<p>My question has to do with MIT but not exactly on the former topic. I hope it's okay. I went with my son to an MIT recruit night and they said something about most of their students ending up with no more than ten thousand dollars of debt after college, because they try to meet your financial position and need. Has anyone found this to be accurate? I'm just not certain if I'm remembering exactly what the recruiter said that night.</p>
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<p>That’s the claim, but remember that MIT is quoting averages. For those middle-class families that don’t get tuition discounts (i.e., fin aid in the form of pell grants or MIT scholarships/grants, as opposed to loans) the picture is decidedly different. </p>
<p>It’s funny too, because MIT likes to point out that an MIT grad is well-positioned to get a good job after graduation, which makes those loans not so hard to pay off in a timely fashion; yet if that’s the case, why is it only the middle-class kids who are being asked to shoulder huge loan debt? Don’t the kids on fin-aid have the same job prospects coming out of MIT? What makes it even more insidious is that these same middle-class families that are being asked to to pay the full sticker-price are excluded from many outside scholarships because the majority of these require that the family qualify for “need-based aid” as determined by the FAFSA. Same goes for a number of “paid community service” positions in and around MIT (although to be fair, the UROP and other corporate positions do not require a FAFSA determination of need).</p>
<p>Dear CarmenSanDiego,</p>
<p>I am a little confused by what you mean by “middle class”. I think of middle class as families like ours, a family of 5 that makes between 70 and 80K. Families like that do, in fact, qualify for significant aid at MIT. I grant you that MIT isn’t as generous as some other schools such as Caltech, Princeton, Vanderbilt, and Harvard. Those schools packaged their aid with no loans for our family and MIT packaged the aid with loans.</p>
<p>But, with a lot of creativity, some exceeding frugality on our part, lots of work on my son’s part, and some outside scholarships, my son should graduate with 10K or less in loans. It would have been easier financially for him to go to one of the other schools but this is what he chose so I guess he’ll find a way to make it work!</p>
<p>I am from a middle class family of 6 making ~70k a year. No businesses or extensive assets or trust funds or whatever. My expected family contribution is about $3600 and I am expected to take out $3000 in student loans per year and then work to make $3000 per year. MIT gave me ~46K per year in grant money(I mean you have to reapply for finaid each year, but assuming things don’t change for my fam).</p>
<p>on the other hand, I have noticed from talking with other 2016 admits that people who are probably the middle class that CarmenSanDiego was referring to do get considerably less finaid from MIT. People who come from a family that makes maybe 100-150K probably don’t qualify for much finaid, but can’t necessarily pay 30K, 40K, or 50K each year.</p>
<p>^ To illustrate the pain for some families:</p>
<p>Two working teachers from rural Oregon might have a combined family income of around $70,000 to $80,000 per year. Let’s say they have 4 children. They live in an area where the cost of living is fairly low, and where they could purchase a decent house for around $160,000. They can expect to receive some substantial help from MIT, along the lines described by IsaacM.</p>
<p>However…</p>
<p>Two working teachers from San Jose, California or New York City might have a combined income of around $120,000-$150,000. Let’s say they also have 4 children. They live in an area where the cost of living is very, very high. They could not purchase a comparable house for less than $500,000. In contrast to the family in rural Oregon, they might expect minimal help from MIT and many other schools.</p>
<p>Agreed that living in So. Cal. is more expensive than living in other areas of the country. Our gas prices have been the highest in the country and food, water, and for some, utilities, seem to be higher than most other areas of the country. I don’t know if MIT takes that into consideration or not.</p>
<p>I think the bottom line is that their endowment simply isn’t as high as some other schools; thus, their aid isn’t quite as good.</p>
<p>In the end, if a student or family feels MIT is worth it, I guess they’ll have to take the good with the bad. Otherwise, there are usually other more generous schools for top students.</p>
<p>Kids who don’t have to take loans typically don’t have many resources for clothing or recreation and expect to help care for family when they graduate. Think if the mom whose husband disappeared when she got cancer and who used her retirement savings to save the house only to have a terrible accident taking her off work fir two yearsal while she is supplementing the poor public school offerings with books and music lessons and wearing ancient clothing so her child can someday be chsllened in college. That child knows he will need to help her survive retirement and is hoping she makes it till he gets his Ph.D. He wonders if he can afford to get married and allow his wife to stay home when the kids are home. There is no one to ask for money when he runs low, so he lives and eats very cheap and tries to save every penny to share if he can, working two jobs in summer. Realistically, $10K might be a much bigger piece if the lie for someone like that than for a kid who will mainly be concerned about setting up a cool apartment, getting hot wheels and going to Jackson Hole to ski at Christmas. All things are not equal. Is $10K really that much for the average MIT grad?</p>
<p>I have to stop writing from my phone. Can’t see much. Pardon the many typos please.</p>
<p>I’m not sure I completely agree with CalAlum regarding SFS disregarding the location and cost of living where the income is earned. I have seen many students apply for aid, and as far as I am able to work out from observing that dataset, the approach at MIT (and several other comparative schools is):</p>
<p>1) Identify the maximum that the family can afford to pay
2) Ask for all of that
3) Give the rest, usually in the form of scholarships. Loans make up no part of an MIT financial aid package.**</p>
<p>Given that the real goal is to extract what the family can afford, Student Financial Services is indeed quite sensitive to the local costs of living, in that it restricts what the family can actually afford to pay. This is why it is very hard to predict aid based solely on income level, the expense level matters as much. You can have a very high income, but several students in fee-paying schools, granny in a hospital bed in the house surrounded by machines that go bing, and have little or no discretionary income for MIT (or anyone else) to grab.</p>
<p>This is not unusual. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth all operate similar policies, with similar flexibility.</p>
<p>** It should be noted, that while the large majority of MIT students graduate debt-free, roughly 30% of students do opt to take on loans to cover some or all of the student contribution. MIT actively supports this option for those who wish to take it.</p>
<p>In my financial aid letter, part of my award was in fact loans. So I do think that loans are a component of MIT Finaid…</p>
<p>The average middle class family makes about 45,000 a year. 130k is nowhere near middle class.</p>
<p>Sent from my SPH-M930 using CC</p>