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This is a great step in the right direction. I can't speak directly for MIT, but there are issues with how these programs don't apply to parents with small family businesses. My parents had a small business, with my father taking home a salary of $XX,XXX. Duke University used the business assets to determine the EFC (expected family contribution) of literally 90% of the salary. Essentially saying to sell off the family business for the college fund, which was a non-starter.

Small businesses are allegedly the backbone of America, and I feel these tuition support programs overlook this segment of the middle-class.

I can understand why they might do this. Many people who own a small business underpay themselves significantly and use the extra funds on the business to build up assets. This defers taxes and allows the funds to be reinvested without tax. They might even take out loans on those business assets. The same way the wealthy will pay themselves a tiny salary and just live off the asset value of their stock. Someone who owns their own business could also easily drop their salary significantly for the year prior to applying to college.

As an owner of a small family business, I have to pay close attention to making sure my salary and that of my other family members involved is "generally commensurate with our duties" or the IRS will be up my backside pretty quick. I obviously try to minimize it as much as possible, but if you drop it to something insignificant and the IRS notices, they'll adjust your income and expenses reported to reflect your non-compliance with tax code.

From what I've observed (worked at a few small businesses before I got an office IT job, and even then...) it's about figuring out enough 'fringe benefits' and/or 'explanations' that are plausible with your CPA. e.x. how many profitable company car buy/leases can you do, a good explanation of why you are saving that money as a small or privately owned company (i.e. saving for expansion via acquisition/etc, but you have to follow through and then sell the results ASAP)

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.

My understanding is that the IRS attitude toward this depends on the exact tax status of your small business. The approach you describe reflects an S corporation, which is nowhere near always the right choice for every small business that sends their children to MIT: as one counterexample, if the parents' business is in NYC, the city's General Corporation Tax (which applies to S corporations) is often more punishing than its Unincorporated Business Tax, and therefore many NYC small businesses organize as LLCs not taxed as a corporation if they even choose to create a separate legal entity at all.

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).

Are you saying that the IRS will literally officially modify your recorded / reported income and expenses to be different from what you reported, at their discretion, even if based on what they think are plausible reasons?

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

This is required to make some people honest who would otherwise report $1 income every time. They have to work a bit harder to optimize the tax.

Well, they'll express their disagreement in the form of a letter and then calculate what they think you should pay and how far behind you are on the usual withholdings as a result, along with penalties.

> the IRS will be up my backside pretty quick

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

As a former owner of a small business I can tell you that what my accountant told me about that is that as long as the salary is over the Social Security max, (which is about $160K) the IRS doesn't really care.

Will they actually though?

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

One hypothesis for why you see both anecdotes is that the IRS is extremely good at filtering out these cases… when they bother to look into it. A lot probably get by without ever being audited, but the small percentage that do regret it.

Keep a weather eye out with that line of scepticism. One of the opinions down that path is that MIT should adjust its admission procedures to filter out the children of honest businesspersons.

> This defers taxes and allows the funds to be reinvested without tax.

All business funds are re-invested without tax, this is actually a good thing. Also for the majority of business owners taking a loan against your assets to pay yourself is a terrible idea, yes it may defer taxation but that tax will still come due and now you have to pay interest.

> Someone who owns their own business could also easily drop their salary significantly for the year prior to applying to college.

This could be a problem but i think the amount of difference this would make would be negligible - most people don't plan like this. You could also emancipate your 17 year old or have them live independently for a period of time (my friend actually deferred his entry and worked for a year in order to get a full ride)

> most people don’t plan like this.

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.

I do appreciate how nonchalantly emancipating the 17 year old was suggested tho. Too funny. Two Americas?

Marriage triggers automatic emancipation. Just sayin'.

I remember CEOs having a salary of $1...

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Isn't the entire point of these assessments to look at total assets, and not just annual income?

I dont think this was an oversight or mistake. I think the expectation was that yes, people should sell assets if they have them .

The "mistake" is that the assets themselves are the source of income. Sell them off, and the income goes away too. It's the equivalent of expecting the parents to use 100% of their income to put their kids into college, which is impossible.

IF I have stock and make $XX,XXX in dividends, how is that different? IF I have own apartments and make $XX,XXX in rent, how is that different?

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

If this was inventory they were counting, sure. But you can’t sell part of a small business. Let’s say the parents own a restaurant, and the value of the land, building, and kitchen equipment is a few million. Do they sell an oven from the kitchen to put you through school? Sell the parking lot?

It’s an all or nothing thing. The business needs all its assets to function, and shouldn’t be considered any more than for its income potential.

Lease back for land and building is definitely possible. Most capital efficient corps do not own their own land and buildings for precisely this reason.

That's economic suicide not sacrifice, for many small businesses the asset produces the revenue. Sell the asset you may as well close the business. It is not a fair assessment of a family's means at all.

It's not equivalent to making all your income off one rental and having to sell it, but it is closer to that. If you sell it, you have no income now. But a small business also creates jobs and provides novel value to the community, so even more is lost than just a single income.

It would be similar if your stock dividends were your sole irreplaceable means of support. So, you sell your stock and give the money to MIT. Now you can’t buy more stock, and therefore have no future income. Permanently ending your career to send your kid to college is an unreasonable sacrifice, in my book.

I wouldn't want to make that sacrifice either, but I also understand that im not entitled to tuition assistance as some sort of human right

There are countries with free public respected universities. So yeah not a human right but not that far off depending on where you live.

No one is arguing it is some sort of human right. The argument is that being the owner-operator of a small business is a financially different situation from having a lot of liquid wealth sitting around. And that smart universities should figure that out so they don’t accidentally lose good students over silly structural flaws in their financial aid processes.

A bunch of stock is a source of income too, but it wouldn't be wrong to use some of it.

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.

> A bunch of stock is a source of income too, but it wouldn't be wrong to use some of it.

Normal US tax law that most people fall under says no, stock itself is not income. It's only taxed at the time of sale. If you ask for mark to market taxing then any increase in market value during the calendar year will count as income -- even if you didn't sell anything throughout the year. But usually those people are drawing a direct income from trading.

Yes, but I think these tests look at both income and assets (like stock). That is why people get dinged for owning assets, even if they are a source of income.

Should they also cut their kidneys out and sell those too?

For someone not in your system, the expectations that seem normal to you sound absolutely insane to others.

Does MIT include the market value of their kidneys in their assessment? You might have lost track of what is being discussed here.

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

Nobody is forcing them to pay this price any more than you are forced to sell a kidney for a private jet.

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

I'd ask how the assets are structured internally.

Is it a small business netting the owner 100K a year with 500K in the bank?

That's different than a small business netting the owner 75K a year but the trucks and equipment for the landscaping business (easiest example, replace as needed) being worth 200K...

It's complicated.

Heh, for my jurisdiction, to get gov financial aid for a 2nd degree, they expected me to withdraw from retirement savings to fund it, but no similar expectation if you had a locked-in defined contribution pension plan (lol I wish).

Nor would they expect you to take a line of credit against the equity in property if you owned any, but stocks are always a rich person luxury that you can sell!

Kinda cemented that we’re rewarding a failure to save and rewarding a failure to save in something liquid.

Same problem for families with multiple kids of similar age - never saw discount for those. Also, no discount for the cost of living in a specific area…

Why are such things in the US so complicated? Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone!

That's the only fair way. Also, a set of well educated people pays itself back later in the form of mostly income and added value taxes, which provides money to keep studying for cheap for the next generation.

Because the US government will loan people very large sums to attend, which allows the universities to raise prices at will. The buyers are price-inelastic, which means that they want to go regardless of price, because they are surrounded by people that tell them that going to college is the right thing to do - and the more prestigious the better.

College in the US would be a lot cheaper if the government didn't inflate it. If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive.

European colleges are incredibly thrifty, though. German universities for example can lack dorms, student unions, and professors lack TAs to grade homework (so homework isn't graded) and your entire grade depends on one final.

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.

I can't agree with your experience regarding German universities. Usually dorms are offered by the university but students usually just rent a room in the city.

I've had to submit weekly sheets that were graded in almost all courses and these qualify for the final exam (in STEM). There were two exercise groups with competent ta to ask questions..

What's missing is some kind of Disneyland experience, student unions also exist to some degree but it's more low key.

Not saying that German university is better or worse - I'm convinced it has it's own problems that only will get worse if nothing is changing but it's not like it's subpar and you are alone with your book.

