". The specific numbers make all the difference.

I think the idea is that Yes, the expectation is for people to make actual sacrifice before they qualify.

Education costs are out of control, but you can still get a degree elsewhere for 10% the MIT cost, and have it paid for entirely by the government if you are low income

Anyway no, they should not cut their kidneys out and sell them.

One of the purposes. They’re also centres for learning and research and repositories of knowledge.

At that point, stop writing grants. Sending money to sub-optimal grantees to effect an education/investment policy is wasteful.

Historically speaking, wealth accumulation was borderline impossible because the incentive to steal it was so large. You had to become a king, and then constantly murder people trying to take the throne, because everyone had the attitude that the only way to acquire wealth was to steal it from others. And that never really worked out well since the king was always threatened by death (the Sword of Damocles).

This stopped when the upper classes realized it was cheaper and more effective to raise the living standard of everyone else than it is to prevent everyone else from stealing their wealth. When you create wealth, you share some of it with others.

In other words, create a society where everyone has salt and pepper, rather than try to hoard salt/pepper for financial gain.

That's true of schooling as well. In the Middle Ages, only the rich and powerful could read and write. Now that everyone knows how to read, Facebook has a trillion-dollar business selling words.

This mentality is present in FOSS to some extent, but it isn't present for education anymore. Everyone seems to think good universities are a perpetually limited good, so we fight over limited admissions spots rather than figure out a way to deliver high quality education to the masses.

It's stupid, because bumping up the difficulty is how we make education worthwhile.

Their duty is to deliver education. It's not solving political problems meant for elected officials (and the population at large).

It isn't.

Despite the name, it's actually a private university.

Penn State is Pennsylvania's land grant university.

The University of Pennsylvania is one of the nine colonial colleges founded before the United States existed. It predates land grant institutions by over a century. I think you are confusing it with Pennsylvania State University, which is a land grant institution.

How much have you contributed to Philly's woes?

Probably nothing, because it doesn't benefit you.

Why would we not want universities to respond to that signal?

.5% of income over lifetime of alumni is very long-term investement

Universities are well aware of that and obviously won't self-sabotage in such dumb way

More likely outcome is that universities will ensure that most talented students will get high income majors

(Median income by age rises sharply from 20->40, then flatlines... the median age of a mother is around 27?)

> Last year, the median annual cost paid by an MIT undergraduate receiving financial aid was $12,938 , allowing 87 percent of students in the Class of 2024 to graduate debt-free. Those who did borrow graduated with median debt of $14,844.

An actual graduate tax would be far less regressive than the current system

As a young teen, I applied for financial aid, to a state school, and got a nonviable response, since my parents of 6 kids could afford to contribute zero, but some bureaucracy thought otherwise.

So I went to Community College part time, while working at a store, and then was a co-op student, and worked my way up from there. After working in industry, I went to grad school, at an Ivy and MIT, and only then did I learn what successful undergrad applications tend to look like, and also that there's various financial assistance available (including some not advertised).

My story is not of the system working. I've seen so much systemic class nonsense and rigging (and sometimes bad behavior by people who feel entitled to whatever they can grab). Being at a disadvantage in those games doesn't stop once you're nominally in. But the relatively recent need-blind admissions, and family income thresholds for tuition, help a lot, especially if we can pair that with getting the information/advising about successful applications to everyone.

I do t know that they are disinterested parties in this that can be trusted uncritically but there is a community college near me that has nicer gym facilities for their students than my big 10 Alma matter had for its “student” athletes when I was in school. Something drives that.

The real problem is that more people want to live in SF than they have allowed housing to be built for. But it isn't clear that if they went with Houston-style "anything goes", would they still be that desirable? Or only as desirable as less popular Houston?

This doesn’t solve all of those problems but it’s a start.

Professors are not the only bottleneck that the administration of MIT and company would be worried about. With more undergrads and professors comes more administration overhead, a need for more facilities (including land for those facilities that may not be contiguous with the rest of campus, which creates additional overhead of its own), and housing for the students (with the impact on the surrounding neighborhoods that that entails).

Additionally, allowing your school to grow from 8000 to 30000 undergrads dramatically changes the character of the school in ways that can't just be brushed off as "elitist".

And again: regardless of the reasons they don't want to change, I don't see any reason why we should expect any given school to so dramatically transform itself just because college became the default path for the middle class.