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Comment by ndriscoll | Hacker News Reader

> Should universities be banned from offering financial aid to lower-wealth students?

Yes, that is transparently a scam that let's them set the price to "whatever you've got (or could access via loans)." That is exactly the type of thing that should be banned.

Wealth redistribution should be a transparent government policy, not individualized pricing, which makes it impossible for anyone to know ahead of time what anything costs, completely destroying any ability to plan or even have a meaningful concept of money.

Insurance makes more sense to have different factors for premiums, but the market would likely function much better if their algorithms were required to be public.

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At least in some cases, that would likely have the effect of making college education less accessible to poorer people. The richer people are currently subsidizing the poorer people; if you disallow that and have everyone pay the average, the richer students would pay less, but the poorer students would be priced out entirely. I think that would end up being a net negative for society.

(I agree the U.S. university pricing system as it stands is far from perfect.)

Wealth redistribution at point-of-sale is simply an insane policy. If you want to have transfers to the poor, provide transfers to the poor. If you want the government to provide aid, apply once with the governemnt, be approved for some level of aid, and then comparison shop with schools' published prices.

People saying "oh but the poor" are emotionally manipulating you to enable themselves to maximally extract from each person.

That's fair, and I agree a more wholesale policy could make more sense (though a government may still wish to limit some redistributed funds to being spendable only on things like college education, in which case you're approximately back in the same effective place). Bringing it back to the original topic, though, that sort of system is outside the remit of the Seattle city government, so I still think it makes sense for them to limit the rule's applicability. (It might not even be legal for them to apply it to universities anyway -- I don't know what Washington state delegates to cities in that way -- but that's orthogonal.)

Obviously, I think your second paragraph is an extreme overreaction; I have no stake in any university's profits, and I am not attempting to "emotionally manipulate" you.

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