<p>I actually thought the threshold was higher than 65. The Ivies are not the only schools that do this. Lafayette, for example, a decent but not stellar school. If you make less than 75K, all your need will be met and there will be zero in loans. Under 100k and all your need will be met with an annual max loan amount of $3500. Good deal.</p>
<p>Right. Now your only problem is to get in. ;)</p>
<p>Honestly,what is it with the Ivies and Rice and not giving merit based scholarships? I get that it isn’t explicitly discrimination, but come on, it’s almost impossible to afford one of these schools if you’re just middle class like most Americans. I can guarantee that these schools miss out on some of the best and brightest because of how their financial aid is set up. You either have to be rich and pay out of pocket or low-income/foreign and get need-based aid to attend. I’m surprised there has never been a lawsuit over this.</p>
<p>That’s a reason, though not by any measure one of the main reasons, why Harvard gets so many applicants. That’s also why it’s so difficult to gain acceptance. Many say it’s a lot easier finding like scholarships at a school without name recognition than getting any of Harvards, and looking at the stats, I have to agree. If your stats are such where you are good candidate, then you can probably get a smilar package at a school that is not well known. </p>
<p>I agree Ostpruessen. Colleges have been getting away with this “parents are responsible until the child is 24” BS for a long time. I’d like to see them get sued over this. But the fact of the matter is that there simply is not enough money even to pay for even a small glimmer of those whose parents truly cannot pay for any of the college when it comes to the college funds. So, it’s done on the basis that those who have the least pay the least, those whose income and asset levels indicate they should be able to pay are supposed to pay, and those in the middle are given gradated amounts to pay. It all falls apart at most schools anyways because hardly any schools meet full need, so everyone gets the shaft except those who are well to do enough truly not to feel the cost. Foreign students do not get much advantage at all, as there are only very few schools that are both need blind and will meet the costs of international students. </p>
<p>There is that pocket of students who have parents who are deemed to be able to pay for college but can’t due to financial mismanagement/misfortunes/cirucmstances or just won’t, and those students are not eligible for financial aid simply because of who their parents are.</p>
<p>My close friend’s DD was accepted to a number of highly selective schools but her father, a surgeon, refused to pay. A divorce situation and he just said, no. So she had to commute and go to a local school. All of those acceptances and none would give a dime to a student with a jerk for a father, despite her stellar achievements.</p>
<p>
Exactly my point, which makes these kinds of schools impossible to pay for if you are middle class and especially if you are a white male like I am. I’m a liberal, but it does bother me that the composition of many schools does not resemble the composition of the general population at all. If anything, race and gender should not be considered when selecting applicants and the amount of tuition payed should be proportional to the total amount of financial assets an applicant’s family possesses. That is to say that if you are wealthy, you should pay more and vice versa if you are low-income.</p>
<p>Every year, about 400 people turn down a Harvard acceptance to go elsewhere, and overwhelmingly that “elsewhere” is Yale, Stanford, Princeton, or MIT, and maybe a few to other Ivies. The number of people who turn down an actual Harvard acceptance to pay less at an institution that gave them merit aid is, at most, maybe a dozen people a year, and they tend to be going to top-quality institutions that have ultra-competitive scholarships with lots of benefits other than just the money. It’s rational to choose to go to Duke with a Robertson Scholarship rather than paying for Harvard; I’m not certain it’s rational to go to the University of Alabama on one of its National Merit Scholarships vs. paying for Harvard. I know personally maybe 20-30 people who have turned down a Harvard acceptance, and not one of them did it mainly for economic reasons. (Well, maybe my mother did. She was fighting with her mother, and secretly applied for and won a full scholarship to Mills College in Oakland CA. She turned down Radcliffe, her mother’s alma mater, to take that, even though her mother and grandfather would have been happy to pay for Radcliffe. This was in 1948.)</p>
<p>Harvard has much better financial aid for kids from families that earn more than $100,000/year than almost anywhere else, including all those colleges with merit aid, so by the time the dust clears Harvard is usually within striking distance of a student’s other reasonable options.</p>
<p>Of course, lots of people never apply to Harvard at all, and fear of paying too much may be part of that decision, but (a) that’s usually based on ignorance about the financial aid policies, not actual analysis, and (b) how many of them would actually have been accepted at Harvard, displacing people who applied and were accepted? Very, very few. Harvard doesn’t pretend that is gets every single one of the best and the brightest, but I don’t think it is missing gobs of them because of its financial aid policies.</p>
<p>My experience is that for my son, other than our state flagship university, which offered him full tuition, room, board, books, an educational stipend and a little walking around money, Harvard was the least expensive school he could go to.</p>
<p>I don’t make a sufficiently-low amount of income to qualify for the near-free deal, and I don’t make so much that we get no financial aid (which tapers off to about $0 at about $250K per year in income, depending on your circumstances). I’m in that middle spot - middle income, not tons and tons of money.</p>
<p>But Harvard’s financial aid is sufficient that I can pay for it out of my ordinary income, and don’t need loans to do it.</p>
<p>So, I don’t think that Harvard, in particular, is pricing too many folks out.</p>
<p>“Which makes these kinds of schools impossible to pay for if you are middle class and especially if you are a white male like I am.”</p>
<p>THAT IS ABSOLUTELY UNTRUE! Many white, middle class families, including mine, are sending their kids to Harvard and Yale for thousands less than the cost of tuition at their flagship state school – and that includes the merit aid that they would have received at the state school!</p>