> your entire grade depends on one final

This isn't due to staff shortages, it's more of a difference in tradition/philosophy of teaching

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It isn't solely the government's fault. Most American universities are corporatized and exist primarily as money printers for the admin staff. The purpose of an adjunct professor is to cost the institution as little as possible while passing as many marginal students as possible so they can maximize profits with sheep that keep coming back to the trough.

This only works if students have the money though - which the government helpfully provides. The Universities are just milking the system - which isn't their fault - it's ours as the voters.

This is a common myth. This might explain why Harvard or MIT tuition is high but not the average college. Tuition mostly reflects staff costs and those have been going up due to Baumol's cost disease. Dentists, along with many other industries with its main cost being highly educated staff that haven't managed to scale production like online brokerages, have had a similar price increase since 1970.

When you compare the campus of MIT or Harvard to the average university anywhere else, you’ll find… excess. Lots of it.

Increased tuition is not primarily going to pay higher salaries to professors. It's mostly going to hiring lots more administrators. https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/admini...

You’re going to have to qualify where you are talking about. Where I am, California, that only describes community colleges. Even state and especially UC have “invested” significantly in infrastructure improvements paid for with loans backed by expectations of tuition income, which has had an absurd effect on growing tuition far outside of inflation. Very little of your tuition at these schools goes towards teaching salaries.

> Even state and especially UC have “invested” significantly in infrastructure improvements paid for with loans backed by expectations of tuition income, which has had an absurd effect on growing tuition far outside of inflation.

What timeframe are you looking at?

Back in 2011, registration fees at UC Berkeley were $7,230 per semester, with $813 allotted to health insurance (which could be waived if you provided proof of existing insurance from your family), so $6,417 ignoring health insurance. Meanwhile, last year, registration fees were an eye-popping $9,847 for new students, but cost of health insurance grew much faster to $1,929 ($7,918 ignoring health insurance). This is about a 23% increase, compared to CPI-measured inflation of about 35% between Sep 2011 and Sep 2023.

(The next biggest driver of the overall increase was the campus fee, which went from $253 to $820.)

Or, if you look at just tuition alone, that went from $5610 to $6261, or just barely above 10%.

https://registrar.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Fe...

https://registrar.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/fee_schedu...

If you look further back, in 1999, tuition was a mere $1543, but I posit that tuition at UCs has actually been fairly stable over the past decade.

Those are some cherry-picked numbers. Tuition went up A LOT just prior to your starting point, 2011, as the great financial crisis made renewing those loans I mention much more expensive: https://ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/fees/201415/documen...

> Those are some cherry-picked numbers.

I don't disagree, but they support my point that tuition has not changed meaningfully in the past decade (and then some), which is why I asked what timeframe you were looking at.

Inflation is perhaps not a good point of reference anyways, since in 2009, inflation per CPI was actually slightly negative. Cost of borrowing is not the same as cost of goods and services or cost of labor, for reasons such as the ones you point out (changes to banking regulations, increased risk aversion, etc).

Although, I'm a little surprised that cost of borrowing would have been much higher, seeing as that was the start of the zero interest-rate policy in the US. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate was hovering around 6-7% pre-crisis and 4-5% in the years immediately following it.

> If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive.

...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...

Costs ballooned in real terms.

Tuition is like 3–5 times the price even adjusted for inflation though

Because education is largely an afterthought, and universities primarily compete on entertainment and prestige.

High cost and exclusivity is the entire point.

A university open to all with a fraction of the price would be a poorly ranked one in every competitive measure.

> universities primarily compete on entertainment and prestige.

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

Still, I do not get it. Why would this competition / exclusivity rule be so much less prevalent in large parts of Europe?

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.

Good question. I wonder if labor competition in Europe is less reliant on University names and reputation? IT could also have to do with cultural difference is what students look for in a university.

My understanding is that most universities in Europe look more like US bare bones commuter schools, opposed to an all inclusive recreational experience.

The top ranked university in Europe is Oxford, which educates more than twice as many students as MIT with half the budget. I doubt this is because Oxford is cutting corners on educational curriculum.

Oxford doesn't pay staff well unless you are in the top of the pyramid, i.e. a professor. Paradoxically those tend to contribute less to education. Senior postdocs and fellows do a significant amount of teaching but their salaries are incredibly low. You need to make lots of life compromises to be able to sustain yourself at one of those. For example, fellows teaching at different colleges often get stipends and salaries in the range of £30-35,000 per year. Keep in mind that those fellowships require a PhD and a stellar CV.

Most other British and EU universities suffer from the same issues. For more information, see this article at The Guardian, which generated lots of debate: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/no.... In a nutshell the article states that "[...] I no longer believe that early-career positions at Oxbridge universities are viable for individuals without independent financial means." Also "[...] the median non-professorial academic salary at Oxbridge is £45,000."

>The top ranked university in Europe is Oxford, which educates more than twice as many students as MIT with half the budget. I doubt this is because Oxford is cutting corners on educational curriculum.

Maybe, maybe not. It could just be from cost-of-living differences: salaries for many jobs (particularly highly-educated ones) pay a fraction outside the US what they do inside the US. How much are Oxford professors and staff getting paid compared to the ones at MIT (which is Boston, which is a very high cost-of-living city for the US)?

I found this on Google:

    > According to ZipRecruiter, the average salary for a professor at MIT is $114,792 per year, with a range of $94,500 to $179,500.

    > A professor's salary at the University of Oxford can range from around £89,429 to £122,261 per year, with an average of £104,347

According to the sister comment to mine, Oxford pays only professors well, and everyone else quite poorly. There's a lot more to a university's staff than just the professors.

Im not sure what you mean by maybe not. If oxford is cutting corners, it still has the top rank in Europe, so I suppose they are the correct corners to cut.

Perhaps high professor and admin salaries in the US are a problem with US education.

>Perhaps high professor and admin salaries in the US are a problem with US education.

This is exactly my point. And not just professor and admin salaries, the salaries and costs for everything.

It's not about "cutting corners", it's that if you compare the cost of something in the US to something in another country, the US usually is much more expensive; this doesn't mean the other country is cutting corners, it means the US is just too damn expensive.

MIT is a huge outlier in terms of R&D and the population it selects students from, it would be more fair to compare Oxford to Harvard. Oxford...really is about as far from commuter schools than you can get, for example having to wear robes to the dining hall...that is straight out of Harry Potter (and indeed, where they filmed the dining scene at one of the colleges).

    > MIT is a huge outlier in terms of R&D

actually ETHZ and EPFL are very good and highly ranked, and have cheap tuition and open enrollment. i don’t know how they do it. I guess things just work better in Switzerland.

They’re also significant funded by the state particularly as they’re the two federal universities. The figure I heard while there, although I can’t find actual numbers online, was in the low tens of thousands in subsidies that may otherwise mostly be collected through tuition.

Also, it’s not exactly what I would call open enrolment as it’s only open to Swiss students who are accepted into and pass a Matura program or similar in grade school while other students typically require applications or minimum exam scores depending on the program.

Education quality, especially adjusting for tuition, doesn't correlate to prestige. Which, after WWII, almost required "Anglophone" as the language of instruction.

I was speaking to the US situation, and agree most European schools are quite cheap in comparison. Not only in tuition, but in terms of their budgets; US schools spend 4-5X as much per student- so it isnt just about state funding.

Guessing those schools can't provide access to the exclusive social network you get by restricting admissions.

>Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone!

I'll go out on a limb and bet people in your country earn much less than the average American, too. Why? Why don't companies just pay these people more? IT all comes back in income and value added taxes.

I don't know where the OP lives. But in Switzerland, where world-class univeristies like the ETH cost something like $ 1.5k a year in tuition, I'm pretty certain that people earn more on average than in the USA.

I live in Belgium, we earn quite a lot less on average indeed. However why would we need so much money? We can go to hospital, or even 20 times visit a dentist for that matter, without expensive insurance and without the fear of bankruptcy. We can have kids without fear of not being able to pay kintergarten.

    > We can have kids without fear of not being able to pay kindergarten.

Also: In Belgium, can you really go to the dentist 20 times? Is there any good reason to allow this in a public healthcare system? If the barrier to entry for healthcare services is very low, then there must be (1) a lot of abuse... or (2) long waiting times... or (3) very high taxes. My guess in Belgium: A combination of (2) and (3).

