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<p>I don’t see any of this as having a moral component. College is something we buy, just like any other service. If I went to a store, or engaged a consultant who gave discounts to people based on how much money they made I would be irritated. The way colleges price their product irritates me. It has nothing to do with morality or moral failings. It’s business.</p>
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<p>Well what about if you wanted a pony and the stable was selling the ponies for $10 to kids with poor parents, but wanted to charge your parents $1,000? Would that irritate you?</p>
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<p>It’s not about me and mine. It’s a business deal. Colleges sell education. Education should be priced reasonably for everyone. And everyone includes people with money.</p>
<p>What if colleges got out of the aide business completely. If we restructured the model to be more like TANF or WIC or MediCal…you qualify for certain $$ based on certain criteria. These criteria can include financial situation, parental situation and academic qualifications. I’d suggest when the financial situation is taken into account, it looks at the past - say - 15 years. This would account for an actual picture as far as how capable a family was to save for college.</p>
<p>As such, a common pool of funds is distributed and you then get to choose where to spend your ‘free money’. You can take your coupon and purchase into a high priced situtaion (WIC at Wholefoods) or you can take your coupon and purchase a different option (Safeway).</p>
<p>After all the high falutin’ stuff is said and done, this really truly is a business decision.</p>
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<p>Some will say yes, but I urge you to see this as a business deal between your family and the college. Nobody else is involved in the decision. You need to choose what is best for you. This money will not magically help some poor person if you decline it.</p>
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<p>If $1,000 was the fair market value of a pony, then no, it wouldn’t irritate me. I’d be pleased that poor people got a chance to have a pony. I don’t want to trade my privileged life with anyone who’s poor just to get a $10 pony, any more than I want to trade my grocery budget for WIC so I can get free milk and cheese. </p>
<p>Then again, no matter the size of my bank account, I would consider myself spiritually poor if I spent my time begrudging what “poorer” people have. Nothing prevents me from giving away my belongings if I want to live like them and get their so-called “breaks.”</p>
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<p>I agree. I see nothing morally wrong with taking a merit scholarship someplace even if you could afford the college without it. If you earned it, then you earned it.</p>
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<p>My beef isn’t with the poor person. It is with the business that is pricing the product. I am not begruding anyone anything. The business is the one that is ripping me off, not the person who is receiving the discount. I would accept whatever discount was offered me (assuming nothing illegal) and I assume others will as well.</p>
<p><a href=“#165”>quote</a> I don’t see any of this as having a moral component. College is something we buy, just like any other service. If I went to a store, or engaged a consultant who gave discounts to people based on how much money they made I would be irritated. The way colleges price their product irritates me. It has nothing to do with morality or moral failings. It’s business.
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A college is not a tore, but a non-profit organization providing an essential service. Need base aid is no different than using a sliding scale for prices, which is done at many non-profit daycares and medical facilities, other nonprofits that provide essentail services.</p>
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That’s what federal need-based aid is. If your income is low enough to get federal aid, you can take it where you want. Some state aid works the same way (though our state gives different aid for in-state schools, depending on whether they are public or private).</p>
<p>When you get your coupon, you can take it to your store of choice - and you may make that choice based on their pricing, which may or may not be the same for all customers. And you may be able to reduce your price even further by combining that coupon with other coupons or discounts, so of which you get based on previous behavior. Private colleges and individual states have the right to decide how to spend their own institutional money. They can use it to attract students who cannot otherwise afford to pay, or they can use it to attract those they believe will enhance their campus in some way.</p>
<p>In D’s case, small private colleges are generally less expensive than our state flagship. When you throw merit aid in, it makes a couple of generous OOS flagships more affordable than the privates due to automatic merit offers, while our state flagship only becomes more affordable if she were to qualify for their highly competitve merit scholarship.</p>
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<p>A college is no different from any other service provider.</p>
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<p>Well, then feel free not to patronize that business. It’s not like you HAVE to apply to a fancy private school. I’m not a huge fan of athletic scholarships, but if I really had a moral objection, I’d refuse to send my kids to schools that offered them. I didn’t (one of my kids’ schools does offer athletic scholarships) so, well, therefore, obviously it’s not a true moral plank for me. </p>
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<p>I disagree. A housekeeping service is a service provider, but I don’t see anyone agitating for financial aid so that poor people can have maids. Education and health care are the two goods where we as a society DO generally feel some level of basic-should-be-made-available-to-all. The details of how can be picked over, but these are not viewed as markets like the car market, where no one gets upset that poor people can’t afford Rolls Royces, or the vacation market, where no one gets upset that poor people can’t afford round-the-world cruises.</p>
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<p>Well, as I said-this isn’t about morality for me. It’s about business.</p>
