Its not about students or education, these colleges are all about institutional needs. Business is business and a cup of tea is a cup of tea.
“The trustees of Princeton University have adopted the University’s operating budget for 2018-19, which includes a 7.7 percent increase to $174.2 million in the undergraduate financial aid budget to continue to ensure that a Princeton education is affordable for every admitted student.”
I do agree that tuition rates at colleges in the U.S. is way too high. I don’t know the realistic and attainable solutions to this problem.
“The average annual bill next year for students on aid is projected to decrease from $11,505 to $11,050, while the fee package (which includes tuition, room and board) for full-tuition paying families will increase from $62,750 to $65,810. For the 19th year in a row, Princeton will have the lowest fee package in the Ivy League.”
Given the current status quo across the U.S. colleges as a whole with no universal remedies in sight, however, I do commend Princeton’s continual effort to make the education affordable for all who are admitted across economic spectrum.
My son is finishing up his gap year, and we just received the FA package for 2018-19 from Princeton. According to the NPC I ran, we suppose to be tuition free (no, our income isn’t $180,000, so I don’t know where that came from), but I suspect that the actual FA offer with EFC being about $3K higher than expected was probably because he’s a gap year student already committed to Princeton. It’s still hard for us to complain about the fact that we’re able to send our son almost tuition free and with less financial burden than sending his older brother who attends the flagship state university.
That may be true, depending on the institution, but it’s not because they like giving money to asset managers. They do it because they expect those managers to produce a superior return, and they’re paying for performance. Of course they’d prefer to pay Vanguard a management fee of 0.04% to produce the return of the S&P 500 than pay a hedge fund manager a 1-2% management fee plus a share of the profits he earns for them. If that hedge fund manager outperforms the market by several percent, though - particularly important if the market is going down - he (or she) has earned what they’ve been paid. What matters is net return (after fees), and PRINCO, which manages the Princeton endowment and pays investment managers a lot of fees, has had very good net returns over time - if they hadn’t because they overpaid investment managers, they’d be fired (as has happened at Harvard). The income reflected in those net returns is why Princeton can afford to spend $174m a year on financial aid.
I don’t think one thing follows from the other. If Princeton lowers its tuition sticker price, quite apart from whatever brand damage it might suffer relative to its competitors, it will definitely receive less tuition money and will therefore have less to spend on all the things a world-renowned research university spends money on, including academic programming, financial aid, debt service and expense related to facilities, which covers dorms, labs, classrooms and libraries as well as rock walls and aquatic centers. And, by the way, a lot of the cost of that rock wall or aquatic center was probably donated by someone who saw an opportunity to slap their name on it and thinks Princeton should have world-class rock walls and aquatic centers - maybe because they were a champion swimmer at Princeton many years before, for example. People aren’t lining up to donate money for the purpose of modernizing electrical systems and plumbing in university buildings. If Princeton thinks it needs to build that rock wall or aquatic center (and maybe funds it with alumni donations) because they think it will help them to attract the kinds of students they want, like championship swimmers, and that having champion swim teams will, for example, give Princeton the publicity of sending a swimmer to the Olympics and encourage alumni to donate more so that Princeton will end up with more money available to modernize electrical systems and plumbing in its buildings, or hire more professors, or fund more research, or increase financial aid, are we sure we know better?
I get that it seems unfair, but since your son is attending his flagship state university, I infer that you’re one of the roughly 325 million (about 4% of the world’s population of 7.6 billion) living in the United States of America and whose children are able to attend such institutions because of who their parents are and where they live. For most kids who don’t live here, that’s unimaginable - and might seem unfair.
I’m sure I’m not alone when I say my kids’ college cost depended, in fact, on how much their Mommy made.
wow