Kindergarten means different things in different countries, and that's probably the source of confusion. In Europe, it usually means a program that gradually transitions from daycare to a proper pre-school as the kids get older. Starting ages vary, but it seems to be 2.5 years in Belgium.

Kindergarten is free in the US. Also the vast majority of people pay a relatively small amount of their income for health insurance (and of course it’s free for 65+ who are the primary consumers).

Americans earn more than Swiss people after taxes according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...

And after paying insurance?

To throw in a data point on this for reference, as an American I pay around ~$220 a month (~$2,640 per year) on health insurance through my job, this comes out of my pre-taxed income. While I won't get into specifics on the details of the terms, I am quite happy with it.

I work in Massachusetts, but I live in New Hampshire. I pay more than double this on both Social Security fees & Massachusetts income taxes, which are non-deductible since New Hampshire has no income tax and makes up for that with higher property taxes (housing is cheaper though). Filtered to just health related services I can easily identify, in total I pay for Social Security, Medicare, and indirectly Massachusett's state healthcare (which I can only gain access to under limited conditions). Of these, only the private insurance fee directly benefits me, and I have little faith social security will actually pay out when I reach the qualifying age.

In terms of investment my HSA, and 401k are a much better dollar for dollar investment for my future finances than any government service, so I find it extremely unlikely I would ever truly benefit from public healthcare.

Despite my tone here, I'm more annoyed than upset about this. Due to the overall societal benefit, I'm not entirely against public healthcare depending on the details, I'm just under no illusion that it would be to my benefit, and I'm not much of an outlier. I'm also mostly convinced the root issue here is the inflated cost of healthcare rather than just the insurance aspect, public healthcare naively implemented would likely turn into yet another government subsidy for hospitals to devour imo.

Most American workers have subsidized insurance from their job.

But how about if I ask "And after paying for mortgage?"

Yeah indeed a giant part (75 percent or so) of what the companies pay, does not directly go to the workers bank account.

Roger Freeman, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan's education advisor, was afraid that educated voters would turn the United States towards communism.

One of Ronald Reagan's campaign promises was dismantling or breaking the department of education, similar to what he had done to California's state universities by limiting their budgets and moving the burden of tuition to students.

At the time this was quite popular as it lowered taxes.

A few weeks ago apparently, the 'promise less taxes->everybody happy' magic spell has once again worked.

And it looks like we'll have a WWE co-founder with no education experience in charge. That should work out well for students.

Well hopefully Trump and his DoGE head Musk will eliminate the Department of Education soon, so that most public universities will have to shut their doors and Americans can stop wasting money on college education. Then all the college students can go to work at meatpacking plants and farms to replace all the illegal immigrants that are about to be deported. This will definitely help America re-assert itself as a world power and a great place to live.

F*k that liberal education. Fruit picking is for Americans, dammit!

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

american universities get closer to this ideal than you might expect. the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away, at least for undergraduate degrees.

it would make more sense to do this redistribution through taxes if possible, but many US institutions are private so that doesn’t really work. so the colleges basically have their own privately-run means testing programs, and like all such programs there are flaws and loopholes.

> the ideal is that college should be very expensive for rich people and cheap, free, or at least more affordable, for less wealthy people. american universities get closer to this ideal than you might expect. the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away, at least for undergraduate degrees.

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.

Why should college be very expensive for rich people?

Because they can afford it. It's a redistribution tactic. You can also phrase it like this: college should be free for all to attend. Then, as long as you have a progressive tax scheme, the outcome is the same. Cheap for the poor, expensive for the rich.

Then are you suggesting buying anything should work like this?

Not at all. But in markets with inelastic demand, I'd say this is probably the way to go.

According to the old story, the New York Times asked a famous bank robber why he robbed banks. The answer: Because that's where the money is.

The money for funding public and quasi-private (universities and hospitals) institutions has to come from somewhere. Making it equally affordable for everybody doesn't raise enough money to maintain operations. Same for funding the government.

Granted, I think all of those institutions are due for reforms, which have little chance of happening right now, but still, I think the basic funding equation can't be eliminated.

> The money for funding public and quasi-private (universities and hospitals) institutions has to come from somewhere. Making it equally affordable for everybody doesn't raise enough money to maintain operations. Same for funding the government.

That's what taxes are for: you take proportionally more from people with more assets. I find the entire conversation about "not wanting my tax dollars to pay for some millionaire's kids' education", because those millionaires would end up paying the difference in taxes (under a fair system) than they do now.

That's without even considering the perverse incentives at play when a wealthy parent can use the payment or withholding of payment for education as a way to control their kids. Just because a parent is wealthy it doesn't necessarily mean that the kid would have access to those funds, or that explicit or implicit requirements that could be imposed to access those funds would be reasonable.

Indeed, and I think we're not far apart on this. I would support funding of things like education and healthcare through progressive taxation, and making them free, or some nominal cost.

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

But this strategy only applies to the wealthy universities, like Harvard, which are extremely difficult to get into -- and that is by design (Harvard could expand its student body), since what Harvard is selling these days, above all, is exclusivity.

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

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.

We have plenty of cheaper schools too, and they’re fine.

The expensive schools are for the richest people to say they went to school next to the best students who get in free.And for the best students to meet rich people.

The cheapest you're going to get is $10K a year (and that's hard to find), and that's just tuition. If it's not near your parents' home then you're looking at $25K/year bare minimum (as in living off ramen packs and peanut butter). So that's $100K that your parents have to have saved up (per child) or which you have to take on as debt.

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.

Even the cheaper schools in the US (public universities) aren't all that cheap anymore. When was an undergrad in the late 1980s, I paid under $2000 a semester. Now it is close to $10000. Yes, there's been inflation since then, but not 5X (it's more like 2.5X).

Education in the US isn't cheap but those are elite colleges. The price tag is mostly for the networking.

I will say though, that pretending there isn't a difference in education is just untrue sadly. I've had to come to terms with this, going from a very small state college to a more prestigious private school for graduate studies. Nearly everyone around me is from a large, more expensive school, literally everyone else in my program is significantly better educated than me. Of course you can find good programs at small schools, they try very hard. But there's just a difference between a school that can afford to run classical mechanics 2 and one that cannot, a school that can afford to pick and choose a good professor for their classes and one that cannot. And that gap is vastly wider than i had imagined

Funnily enough, if you think about for networking you'd much rather be surrounded by kids who can afford that 200k price tag upfront.

That depends who you are. You want to be surrounded by kids who have assets you don't. If you're there on an academic scholarship, you want rich contacts. If you're there on family prestige, you want capable contacts.

If you're there on a need-based scholarship, you need both kinds, but neither of them need you.

Because America is a place where people have been indoctrinated to believe that misery is the cost of freedom. It's a place where half the population would rather read your obituary or donate to your fundraiser than simply have a healthcare system that people can use in a timely manner without worrying about cost.

I really think Freedom, the American way, is super overrated. If the cost is misery, fear of loss of health or job, what's left of Its benefits? "I'm the chosen one protected by God"? Or does social security still have this huge connotation with communism?

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

America is “free” might be one of the funniest things Americans believe…

Having lived under a dictatorship I find it very offensive when people claim America isn’t free. Get some perspective please.

American universities sell their students a lot of amenities that aren't really necessary for study. Not to mention the bloated admin class. You want to feel "in" when it comes to social justice? Here are your administrators that do the rituals of social justice as a full-time job, but they demand salaries.

As for amenities, back in Europe, many universities don't even have a campus, just a scattering of buildings all around the city, acquired randomly as the school grew (that includes dorm buildings, often quite far from one another). You will spend some extra time commuting among them, but the university saves money - and, indirectly, you too.

Getting from dorm to lectures usually took me about 30 minutes each way - on foot, then subway, then on foot again.

30 minutes does not seem too bad. Unless you paid a lot for the dorm.

Well, how big were the business assets?

Specifically, what percent of the business would have to be sold off? My reaction is very different for 5% versus 50%.

You usually can't sell off 5% of a small business. A sole proprietor is not going to issue stock for 5% and get any buyers.

Had the same problem (with MIT among others). Somehow I heard farmland was treated a bit more generously (a recognition that you can't just sell the land to pay for college & remain a going concern). For a small biz with 4 employees, though, the math was impossible. Good thing Caltech was cheaper.

s1artibartfast below is saying that it seems intentional. But how can someone with a small business sell the assets, eliminating their own income in the process, and provide for the remaining children/themselves/etc? Sacrifice is one thing; killing the job you created is another and far too short-sighted.

