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When I was touring colleges as a high school senior I met someone who had gotten into MIT but whose family could only afford to send one kid to an elite college, him or his sister. He decided to go to a state school which was a lot less expensive but whose academics weren't close to the same level. This stuff matters to people.

While I think this is well meaning, I’d be much more impressed by institutions actually cutting costs, The ratio of administrators to students is insane as is the faculty ratio at most universities, not to mention the outlays for extravagant projects like sports centers and student centers.

This is a great step in the right direction. I can't speak directly for MIT, but there are issues with how these programs don't apply to parents with small family businesses. My parents had a small business, with my father taking home a salary of $XX,XXX. Duke University used the business assets to determine the EFC (expected family contribution) of literally 90% of the salary. Essentially saying to sell off the family business for the college fund, which was a non-starter.

Small businesses are allegedly the backbone of America, and I feel these tuition support programs overlook this segment of the middle-class.

Started looking and found out there's some much worse, and far more obvious cases that need to implement these reforms. [1]

UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.

BTW, amazing site to be horrified by gun violence (and vaguely fascinated). Look upon the awfulness of Philadelphia. [2] Sitting in their safe little haven while East and South is wounding murder land with overlapping murder / wounding statistics. (12k from 2014-2023, 190/100000 urban) [3] Northwestern and the violence everywhere South in Chi-town is maybe a personal second choice. ($13,700,000,000, +74%, 26.9k, 280/100000 urban) [4][5]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...

[2] (Guns, Philadelphia) https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...

[3] (Location, UPenn) https://www.google.com/maps/place/University+of+Pennsylvania...

[4] (Guns, Chicago) https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...

[5] (Location, Northwestern) https://www.google.com/maps/place/Northwestern+University/@4...

Or, crazy idea, have the government pay all tuition up front for everyone and then collect an extra .5% on your income tax for every semester you attend (or .33% for every quarter). Obviously you'd have to put some limits on what colleges can charge to get paid from that pool of money.

Then you can't go broke from debt because it's a percent of your income, but it's also not "free" to address those who have concerns with that.

You could apply it to all outstanding school loan balances too. Get your loans paid off in exchange for an extra 4% income tax.

The article claims 80% of American households meet this threshold. I wonder what % of their incoming class (say restricted to Americans) meets this threshold.

A sham marriage (get a prenup if you want) is sufficient to have parents' income not counted by FAFSA.

I saw a similar headline just today (albeit on a much smaller scale) for Carnegie Mellon University: https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/carnegie-mellon-univ...

I feel like the timing is too close to be a coincidence—does anyone know if there's a link?

Is this going to create some weird incentive for me, a parent of a college kid, to go 4 years unemployed traveling the world?

This part seems to be getting overlooked -

> And for the 50 percent of American families with income below $100,000, parents can expect to pay nothing at all toward the full cost of their students’ MIT education, which includes tuition as well as housing, dining, fees, and an allowance for books and personal expenses.

> This $100,000 threshold is up from $75,000 this year, while next year’s $200,000 threshold for tuition-free attendance will increase from its current level of $140,000.

- even though that's the article's 2nd and 3rd paragraph.

I bet this describes Whitfield Diffie, who started at MIT in 1961. A riot happened that year over tuition rising from $1200 to $1400 [0]. He’d intended to transfer to Berkeley where tuition for residents was something like $120.

[0] https://alum.mit.edu/slice/what-50000-i-better-practice-more

I knew a student at my high school whose parents earned enough to be able to both take simultaneous sabbaticals for a year so that their child could avoid tuition at a school with a similar program.

Yes but the algorithm also is that they take 5% of your assets each year. So if you've saved $1M (not much for a $200K a year couple in their 50s), that's $50K a year out the door.

This is only tuition though. Using their estimates you would still be expected to spend $30k/yr

https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...

MIT is a great financial investment. There is financing already available (federal and private) so presumably if someone wanted to go they likely could. They may leave with debt however.

The median salary of an MIT graduate is 120k and the median debt is 12k, and less for lower income families (2023-2024):

$0 - $30,000 family income: $6,866

$30,001 - $75,000 family income: $9,132

$75,000+ family income: $12,500

Bumping this up to families making $200k seems really unnecessary and helps people that don't really need to help.

https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...

I never like these hard cut-offs. We should establish a name/expression for all these rules a simple wording which represents 200k=0% and eg. 250k=100% or something.

