“Here’s what families who received some federal aid paid for a Stanford education in the 2012-2013 school year, after taking into account free financial aid (in other words grants, not loans) such as institutional, federal, and state grants: …”
http://qz.com/375312/stanfords-free-tuition-benefits-less-than-02-of-american-college-students/
That headline is comically misleading and just bad journalism.
Of course it benefits so few since according to the article there are only 3414 full time undergrads on aid at Stanford. vs. the 19.2 million total college students.
Did the author expect that Stanford was going to pay for college for non-Stanford students?
The relevant metric is of those 19.2 million college students how many would the program have benefited IF they got into Stanford. I expect that the number would be very, very high.
The headline does seem kind of obvious . . . clearly Stanford’s policies can only affect a very small percentage of US college students.
I think the point the author is making though is that for families qualifying for financial aid, Stanford and a few other private schools with the money to offer generous financial aid can have a lower net cost than a local state university . . . true, and this is one reason why these schools have seen applications go up so much in recent years.
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If that was the point he was trying to make, he should have made that point and had the headline reflect that. A headline saying the program benefits less than 0.02% implies that it doesn’t have much of an impact. Duh. It only impacts Stanford students, and Stanford students only represent about .04% of the college population,
The article is a joke and this thread should be removed. “Oh, the Stanford program isn’t that good because it only effects .02% - I read that on CC”.