>but there are issues with how these programs don't apply to parents with small family businesses.

That's a "happy accident". The college educated bureaucrats who joined hands with academia to create these programs were perfectly fine omitting the plumber's children. They sure weren't gonna do a huge amount of work to find away to avoid an edge case they were ok with.

That's quite a claim. Got any evidence for it?

On the flip side, it’s possible to sell a business for 7+ figures and then have little to no income in subsequent years in which case quite wealthy families would qualify for assistance.

I find it hard to believe that total liquid assets would not be considered during the financial aid application process.

Similarly, I wonder how they’d consider shares of a non public company. Probably a common situation for people on HN, that take a pay cut to work as early employees at a startup.

Isn't this another way of asking how they consider assets? Which never seems to be mentioned in these headlines about income qualifications.

Small Family business assessment should be different than larger businesses for this kind of criteria.

This is not a step in the right direction.

Tuition for undergraduate studies should be affordable. Not for a small number of very rich universities that can afford it. But to all universities, as it is in most of the world.

Parents should not be allowed to support their kids in college. Make the kid like away from home buy thier car if they want one. work jobs not for the family. don't let them take loans for more than their yearly income.

That is prove the kids are really responsible.

I remember how the FAFSA was more complex than any tax return I've had to do as an adult (late 30s now).

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It’s incredibly difficult to structure these rules in a way that doesn’t discriminate against small businesses while not opening a giant loophole for the rich.

The reason is because small business owners are often, by any measure that doesn’t explicitly discount ownership of the business, actually rich.

How so? I know a guy who has literally millions of dollars tied up in shit that moves dirt and rocks and another mil tied up in some gravel pits.

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.

> MHSA regulates him like he's running a pit mine, it's a huge f-ing farce

Not as much of a farce as getting silicosis and dying at 50 because your idiot gravel pit boss refuses to maintain a sprinkler system.

> How so? I know a guy who has literally millions of dollars tied up in shit that moves dirt and rocks and another mil tied up in some gravel pits

Having literally millions of dollars in productive assets is rich by any reasonable standard.

> The free cash he has, the house he lives in, the lifestyle he can afford is on par with "normal" white collar professionals

And he has decades of support at that level of wealth in and realizable from the assets. Choosing to use it to generate a a “normal white collar professional” (i.e., reasonably well off to start with) income doesn't change that it is an enormous store of value that he owns.

A few million bucks is all you need to immediately retire with the expectation of being able to draw a us median income from your investments in perpetuity.

He could probably sell that business to the right buyer for a few million dollars and walk away. Just go sit on a beach somewhere, drinking Mai Tai s for a year, and then get bored of not working and then go back to working.

That you don't envy his current lifestyle doesn't mean he's not rich.

Why is the price you have to pay for something dependent on how much money your parents make? Feels so unfair

Because it is really a discount to the parents, not the student. It is understood that few 17 year olds have saved enough money to pay MIT's tuition of $85k/year for 4 years and parents are usually footing the bill.

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.

> 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.

No you can't. The school is the one choosing to set their prices based on the parents, who might or might not have anything to do with the student's school budget. That is the school's faulty assumption, and they, not the parents, are the ones screwing over those students.

My point is that the school has zero obligation to a prospective student. If the parents have the means to pay, but dont want to, that seems to be a bigger question of responsibility and obligation.

You can't make that case at all. The price these name-brand schools ask is pretty much "how much do you(r parents) have?", and your kids could instead go to state school (if they can get into MIT, they probably qualify for a full ride scholarship or at least close) and have that tuition go to an ~80% down payment on their first house.

I agree with that. I dont see how that is MIT's problem.

It's not their problem, but they're setting the absurd price, so it's not the parents screwing over the kids somehow. The price being so outrageously high does also call into question whether their charitable endowments could reasonably be characterized as part of a tax avoidance scam.

>The price being so outrageously high does also call into question whether their charitable endowments could reasonably be characterized as part of a tax avoidance scam.

I dont see how that follows at all. They spend more on students than they receive in tuition funds. Who would they be scamming? What if they offered a million dollar education? I still dont see how that would impact their non-profit status.

In my opinion, you're reasoning about it incorrectly.

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?

still seems weird to me. is there any other product for 18-22 year olds where the price changes depending on their parents wealth?

> still seems weird to me. is there any other product for 18-22 year olds where the price changes depending on their parents wealth?

If by “price” you mean, “net price after available subsidies”, then, yeah: healthcare, housing, and food, among others.

The difference is that the subsidies are usually public, whereas the education subsidies are by the seller—but the seller is also a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the entire premise of which, and the reason donations to them are tax deductible to the donor on top of the nonprofit being tax exempt, is that the nonprofit functions serves social needs in lieu of the government doing so.

When I was 18-22 and living with my parents (pretty normal in Europe) I worked and contributed to the house expenses. I'm pretty sure kids of rich people don't do that. If I wanted to take out a loan, my parent's wouldn't be able to provide guarantees and thus the kind of loan and conditions I had access to would be much different than those a kid with rich parents could. In University people could also get grants based on your family income.

Those examples are varied and are not the same thing as purchasing a concrete product, yet I believe they are relevant to your question - education is a service that supports society, not a concrete product for your personal use and enjoyment. How and if you get it, relies not entirely on you at that point in your life, but heavily on your parents and in general on your family as a single economic unit to which you belong.

Interesting question. I can't think of anything outside of the education sphere, no. Maybe someone else will chime in with an example.

I would argue that financing a purchase (say, a house or car) falls into this category. The object itself does not change price, but the financing will change price wildly depending on whether the parents have good credit and can cosign the loan.

True, although that's sort of the opposite. If your parents have resources and choose to help you out, the car loan will be cheaper. If it were similar to the college scenario, the dealership would say "your parents are rich, so we're going to charge you more because they'll be able to afford it". Of course that would never work because there's competition in the auto market, while prestigious colleges are effectively a cartel.

This one makes sense to me cause the price (interest) is related to the risk or repayment. The way the universities do it is they want to find out how much money is in your parents bank account and then take as much of it as possible.

So there is an upper limit, which is the real price?

There really aren't that many rich people, relatively speaking, so who cares? That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

At an upper end college? Yeah I guess it has to be like definitely below 90% of the population. Basically zero!

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When I was touring colleges as a high school senior I met someone who had gotten into MIT but whose family could only afford to send one kid to an elite college, him or his sister. He decided to go to a state school which was a lot less expensive but whose academics weren't close to the same level. This stuff matters to people.

Most students go into debt to attend college. I fell into a bracket where I didn’t get any financial assistance but my parents didn’t want to/couldn’t pay for tuition. I got personal loans for everything. I think this is a common scenario.

Same here. I paid "full price" for my degree coming from a normal middle class family. Fortunately I was able to pay it all off a few years out of school with my first job.

The large majority of MIT undergraduates graduate debt free.

> I met someone who had gotten into MIT but whose family could only afford to send one kid to an elite college, him or his sister.

So they were rich enough that he didn't get exempt from tuition but still could only send one kid to an elite school?

I wonder if the guy was just pulling your leg.

I met him when I was at MIT for Campus Preview Weekend when accepted students visit the school. Is it necessary to assume things in such a cynical fashion?

needlessly adversarial. financial aid is a best effort kind of thing, and plenty of people with unusual situations fall through the cracks.

I don’t see it like that. People bragging about getting into MIT but not being able to go for some reason is an old meme, it always turns out that they didn’t really get in.

His sister got in and he didn’t.

When was this? MIT's financial aid was already very generous when I was applying (in 2008); IIRC the no-tuition threshold was 100 k$ back then

This was more than several years prior to that, I just tried to look up the financial aid of previous years and for some reason couldn't find it. If someone else finds it, I'd be curious to take a look.

While I think this is well meaning, I’d be much more impressed by institutions actually cutting costs, The ratio of administrators to students is insane as is the faculty ratio at most universities, not to mention the outlays for extravagant projects like sports centers and student centers.

Thank you for this comment; articles on the rising costs of college almost always uncritically treat it like a law of nature, and rarely have I seen articles that attempt to study in-depth the extent to which college administrations have become bloated, self-perpetuating jobs programs. All while at the same time departments are cut, professors are expected to do more with less, and more and more classes are pushed on to adjunct faculty who get paid a pittance. Until this is addressed, any efforts to improve the ways in which students finance their education is just a band-aid.