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<p>Well-isn’t that why we fund state universities? To provide university education that is affordable to all?</p>
<p>I don’t see why private universities adopt the business policies they have. They seem crazy to me. Private universities have no requirement to make their product accessible to everyone on the planet. </p>
<p>It isn’t about morality for me. It just seems like poor business practice.</p>
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<p>For-profit companies throughout the economy have not been raising their prices as fast as the so-called non-profits in education. In reality a non-profit insulated from market forces is often run for the benefit of the people who work in it, not the people who are supposed to be served. Universities have been “captured” by increasing numbers of high-paid administrators and professors who prefer to teach few courses, on esoteric subjects.</p>
<p>Proudparent - you’re right, it’s a business decision. It is their decision that they want to attract certain students, and to do so they spend their institutional money to encourage certain students to attend their school. Is that any different than Kohls offering a 30% discount to some, but not all of their cardholders? Is it any different than my local grocery store offering discounts to those who use their loyalty card? Even in the exaple you give of a pony, there could be a reason why a business might offer a $10 pony to a particular low income family. The state run stable offers the cheap polies to poor families. The for-profit stable mostly offers $1000 ponies, but makes 3 or 4 ponies available for $10, to select customers, either because those customers have influence (and will encourage others to buy their ponies for $1000), or because they are particularly good at riding ponies. If they are good at riding ponies, there may be some distant future benefit to the business, though there might not be much direct current benefit (unless the purchaser fits the first category and has influence).</p>
<p>If it was a bad business decision to award merit aid, colleges wouldn’t do it. Some already don’t, because they can attracts the best students without it - they don’t need it. Others do because they won’t attract the same students without merit aid. They are right that all would need to end merit aid for them to still be able to attract the same set of students. But if they do that, they will all then need to do something else to make themselves stand out, in order to get students to pick them over other similarly priced schools.</p>
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<p>Except insofar as a college is subsidized six ways to Sunday by favorable tax treatment and other direct and indirect public subsidies, including:
<p>So a college, even a private college, is not just a “business.” It is in large measure a taxpayer-supported enterprise. Why do we lavish all these public subsidies on colleges and universities? Well, because through our political processes we have decided as a society (as have all other advanced economies) that higher education is not just a private good to be provided through markets, but in some measure a public good that benefits society at large, and that we are therefore willing to invest substantial sums of public money in the nation’s higher education enterprise. To that extent, colleges’ financial aid policies, which effectively determine who will and will not be able to attend, are matters of public concern. I’m not suggesting those policies should be set through the political process. I am suggesting that we ought to be cognizant of what those policies are, and consider what we are actually getting in return for all the subsidies we’re handing out. My own view would be that colleges that effectively price out low-income students by skimping on need-based aid in order to marshal resources that end up going to more affluent students in the form of merit aid are . . . well, let’s just say that in my book, they’re not doing the people’s business, and it raises serious questions in my mind as to whether they ought to continue to receive all that public largesse.</p>
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<p>Because that’s the positioning they choose.<br>
Nothing prevents Harvard, tomorrow, from saying either one of these two things:
<p>2) We’ve decided to eliminate any need-based aid entirely; from today forward, we are going to price Harvard at $100,000/year. If you don’t have the cash? Sorry, don’t bother applying. Full-pay or bust. Your state university is that-a-way if you don’t like it.</p>
<p>The brand implications of either statement are not what Harvard wishes to stand for. Pricing is a tool of marketing just like any other tool. From their standpoint, they are making smart business decisions. If they didn’t feel their decisions were achieving their goals, they’d change them.</p>
<p>I understand that they choose it because they choose it. However, it does not make sense to me. Most customers cannot afford their product and they do not have a truly systematic way of deciding who will pay what price. It really makes no sense to me. It isn’t only Harvard.</p>
<p>BTW-the state universities in my state absolutely have merit aid as well as need based aid.</p>
<p>^^ If Harvard adopted Pizzagirl’s policy #2, I am fairly confident there would be a serious push to revoke its tax-exempt status. And I would support that. But that’s not going to happen because Harvard implicitly understands that as a heavily tax-advantaged and otherwise substantially taxpayer-supported institution, it is not just a private business, but instead it has a quasi-public mission, and it believes that mission is best served through a policy of generous need-based financial aid.</p>
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<p>A tax supported institution can only receive $$ from those who PAY the taxes. One can safely make the assumption that those who qualify as full pay will have already contributed substantially to the tax $$ given to these institutions. And conversely, the need based attendee, because of SES will not have contributed at any level near the full pay attendee to this tax pool. So, in the end, the full pay has already paid more than the sticker price.</p>
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<p>If it were accompanied by cutting the total cost from almost $60K to $30K, I think the change in policy might have as many supporters as detractors.</p>