<p>I suspect that collegehelp’s point with post #889 was supposed to be that a large number of students at those schools came from families with incomes similar to or less than his cousin’s family’s income, since he wrote
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<p>I don’t think the argument was going to be economic egalitarianism, nor preference for/discrimination against students from families with moderate incomes.</p>
<p>I think the argument was going to be: Look, a high fraction of the students at these schools come from families that make no more than my cousin’s family! So <em>now</em> why won’t those chintzy people take out an $80,000 loan (per child) in the spirit of generosity and loving their children!</p>
<p>Unfortunately for this argument, the list just gave percentages of those receiving Title IV aid. The supposed percentages looked patently ridiculous to anyone who knows much at all about the student bodies at those schools. </p>
<p>I think that it is not difficult to locate on the web the fraction of Harvard’s class that comes from families in each quintile of income–or at least, the top and bottom quintiles. And Harvard has very generous financial aid policies.</p>
<p>I am not sure about some of the “elite” LAC’s on collegehelp’s list of desirable schools. I doubt that they have endowments that permit the same financial aid policies as Harvard, and suspect that they are skewed toward higher incomes, relative to the Harvard group–although Harvard may have more of the super-rich.</p>
<p>With regard to Pizzagirl’s comment that the schools aren’t populated by Richie Rich types, I think that is true. However, I think that a student who comes from the higher income ranges is unlikely to have a realistic understanding of the limitations faced by a median-income family. This doesn’t come out through flaunting of wealth, but through automatic assumptions that are not reality-based.</p>
<p>This seems like a good time to mention that I thought that my fiance’s family was “rich” because everything in the bathroom was color-coordinated.</p>