If you’re interested.

https://www.goacta.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/The-Cost-o...

I saw a similar headline just today (albeit on a much smaller scale) for Carnegie Mellon University: https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/carnegie-mellon-univ...

I feel like the timing is too close to be a coincidence—does anyone know if there's a link?

It's not really something new; most top universities like CMU already have a similar policy. MIT has had it as well, they just raised the threshold for qualification.

Maybe it has something to do with the incoming Trump administration and federal student loans. They seem to want to reduce government spending and may see federal student loans as waste, especially since some were forgiven. Maybe there is some amount of arm-twisting involved. Better for the universities to not mention any of that and appear altruistic.

The freshman class of MIT pays enough to cover all other students every year.

Started looking and found out there's some much worse, and far more obvious cases that need to implement these reforms. [1]

UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.

BTW, amazing site to be horrified by gun violence (and vaguely fascinated). Look upon the awfulness of Philadelphia. [2] Sitting in their safe little haven while East and South is wounding murder land with overlapping murder / wounding statistics. (12k from 2014-2023, 190/100000 urban) [3] Northwestern and the violence everywhere South in Chi-town is maybe a personal second choice. ($13,700,000,000, +74%, 26.9k, 280/100000 urban) [4][5]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...

[2] (Guns, Philadelphia) https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...

[3] (Location, UPenn) https://www.google.com/maps/place/University+of+Pennsylvania...

[4] (Guns, Chicago) https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...

[5] (Location, Northwestern) https://www.google.com/maps/place/Northwestern+University/@4...

Is there a coherent argument tying A to B here? Schools have large endowments and are also sometimes located in violent cities. Is it your contention that one causes the other, or even could in theory affect the other? Otherwise I don’t see the point, you might as well bring up the number of potholes in Philadelphia too.

Also Northwestern is in Evanston, not Chicago. Two different cities.

> UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.

Why is it UPENN's responsibility to solve these issues? This is Philadelphia's problem, the university is just a business operating in the city.

I think that speaks to the low bar we have come to expect from our endowed institutions today more than anything else.

American Universities, historically, are supposed to improve not just their students’ lives but also society as a whole, especially as serving as boosters for the city they’re in and their immediate neighbors. That’s why they’re nonprofits. That’s also likely their strongest lifeline to remain relevant in the future rather than as the hollow alumni clubs and gatekeepers their critics say they are, with AI/the internet/online schooling/topic of the day breaking down socioeconomic barriers to knowledge access

That’s why the Carnegies and Mellons built libraries, museums, and the very literally named Carnegie-Mellon university, back then. Now it seems like the first thing billionaires today do is isolate themselves and their wealth from the masses as much as possible.

I doubt they could even if they wanted to. All problems cannot be solved by throwing money at them, and the local governments may not be cooperative or efficient enough to use the money. There are chemically engineered drugs that will gigafry your brain into addiction in one dose getting better every day. Police departments all over the country/west seem to be ineffective at enforcing order, courts are too delayed and too lenient on sentencing, list goes on. Problems on the public side that private enterprise can't really fix without a lot of cooperation. Maybe in a much less regulated world like the Carnegie's, they would be able to try a lot of things without permission, now it would take years of begging to get a permit to build a drug rehab centre somewhere no matter how rich you are and the neighbors would block it.

> That’s why the Carnegies and Mellons built libraries, museums, and the very literally named Carnegie-Mellon university, back then. Now it seems like the first thing billionaires today do is isolate themselves and their wealth from the masses as much as possible.

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.

> You had to become a king, and then constantly murder people trying to take the throne

There’s a bit more to it than that. There’s a reason Xi Jinping doesn’t need to murder members of his cabinet all the time. A stable government has a winning coalition which keeps the leader in power. The leader has to keep them happy which in small enough governments he can do by paying them directly.

In a democracy, the winning coalition is way too large to simply pay supporters. The government has to fund public works which are more cost effective. A larger winning coalition is better for the median person for this reason.

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UPenn is a land-grant institution, they are not "just a business" they were given land and money specifically to serve the public good. They're why we have engineering degrees, the government specifically wanted institutions that taught practical marketable skills and to do research in those fields.

> UPenn is a land-grant institution

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.

Wow an actual topic on HN that I know about. I spent 3.5 years studying the history of UPenn - including writing my thesis in its history - and it is definitely not a land grant university.

> UPenn is a land-grant institution

It isn't.

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

Penn State is Pennsylvania's land grant university.

> They were given land and money specifically to serve the public good.

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

If their duty is to deliver education, why are they sitting on a $20B hoard?

Presumably they could spend a little bit of that to deliver some more education, couldn’t they?

Endowments are not just slush funds that can be used at leadership’s discretion; they are often from donated monies with specific stipulations set by donors on how, where, and what those funds can and cannot be spent on.

college endowments are invested. Managing these investments is a huge focus of universities

In the short term, yes. Just like an orchard owner can chop down his trees and sell firewood to make a little more money this year.

They spend $9 billion annually on exactly that. This "hoard" can, checks notes, fund barely two years of operations.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/231...

there are many, many people who are paid a lot of money to pretend to believe that the universities should actually be spending less and keeping more for their endowments because that strategy would enable the biggest impact at some indeterminate point in the future

If they are like most other schools with a low income neighborhood nearby, they probably offer an entire k-12 education sequence for these kids ran under their education major’s department. Likewise their hospital probably treats low income people in the community. And of course the school itself is a massive jobs program for low income people in the area as well, who might qualify for reduced or no cost tuition for themselves or their kids.

>Why is it UPENN's responsibility to solve these issues?

Who's responsibility is it? Have you seen how the government operates? Why wouldn't UPENN want to help solve it?

You're asking the wrong question: why would they?

How much have you contributed to Philly's woes?

Probably nothing, because it doesn't benefit you.

> How much have you contributed to Philly's woes?

To resolve Philly's woes?

> Probably nothing, because it doesn't benefit you.

If they pay taxes...

It is the government's responsibility. Change your government with votes.

OK, but they do exist to educate people, and have a comically large endowment to do it with that only keeps growing. I guess their plan is to grow the endowment until all human beings everywhere can get full ride UPenn scholarships?

Going up is what an endowment is supposed to do; you spend some part of the return on operational needs, while also growing the base so you have greater (nominal, and hopefully also real) capacity for that downstream.

If, over the long term, an endowment isn’t growing, it’s being mismanaged.

Just want to point out that Philadelphia’s homicide count is down ~40% from last year. And Penn’s “haven” looks similar to the other affluent commercial corridors throughout the city.

What is the argument here, exactly?

Thetrace.org is in fact pretty sweet looking. Interesting that philly seems to be shot to injur and next door camden seems to be shoot to kill.

They are not sitting on it. They spend about 5% of it annually.

> UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.

Endowments have strings attached that limits the use of funds, the endowed money isn’t just a general slush fund: https://www.acenet.edu/Documents/Understanding-College-and-U...

Also, an endowment is meant to be perpetual, so only a small fraction of it is spent every year to ensure the principal amount doesn’t go down. “Don’t kill the golden goose” in other words.

philadelphia rots? please. I grew up in baltimore. philly is not what a rotting city looks like.

You left off

(Drugs) https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/mexico-depicts-phi...

So if a university has money, learning there should be free?

If you don't have guns, you won't have gun violence, but I guess the second amendment won't be changed any time soon.

For a private school, they can choose how to spend their money. Hoarding it is one option.

For the federal government, they can choose how they allocate grants. Withholding grants from greedy schools is one option.

> Withholding grants from greedy schools is one option

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

> So if a university has money, learning there should be free?

Not an unreasonable proposition. The purpose of the university is ostensibly to provide an education, not to continue hoarding more and more money.

> purpose of the university is ostensibly to provide an education

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

I disagree. I think teaching is the sole purpose of a university. Research is ancillary to that, and if an organization only did research but didn't teach I would not say they get to call themselves a university any more.

> I think teaching is the sole purpose of a university

Cool. This isn't how the word works in practice. More importantly, it isn't how the trustees of the people who gave those universities the money asked for it to be used. (Nor the government or the granting agencies.)

> if an organization only did research but didn't teach I would not say they get to call themselves a university any more

Again, cool. This isn't true in reality. Research universities famously put research first, which is why they can attract top faculty.

