Look, anyone who thinks that poor people have it better off when scoring financial aid for college can very easily put themselves in the exact same position. Quit your high paying job, give away your assets and become poor. It’s much easier to do than it is for a poor person to become wealthy (or even middle class). What’s that you say, you would never do something like that? Than stop complaining.
@FCCDAD This was in response to my post about how the majority of Americans, regardless of income/wealth tend to view themselves as “middle class” So yes, by the definition of a perception about working hard and saving, almost everyone thinks they do that.
Happily, you can develop the resolve to be full pay wherever you go and set a wonderful example for the rest of us.
“Statistically, you’re just plain wrong; it is nearly impossible to “get your life together” and rise out of poverty in this country. Basically, if you’re poor or born into a poor household, you’ll very probably be poor for life.”
Thousands of immigrants to this country are proving this wrong year after year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
“The correlation between parents’ income and their children’s income in the United States is estimated between .4 and .6. If there was perfect economic mobility and being raised in poverty was not a disadvantage, you would expect to see 20% of children who started in that bottom quintile remaining there as adults. That is not what research shows. According to a 2012 Pew Economic Mobility Project study[14] 43% of children born into the bottom quintile remain in that bottom quintile as adults. Correspondingly, 40% of children raised in the top quintile will remain there as adults; 63% of children in the top quintile will remain above the middle. Additionally, large shifts in income between childhood and adulthood are very unlikely to occur. Only 4% of those raised in the bottom quintile moved up to the top quintile as adults, and only 8% of children born into the top quintile fell to the bottom.[14] These findings have led researchers to conclude that “opportunity structures create and determine future generations’ chances for success. Hence, our lot in life is at least partially determined by where we grow up, and this is partially determined by where our parents grew up, and so on.”[15]”
“Several large studies of mobility in developed countries in recent years have found the US among the lowest in mobility.[3][7] One study (“Do Poor Children Become Poor Adults?”)[7][11][17] found that of nine developed countries, the United States and United Kingdom had the lowest intergenerational vertical social mobility with about half of the advantages of having a parent with a high income passed on to the next generation."
“At virtually every level, education in America tends to perpetuate rather than compensate for existing inequalities. The reasons are threefold. First, the K through 12 education system is simply not very strong and thus is not an effective way to break the link between parental background and a child’s eventual success. … Second, because K–12 education is financed largely at the state and local level, resources devoted to education are closely linked with where people live and with the property wealth of their neighbors. For this and other reasons, poor children tend to go to poor schools and more advantaged children to good schools. … Finally, access both to a quality preschool experience and to higher education continues to depend quite directly on family resources.”[48]
So it is bad, but it is just not quite as bad as I thought it was.
Since you have provided a link to the article, I highly recommend that those who are really interested in the topic go to the first sources, particularly the more timely Pew Trusts study referenced in the quoted paragraph above (some of the references in the article are too out of date to be useful.) It’s an easy, and thought-provoking read. Some things are not surprising at all. If you are born into poverty, in a household without regular wage income, guess what? You are going to have a hard time building any kind of wealth that you could use to attempt to move up the economic ladder. Welfare does not lead to wealth, and the struggle to escape the welfare-dependent life is a mighty struggle, and few make it out. That said, even our poorest these days are richer than the poor of the past and have more opportunities than the truly poor have had throughout human history. If your parents and grandparents already did all the hard work, and you enjoy the benefits of their labor and sacrifice, and the comforts of life at the top of that ladder, you are likely going to remain at the top (barring any financial catastrophe.) Again, no surprise there.
Anyway, read the Pew Trusts study yourself:
Thousands of immigrants to this country are proving this wrong year after year.
I didn’t think we let in the poor ones.
Most refugees/asylum seekers are poor. Some family-based immigrants and grad students are poor. And do not forget illegal immigrants and people who overstayed their visa. Even some insourced underpaid H1Bs and post-docs.
However, immigrants are generally among the most highly motivated people, since they moved to an entirely new and unfamiliar country. I.e. there is a (self-)selection effect here that makes them not exactly comparable to non-immigrants from similar SES backgrounds.
So claiming that there are no opportunities for poor people in this country is actually not correct. They just need to be highly motivated.
Even being highly motivated doesn’t guarantee any success at all. For example, think about bunch of high stat international students kids who are rejected from colleges. High motivation can’t solve being needy in FA, and therefore being less favorable than other candidates.
Paul, not clear why you believe that US colleges owe FA to the international kids while there are a lot of US residents who cannot afford college in their own country. US colleges are mostly luxury goods. My nearest Community College looks much more impressive than the foreign University I graduated from.
Your high stats motivated poor international kids can get a perfectly good cheap or free education in their own country and come here to use their education to become poor grad students or exploited H1B workers. There is really no discrimination here in most fields based on where you got your undergrad degree.
But why would any poor person would want to come here if the country sucks and there is no social mobility (as per post up-thread)?
“US colleges are mostly luxury goods.” I take issue with this; US colleges are as essential to our economy, education the population AND doing research, as K-12 primary education.
Not everyone needs to go to college, but we ALL need the colleges, everywhere, to continue producing graduates and research. They are no more a luxury than the Fire Department, even if we never have a fire at our home we still need the FD to make sure the whole neighborhood doesn’t burn down when someone else has a fire. The benefit of having colleges is simply not that my child gets a degree or a job; I’m a consumer of their work even if I had no children and hadn’t gone to college myself.
“But why would any poor person would want to come here if the country sucks and there is no social mobility (as per post up-thread)?”
-Because even poverty here can be better than life in some other places. There are various countries that have more poverty, more disease, and more violence than we have, and coming north to the US is simply more feasible than heading to Europe for many of them. Whether this country sucks or not rather depends on what country you compare it to, no?
I did not really question the need for higher education institutions but US colleges are implemented as luxury goods comparing to the colleges abroad. They price themselves out of reach for more and more US students. They are really businesses in competition with each other. Run by people who used to sell shirts that now sell college spots. Every year more spots will be sold abroad. At some point the question arise why they are non-profit and receive federal support.
Who said US colleges owe money to foreign students?? I didn’t…
We make around 250k and consider ourselves middle class. But we have 5 kids and huge student loan debt and while we saved for college, we had no idea how expensive it got and we are no where near paying cash for a 65k school or even a 20k school. It will be a sacrifice for us too.
It’s a sacrifice for most everyone, cello mom.
Even folks with one child.
IMO educated immigrants have a large advantage over families who are citizens but who have been living in poverty for generations.
The immigrants have resources and expectations that things are & will improve.
OP, you dodged the question of how much money your parents can contribute and how much they have saved. It’s not like they should not have realized upon the birth of each of their EIGHT children that they have responsibilities to educate them. You seem to be angry at the poor, highly accomplished students who receive aid. The child of two physicians should be able to fully pay for school. It’s a matter of what your parents decided to spend money on. It was not your education apparently. Your rant against low income people reveals you have little empathy toward others. Maybe you should work on that.
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I don’t think I understand the first sentence, @emeraldkity4
Sorry, I didn’t graduate from high school, so my grammar isn’t necessarily kosher.