<p>Ostpruessen, I agree that there is a “hole in the dough nut” that is unfair. No question about it. But what is the solution? It’s got to be a solution that does not cost more money; just using what is out there. Any resdistribution of such funds that I have worked on in theory in the whole area of making college possible for more students, means even a tighter squeeze because the sad truth of the matter is that though in a situation where a student from a low income student is accepted to a college that meet full need, that student will be fully funded, that is a very rare incident, an outlier. Most low income high school graduates do not go to a four year college, much less a sleep away one or even go full time. Most do not get the support, direction and prep to even think about applying to such schools where full need can be met, much less getting accepted to such schools. Many can’t even afford to go to a communty college with the costs met, since things like transportation, administrative headaches, all are too much when ones family cannot help at all. So it’s not like being in the low economic strata is a panacea and there is a train for all of these students to go to highly selective schools on a full ride. But, yes, if such a student manages to get accepted to a school that will give him full need, he has a way to go without involving his parents, whereas the student whose parents are deemed able to pay but can’t or won’t doesn’t have that venue.</p>
<p>Gibby, it is true that there are kids whose families are deemed able to pay but won’t or can’t, so they cannot go to a private college. Though Harvard, Princeton, Yale do have a more geneorus definiton of need than most schools, there are kids who can’t get the support for those school, and if they have parents that should be able to pay, they are not getting any financial aid. I know such a kid personally. Divorce situation, and Dad refused to pay, so tough luck to the kid. </p>
<p>Though a school like Harvard has a very generous definiton of middle class the vast majority of schools are much tighter in giving our financial aid, and most gap. So when one is talking about all of the private schools, not just Harvard, which is a very special case and not at all indicative of the situation, it is very difficult of middle income families to afford such schools, and the amount that the schools say a family should pay is often way over what is affordable.</p>
<p>cptofthehouse: As the OP posted this thread on the Harvard forum and OstPruessen responded to it, both should understand that when comparing apples to apples – students from white, black, brown, yellow, or red middle class families who are deemed able to pay and can – for many of them, Harvard is a cheaper alternative to public colleges, even when factoring in merit scholarships given by public schools. That is one reason why applications to Harvard, Yale and Princeton have risen so much over the past five years.</p>
<p>
And I did propose a solution to that predicament. Charge based on income. To each according to his own, no? Those who can afford to pay more should be obligated to and those who can afford to pay little should do so. The potential for a lack of coöperate is present, I understand, but it’s just a thought.</p>
<p>My response was to post #23 which extends the range of colleges to outside of just Harvard.</p>
<p>Kids whose parents will not pay, do not alway go to work. Some find merit awards, go locally on loans, work part time. It’s not an all or nothing situation. I’ve seen it a number of times, usually in divorce situations.</p>
<p>
This, I’m not sure about. It depends on how we define middle class. My dad makes roughly $250,000 per a year before taxes, and since none of my siblings are in college currently, I would end up paying full-tuition to Harvard if I chose to attend. UT-Austin (my state’s flagship university), by comparison, offered me a full-tuition scholarship for four years. I got accepted in to both, as well as Brown, but it would be a financial burden on my family to pay nearly $60,000 out of pocket for me to go to Harvard, especially because I plan to go on to med school while my little brother would be in the middle of his college career.</p>
<p>OstPruessen – What you propose is exactly what all of the Ivies (and most other equivalent colleges) do, with only a few twists. They make what people are asked to pay depend on a combination of their income and their assets/savings (because it’s possible to be very wealthy and to have a low income). As with any system based on a broad principle, working out the details can be difficult, and sometimes there are results that seem harsh. (You don’t hear much about this at Harvard, but sometimes colleges are unrealistic about what they think people who own small businesses, or valuable farmland, can pay.)</p>
<p>cptofthehouse: Divorce situations/dads refusing to pay can be heartbreaking. However, I think the colleges have to be pretty strict about this, because once you start NOT penalizing kids whose dads (mostly it’s dads) refuse to pay, then there will be a LOT more dads refusing to pay. And even a LOT more couples separating, and the dads refusing to pay. From a social policy standpoint, having an unrebuttable presumption that both parents will pay is pretty much the rule that causes the least harm.</p>
<p>Even some of the other schools that accepted my son would have required little or no debt. Only Johns Hopkins would have really required any significant amount of debt over 4 years - perhaps around $40,000 total.</p>
<p>JHS,</p>
<p>“You don’t hear much about this at Harvard, but sometimes colleges are unrealistic about what they think people who own small businesses, or valuable farmland, can pay.”</p>
<p>This is true even at Harvard. I own a small business and was a little surprised at the initial offer of financial aid. However, when I explained to the financial aid folks that the main chunk of “assets” were not available to be used on tuition, they readily understood and adjusted the financial aid package to take into account my individual circumstances.</p>
<p>Conversely, I found that Johns Hopkins had absolutely no interest in re-visiting my son’s offer of financial aid from them.</p>
<p>“It depends on how we define middle class. My dad makes roughly $250,000 per a year before taxes”</p>
<p>Your definition of middle class does not fit any college’s definition of middle class.</p>
<p>60K off that 250K is not just a drop in the bucket though. And they clearly define middle class differently than I do, because while my dad’s job pays well, he’s still considered to be in middle management. And if you look at these sample academic models you will notice that most of them would describe my family as upper middle class. <a href=“American middle class - Wikipedia”>American middle class - Wikipedia;
Anyways, this is clearly an endless loop is it not?</p>
<p>@OstPruessen: Let me give you a real world example. Our family makes about $150k before taxes. We have two kids in college. My daughter is attending Harvard (total cost for tuition, room, and board = $18k) and my son is attending Yale (total cost for tuition, room, and board = $14k). We are currently paying for tuition out of income and savings; no loans. Now, let’s do some math – in total, we are paying $32K for two kids in college, which represents 21.3% of our income. For comparison, if we use the same percentage for your family ($250K times 21.3% = $53,250), your parents would be spending the same percentage as my family for college costs. Granted, our family has two kids in college and your family will have one in college. But, your family makes 100K more.</p>