You can disagree but that doesn't change anything. Most major universities are research institutions that also teach people, and hopefully bring up some through the ranks to further research/academia/human knowledge.

Without research there would be nothing new to teach, Without research diseases wouldn't be cured. A lot of amazing things we have came from universities.

Medical research is a profit center for many universities, not a cost center. They get funded by grants from external entities like the NIH and get to skim off the top of each grant for overhead. As one outsized example, my alma mater got $583MM in NIH grants in one year. I'm not saying universities don't fund research from their own coffers, but it's important to understand how much funding comes from the government and from other sources.

I wasn't addressing that. I was solely addressing the idea that universities were teaching centers that do research ancillary. A lot of them would consider that backwards. They're research institutions that also teach.

Also known as education

> Also known as education

No. There are non-teaching research universities. Many universities have non-teaching faculty. Learning != teaching != education.

If they were spending the money on those things, this might be an argument. But they're not spending it; they're hoarding it.

They are spending it. On average they spend about 5% of it per year. In 2023 that was $975 million. It goes 53% to instruction, 22% to health care, 15% to student aid, and 10% to research, academic support, and other services.

The point of an endowment is to provide long term support for whatever the purpose is of that endowment. That is done by investing it and using the investment earnings for that purpose.

> If they were spending the money on those things, this might be an argument. But they're not spending it; they're hoarding it

There is something ironic about people who work in start-ups arguing for endowments to be spent down. Who do you think gives money to the VC funds?

I don't think you understand how endowments work.

It's not a pile of gold sitting in a vault on campus. It's an account which is productively invested and generating returns which are what's actually used for funding operations. A $20 billion endowment would be expected to produce about $1 billion per year, or around 20% of the annual operating budget. They need to bring in about $4 Billion more dollars per year to keep the lights on.

I do understand actually, and my argument is that this wouldn't be acceptable in any other category of nonprofit, so why is it acceptable for universities? If the Red Cross decided to take donations and then hoard a 20 billion dollar endowment while also charging top dollar for disaster relief, people wouldn't accept that as a legitimate strategy. Why is it suddenly OK when a university does it?

$9 billion annually [1] qualifies as not spending it, I guess. I wish people actually checked figures before ranting online.

1- https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/231...

The page you linked shows their revenue is $9.93B/year and is greater than their expenses. So clearly they're not spending down the principal.

That’s because donors won’t let them drain all the principal in a few years.

UPenn’s revenue includes “sales of assets” and “investment income,” i.e., taking some part of the endowment annually to fund their operations.

This is only tuition though. Using their estimates you would still be expected to spend $30k/yr

https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...

A sham marriage (get a prenup if you want) is sufficient to have parents' income not counted by FAFSA.

If true, this is wild. I've never heard of it, nor of anyone exploiting it.

I've never heard of anyone doing this either, but it is true and it's a pretty reasonable rule in my opinion. If you're an "independent student" then you don't need to report your parents' income, and the government is fairly generous about who qualifies as independent: https://studentaid.gov/help-center/answers/article/independe.... You can definitely game some of these qualifications, but that's fine, the overwhelming majority of people who qualify for this are legitimately independent from their parents and should be considered for financial aid.

Another way to save money is to rent an apartment and make that your permanent address freshman year than to pay out of state tuition and room and board. I always thought this scheme could never work until I met someone who played it and saved tens of thousands in the process.

Is this going to create some weird incentive for me, a parent of a college kid, to go 4 years unemployed traveling the world?

Honey, think about how much money the divorce will save us on tuition!

The decrease of buying power, post Covid, makes this pretty much moot at best. It’s sort of depressing to think that even if I had children, or magically qualified to attend a prestigious school like MIT, I’d still be surely priced out. Just like I am buying a house. Making $200k a year ensures I’ll never own a home unless I want to move to an area I don’t feel safe in. I imagine having children make that trade off better, but not without substantial intrinsic costs to one’s self and one’s children. If someone makes $199k at this point, they’re likely unable to afford a home in any major metropolitan area. While being able to have your gifted children receive a free education is great, I imagine many folks will push ever so slightly past that, assuming two years working parents, by the time their children would be of age to go to school.

It’s just depressing. Sorry, I’ll go back into my hole.

that's nice, but it's become nearly as difficult to get into MIT as winning the lottery

The MIT undergraduate student body is about the same as it was in 1960, but the number of applications rose from around 4000 in 1960 to 11000 in 2000, to 20000 in 2024.

This isn't just an MIT problem. The undergrad populations of the top universities (Ivy league and similar) have hardly grown over the decades despite a large increase in student population overall in the US, not to mention the very large increase in foreign students over the past 25 years. This is by design to create increasingly exclusive brands.

Deep dive into this: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-university-of-impossibl...

> The undergrad populations of the top universities (Ivy league and similar) have hardly grown over the decades despite a large increase in student population overall in the US

Why should we expect individual universities to scale up their class sizes proportional to the student population in the US? Some universities may choose to, and new universities could spin up to serve the increased student body, but I don't see a compelling reason to argue that any given university should scale up just because college has (somewhat arbitrarily) become the default path for the entire middle class.

There's nothing wrong with MIT wanting to stay small, and it's not necessarily a conspiracy to build exclusive brands. They could also just recognize that their system won't scale up to an order of magnitude more students.

The article claims 80% of American households meet this threshold. I wonder what % of their incoming class (say restricted to Americans) meets this threshold.

Princeton has had a similar rule since 2001. Their current number is $100k. 25% of students pay nothing to attend. [0]

[0] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2024/03/29/princeton-trustees... (go tigers)

Approximately 60% of American households earn less than $100K. That's quite a difference in relative size.

Households with earners in their 20's and early 30's don't tend to have a lot of children of university age. One would want to use the median income of households with university-aged children.

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

The population of people who apply to a nice college, or even college at all, is probably not representative of the average american household

That's a great question, I'd bet it's fair to say that 80% of their applicants would not qualify, and yet it opens the door for some really deserving humans. (Not being able to afford it is why I didn't go to MIT, I also wasn't accepted at Cal, yet UCLA (and all of the UC system for that matter) was under 4,000 a year and that's what my folks and I could afford so that's where I studied.)

Use College Navigator for these types of questions:

https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=MIT&s=all&id=166683#...

That link says 72% of incoming freshman in 2022-2023 received financial aid. Also has a full-time beginning net cost average of just under $22,000 in 2022-2023.

It's not a perfect source of data, but there is enough on College Navigator to let you dig into it a bit and compare to other schools.

Note that aid includes federal student loans though. They may have needed to come up with $22,000 out of pocket but also have taken on thousands more in loans that will need to be paid back. If they don't have the $22,000, then private student loans at much worse terms are likely required.

The article actually goes into more detail:

> 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.

Or, crazy idea, have the government pay all tuition up front for everyone and then collect an extra .5% on your income tax for every semester you attend (or .33% for every quarter). Obviously you'd have to put some limits on what colleges can charge to get paid from that pool of money.

Then you can't go broke from debt because it's a percent of your income, but it's also not "free" to address those who have concerns with that.

You could apply it to all outstanding school loan balances too. Get your loans paid off in exchange for an extra 4% income tax.

I actually quite like the system we have in the UK.

Graduates pay roughly 9% of their income above £27k towards debt repayment, and the remaining balance is written off after 30 years. Typical tuition fees are just over £9k per year.

This strikes a nice balance between encouraging people to carefully consider alternative non-university careers whilst also not preventing too many people from not being able to afford it.

Note my numbers are approximate because they can vary depending on when & where a person went to university a couple of other factors. Also I do think the system could be slightly improved (especially around maintenance loans) but on the whole has a good structure.

It would be a good system if the interest rate on the loan wasn't absolutely insane.

That subsidizes useless degrees, low quality colleges, and punishes people who work in vocations (likely providing more value to society), among some other issues.

How does it punish vocations?

just a guess, but upfront money needs to come from somewhere, presumably everyone else that is working, including vocations.

MIT is rich and can certainly front the money. If it’s such a great idea, let them do it.

Make this .5% go directly to the university. Will incentivize universities to teach more useful skills

It would incentivize them to only offer majors that lead to high incomes. By pooling the money it removes that issue.

jobs that pay well are a signal that there is high demand for this skill in our society and that more people need to develops these skills.

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

What makes a skill useful?

Sounds similar to how it works here in Australia

Is this age dependent? For example I'm in my 40s and make a good salary, but am under this limit. If I got accepted would that apply?

Presumably yes

I knew a student at my high school whose parents earned enough to be able to both take simultaneous sabbaticals for a year so that their child could avoid tuition at a school with a similar program.

MIT is a great financial investment. There is financing already available (federal and private) so presumably if someone wanted to go they likely could. They may leave with debt however.

The median salary of an MIT graduate is 120k and the median debt is 12k, and less for lower income families (2023-2024):

$0 - $30,000 family income: $6,866

$30,001 - $75,000 family income: $9,132

$75,000+ family income: $12,500

Bumping this up to families making $200k seems really unnecessary and helps people that don't really need to help.

https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...

> Bumping this up to families making $200k seems really unnecessary and helps people that don't really need to help.

My household income is right around $200k, and my daughter (still a few years from college) would definitely consider e.g. UC Berkeley, which (including housing) is half the cost of MIT for an in-state student. Free tuition would certainly make her look at MIT more closely, so if the goal is to draw the best students (and helping poor students is a side-effect), then it's a good idea.

Also, it's headline-grabbing. There's at least one poor kid somewhere in the US who will read this headline and consider MIT, when they previously didn't (even though they probably already would have qualified for free, or nearly-free tuition).

True. Counselors at poorer school districts frequently don't recognize that these "dream schools" are often more affordable than a state school for certain populations. The students certainly don't know it unless a trusted adult shows them and really pushes them towards pursuing it. Hopefully, some students out there will see this and realize that while MIT is crazy selective, getting in is the hardest part.

Programs like Stars College Network (https://starscollegenetwork.org/) and Questbridge (https://www.questbridge.org/) help to bridge this gap in knowledge. They are really good programs, based on my limited to exposure to them as a Caltech alumnus. It was an incredible stroke of luck that I knew Caltech even existed growing up in a very small town pre-Internet, and these programs take some of that luck out of the equation.

Good point. Kids of poorer school districts still have the prestigious admissions system stacked against them, in many ways, but simply knowing that Ivy/MIT/Stanford/etc. may be options will lead some to look into it, and some will then have information, time, and means to make their application look plausible.

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.

  MIT is a great financial investment.

  families making $200k seems really unnecessary and helps people that don't really need to help

When I looked at MIT in 1990, tuition was fully covered but housing was BRUTAL.

More than twice my parents mortgage. I'm sure it's worse, now.

From the page GP linked, the median scholarship for students with household income under $65k/yr also covered housing, and $65k-$100k covered most of the housing costs.

It definitely is and is made worse by institutions like MIT and Harvard that don't pay their full tax burden to the city due to the PILOT program. They're allowed to accrue more and more real estate while paying a fraction of the taxes that other property holders would and drive prices up dramatically.

> They may leave with debt however.

The linked article says not.

  Loans are not included in our financial aid offers because we believe your financial aid will cover your expenses. We do not expect any undergraduate to take out a loan. Rather than borrow, most students opt to work during the academic year. At MIT, this work often provides students not only a way to help pay for college but also with world-class research experience. 

I've never heard an MIT graduate say they wasted their time there.

I feel like the number of children you have makes a big difference. 1 child vs 5 kids potentially with 2 in college / 3 in private school would be vastly different financial situations.

Except it's a financial investment where person A(parents) invests, and person B(student) reaps the rewards.

Yes but the algorithm also is that they take 5% of your assets each year. So if you've saved $1M (not much for a $200K a year couple in their 50s), that's $50K a year out the door.

Honestly, that wouldn’t be a bad way to fund education: education is free, but the university gets taxation power over you so they can tax you at x% of your income. It aligns incentives better than the current system.

In which case you may like how it’s done in the UK. it’s technically debt but in essence works as a graduate tax. The government pays for your education with a loan. You then only pay back 9% of your income over a certain income threshold. You do this until you pay back the loan or 30-40 years have passed. So in practice this is a graduate tax.

For most taxes you expect higher earners to pay more but this is not the case with student loans because high earners pay of their loans quickly whereas lower earners end up paying far more in interest.

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

Australia does something similar (it's called HECS if you want to search for details).

Where are you seeing this?

FAFSA. That's one of the calculations that goes into Expected Family Contribution. There is an expectation that parent's contribute some % of income (20%?), 5% of assets, and that the student basically contributes 90% of any income or assets to their name before a single dollar of aid, usually federal loans, will be offered.

For all of you younger folks just starting your families, expect to pay full price for college if you are anywhere near the top 25% of earners (most of this site presumably). Any scholarship money is a bonus but aid probably isn't going to be forthcoming.

The subtext of this MIT announcement is that any family making more than $200,000 will be paying full price to subsidize the poorer students.

that means if the parents earn 300K a year, one can just quit his/her job and take the free ride?

One couple, both PhDs, when their daughter went to Harvard, the mom quit her job to qualify for the free tuition.

What about if someone has a large net asset? will the 200K still apply?

Awesome. Now let’s lower the bar further and do it everywhere. And then let’s keep doing more until students can pay their tuition with a summer job, like they could when our elders went to school.

I’ll hold off on asking for higher education to be free, as the culture still pushes back on that. But a return to the former model would be most welcome.

I'd like to see a future where a student can have free tuition but (with exception) is required do meaningful civic service work that benefits the community and country that is paying for tuition, ultimately graduating with zero debt if requirements are met.

Maintaining national parks? Helping support inner city? Tutoring and improving public education? Imagine having the majority of American college students contributing to these worthy causes AND getting a strong education.

This is basically the point of PSLF[0]. The cost to participants is not $0, but it can ultimately be very low if they only make income adjusted payments during their 10 years of service.

https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/forgiveness-cancellation...

Doesn't the federal government already do this? Work for them 10 years and student debt is cancelled?

I think they are suggesting that you would graduate debt free for having done service while getting your education

But how would you have time to study full time and work full time?

In the former model, which I also would love to back to, college was cheap because the government didn't keep inflating the price with huge loans, coupled with every adult in range telling kids that the HAVE to go to college and the more prestigious the better.

Get rid of government loans, bring us back to how universities used to operate, and education will once again be something you can pay for with a summer job.

All we're doing with these government loans is transferring the wealth of society to the universities.

>> pay their tuition with a summer job, like they could when our elders went to school.

or like it is currently for EU citizens in any EU country. Americans are getting ripped off from all sides.

Do we also return the facilities to the state they were in before, particularly the residential programs? College enrollment percentage? What about a near universal military draft for men?

Not that I think lowering the cost of education is a bad effort but appeals to some prior culture like they are apples to apples comparison is dishonest.

And the classrooms should be an easy stroll from the dorms, downhill, both ways.

> Do we also return the facilities to the state they were in before, particularly the residential programs?

Yes, please. Students learned just fine without all the fancy facilities. Perks are great and all, but I would trade them for a low cost of education in a second.

The university’s would argue that the students voted with their feet, and that those facilities are an arms race that if you lose you lose students.

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.

Why not be more ambitious and aim for free?

It's never going to happen in a country where politicians try to convince people that college education == elitism, and a significant part of the population actually believes that

It is difficult to enact meaningful change in a country that doesn't see supporting its people as an investment in itself. Discussing the price when it should be free is a distraction.

Won’t happen as long as the govt is giving out free loans, which is the driver of increasing tuition prices.

I tried to check if that was true, but couldn't find much historical tuition data online. What little I did find showed that tuition adjusted for inflation has been increasing fairly steadily for over 100 years, and I didn't really see any change in the rates between before government loans and after.

Maybe if I had found data for a wide range of schools instead of just a couple of hard to get into schools there would have been a more noticeable effect.

Clearly nothing to do with inefficient administration, then. Here in Australia, where a friend's wife works as the PA for the Dean in one of our foremost universities, and I know numerous lecturers, some of whom are moving overseas for better opportunities (in Southeast Asia of all places!), the faculty-members-over-beer perspective is largely that the universities are head-in-sand about AI and about to become far less relevant. IMHO MIT OCW is great, we need more of that, and more mini-courses.

I was going to comment that free loans and inefficient/outsized admin go hand-in-hand. On further thinking if you take away the loans, the admin has no choice but to shrink and achieve higher efficiencies.

As far as I know, and countries where tuition is free entrance is restricted and the students do not expect to live the United States university lifestyle.

Free would be fine if we could expect actual return on the investment instead of extended high school, delaying adulthood, and channeling people from useful vocations within their grasp.

What about wealthy people with low AGI but lots of assets?

Check out CSS or FAFSA calculators to figure out your expected family contribution. Financial Aid offices at places like MIT that are need blind fill in the gap between your expected contribution and cost of attending with aid.

The answer to your question is it depends. Some assets like your primary home and retirements can be shielded from expected family contribution. If you've got assets sitting in a taxable account....

On a related note, why does an institution so commendably progressive as Harvard charge tuition at all?

I've come to realize what we think as progressive places are what I consider "inclusively conservative" as in liberal socially, but very much bound to keeping wealth strata in place.

San Francisco + older bay area cities are a prime example of being a bastion of free market capitalism in the guise of progressivism.

San Francisco + older bay area cities are a prime example of being a bastion of free market capitalism in the guise of progressivism.

The main reason SF is unaffordable is that the city government forbids people from building housing, which is the exact opposite of a free market.

SF is already one of the most dense cities in the USA. If the government forbids people from building housing, they've historically done a poor job at it. They are the second most dense city in the USA after NYC, and no would accuse NYC of not being unaffordable either.

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?

Sf is 7 square miles. You can cut a swath out of that size out of other cities and find that density. Possibly more density. Koreatown in LA has like 45k people a square mile, over twice as dense as sf. Several other areas there clock in at a higher density too. Really you need to consider it as just a region in the greater Bay Area metro region. And given its prominence in position as a transit hub with billions invested over decades in just that effort, it makes sense to add density there.

Yes, SF is only 7 square miles, so already you don't have much to work with. The Bay Area is the 4th most populated metro in the USA. So still not as dense as NY or even LA, but still denser than the vast majority of places in the USA.

1. 2,251.1/sq mi Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA / 12,828,837 2. 2,156.5/sq mi New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA / 19,865,045 3. 1,614.4/sq mi Trenton-Ewing, NJ / 369,526 4. 1,303.6/sq mi San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA / 4,466,251

Bay Area density fairly well correlates to SF's density, actually (yes, not as dense, but neither are the metros around the other dense cities).

More housing is always great, but I think it is really idealistic to think that building more housing in a hot area is going to bring prices down much, if at all. Literally, anywhere in the world, that simply doesn't happen. At best, we get a place like Berlin that has a nice economic bust that brings housing prices down for awhile (and then they start ticking up again as the economy improves), or Tokyo, where a country-wide baby bust coupled with anemic local wages and a huge 1980s housing boom hang over, keeps things reasonably priced.

> Tokyo, where a country-wide baby bust coupled with anemic local wages and a huge 1980s housing boom hang over, keeps things reasonably priced.

Nope. Tokyo's population is still growing, and 1980s housing in Tokyo is deeply undesirable. The reason Tokyo has sane housing prices is that it continuously builds large amounts of housing, because they haven't made it de facto illegal the way too many places have. Sometimes that's all it takes.

>Newly expanded financial aid will cover tuition costs for admitted students from 80 percent of U.S. families.

What percentage of MIT students...

Two teachers in a HCOL city are going to be above 200k.

https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...

> 58% of full-time undergraduates received [some form of] MIT Scholarship [but not necessarily a full one] during the 2023–2024 academic year.

What's the logic for choosing 200k

More than 100k but less than 300k

80% of American families... but what % of MIT students?

UVA does this for households that make less $100K. Hopefully, they’ll follow suit and bump it to $200K as well.

With their endowment it's criminal that they don't

Is there a term for doing beneficial things for a tiny fraction of people and coasting off of the PR for it?

What's this going to do for people that aren't good enough to be in the top .1% of merit? Why do we care?

This may have unintended consequences on chances of a successful application. Now, as a high school senior, you have to compete against an additional pool of strong students who aren't especially interested in MIT's offerings, but have parents pushing them toward the least expensive of all top universities.

It’s not an unintended consequence. Another way of phrasing your concern is “MIT will have an especially strong applicant pool” which is a desirable outcome.

100% agree, isn't this the meritocracy we want?

The other side of this is saying the status quo is; as a high school senior with wealthy parents, you don't have to compete against as many strong students if you apply for MIT because it has high barriers to entry (that aren't based on merit), and so you should apply even if you aren't particularly interested in their offering.

Also, the reality is most kids will be applying for all of the schools. MIT might want to improve their yield rate.

Yep. I just got done reading The Meritocracy Trap and the gist of it is that wealthy kids already have tons of educational resources thrown at them to get into good high schools, colleges, and careers. So they don’t also need financial advantages and legacy admissions.

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

One more reason to select deferred comp!

Would have been lovely about 20 years ago. Oh well, no MIT for me.

I'm sure this causes pause for more than a few people who always wanted to go to MIT, knew they could, and didn't. Tuition wasn't appetizing even 20 years ago.

In addition to pioneering Open Courses that were of high enough quality that you'd want to take them, this is hopefully the start of another trend/wave.

Please tell us that counts for the Micro-Masters certs like Data Science. That would open up a lot of opportunities for people who can’t put in as much time due to working to pay bills.

This part seems to be getting overlooked -

> And for the 50 percent of American families with income below $100,000, parents can expect to pay nothing at all toward the full cost of their students’ MIT education, which includes tuition as well as housing, dining, fees, and an allowance for books and personal expenses.

> This $100,000 threshold is up from $75,000 this year, while next year’s $200,000 threshold for tuition-free attendance will increase from its current level of $140,000.

- even though that's the article's 2nd and 3rd paragraph.

wow that’s amazing

Just read an adjacent banger that interrogates the underlying reasons why our (US) education system is broken, how it got that way, how it's influenced culture beyond our (individual) control, insinuates why these institutions are so preposterously expensive, and proposes thoughts on how to fix it (TL;DR prolly won't get fixed)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/meritoc...

https://archive.ph/OC81c

Yeah, education should be free. Record all lectures and put them out there. Charge a small fee to view them if you must but lecturers repeating themselves is not my idea of a great use of their time. Yes, I know lots of lectures are already published.

It really depends on the subject matter and the institution's focus (and tier). For disciplines where foundational knowledge remains relatively unchanged (say, Latin) recorded lectures could be an efficient way to disseminate information without requiring professors to repeat the same material. A "flipped classroom" would offer opportunities for more dynamic interaction and deeper understanding, and of course this would cost money.

However, as a professor myself in a rapidly evolving STEM field adjacent to AI, I update at least 20% of my course materials each year to keep pace with new developments. As it happens, about a third of the new content is derived from my research group's latest work. Recording lectures isn't a one-time effort; it would require constant updates to remain relevant (and let me tell you, if you want to get the voice-over right, it is a lot more time-consuming and soul-crushing than simply turning up in class and giving a live lecture).

The value of live lectures goes beyond just "transmitting" content. They offer real-time interaction, immediate feedback, and dynamic discussions that adapt to the students' understanding. This level of interaction devilishly difficult to replicate in recorded formats.

I would ramble on more, but I need to return to the lecture materials I am developing for this Friday on Vision-Language Models :P

Its not the lecture thats valuable. Its everything else. Particularly research opportunities. That’s how you get really solid in your domain. The difference between a student who only took class in the subject and a student who applied those concepts in a lab environment to make contributions is staggering. Its like the difference between someone who watched a video on engine maintenance and someone who has not only watched that but has been rebuilding engines themselves for 2-3 years.

Watching non-interactive lectures is a small part of the overall experience. I'm not commenting on whether the experience is 'worth it', but assuming the only thing people get is the ability to watch lectures doesn't make the point.

A big part of it is having a long-term peer group of people who were disciplined and motivated enough to get into MIT and succeed there. Arguably true for any university. We're products of our environments, and if you surround yourselves with hardworking people it rubs off on you.

On the other hand, many people act like "talking to professors over beer" (or to your classmates, for that matter) is supposed to add "value" to the college experience, when it's perfectly possible to get at least a bachelor's and a master's without ever doing that (source: I did).

Two people with the same GPA and same piece of paper from the same college, may have gotten different amounts of lasting value from their college experience.

Why should people be compelled to provide education for free? Compelling work without compensation is slavery.

Is this a Good Will Hunting reference in disguise?

Sorry, but this is peanuts for MIT and merely a performative stunt.

Time to tax these endowments.