Otherwise we always have a situation where making more money suddenly leads to less net

What happens if family earns $200,001 ?

Follow up question - what is a “family” here? A single parent with 3 kids? A married couple with one child?

The decrease of buying power, post Covid, makes this pretty much moot at best. It’s sort of depressing to think that even if I had children, or magically qualified to attend a prestigious school like MIT, I’d still be surely priced out. Just like I am buying a house. Making $200k a year ensures I’ll never own a home unless I want to move to an area I don’t feel safe in. I imagine having children make that trade off better, but not without substantial intrinsic costs to one’s self and one’s children. If someone makes $199k at this point, they’re likely unable to afford a home in any major metropolitan area. While being able to have your gifted children receive a free education is great, I imagine many folks will push ever so slightly past that, assuming two years working parents, by the time their children would be of age to go to school.

It’s just depressing. Sorry, I’ll go back into my hole.

What about wealthy people with low AGI but lots of assets?

from my personal experience (an outsider trying to apply), the admission process was by itself intimidating enough to keep me from even applying. let me explain.

thanks to purchasing power parity and exchange ratio gap, i was already from a broke family that would meet the cutoff for most universities a decade ago. however, the act of paying hundreds of dollars for application fees was enough to not make it like you lose nothing by trying. to put things to perspective, a few hundred dollars, which could cover a handful of applications, were equivalent to the take-home salary for a month during that time.

maybe i was unaware of some concessions or perhaps there has been improvements on this front, but i wonder if some applications might still be this hard pressed despite these initiatives.

Awesome. Now let’s lower the bar further and do it everywhere. And then let’s keep doing more until students can pay their tuition with a summer job, like they could when our elders went to school.

I’ll hold off on asking for higher education to be free, as the culture still pushes back on that. But a return to the former model would be most welcome.

It seems insane that your personal choices are bound to your family situation- especially when you are an adult.

Just the idea that parents in the US are expected to pay for their children's education is so wrong.

"MIT’s endowment — made up of generous gifts made by individual alumni and friends — allows the Institute to provide this level of financial aid, both now and into the future."

This 'free education' is a great argument for MIT to persuade Wealthy Lefties to donate/leave them their inheritence. And do the senior people get any bonuses related to number of applicants/places?

But regardless, the increase to the current thresholds are great!

Is this age dependent? For example I'm in my 40s and make a good salary, but am under this limit. If I got accepted would that apply?

I'm sure this causes pause for more than a few people who always wanted to go to MIT, knew they could, and didn't. Tuition wasn't appetizing even 20 years ago.

In addition to pioneering Open Courses that were of high enough quality that you'd want to take them, this is hopefully the start of another trend/wave.

This is great and all, but will we be addressing the fact that the acceptance rate of these institutions are all artificially low? The size of freshman classes are the same or smaller than the same in the 1980s, and the population of the country is much larger.

Tuition isn't the only problem here. If we want a country with social mobility, our higher ed institutions should reflect this and not create artificial scarcity.

Please tell us that counts for the Micro-Masters certs like Data Science. That would open up a lot of opportunities for people who can’t put in as much time due to working to pay bills.

Would have been lovely about 20 years ago. Oh well, no MIT for me.

>Newly expanded financial aid will cover tuition costs for admitted students from 80 percent of U.S. families.

What percentage of MIT students...

Two teachers in a HCOL city are going to be above 200k.

UVA does this for households that make less $100K. Hopefully, they’ll follow suit and bump it to $200K as well.

On a related note, why does an institution so commendably progressive as Harvard charge tuition at all?

that means if the parents earn 300K a year, one can just quit his/her job and take the free ride?

One couple, both PhDs, when their daughter went to Harvard, the mom quit her job to qualify for the free tuition.

What about if someone has a large net asset? will the 200K still apply?

Man.. I am highly paid yet poor enough for my kids to go to MIT for free. Awesome.

This may have unintended consequences on chances of a successful application. Now, as a high school senior, you have to compete against an additional pool of strong students who aren't especially interested in MIT's offerings, but have parents pushing them toward the least expensive of all top universities.

that's nice, but it's become nearly as difficult to get into MIT as winning the lottery

The MIT undergraduate student body is about the same as it was in 1960, but the number of applications rose from around 4000 in 1960 to 11000 in 2000, to 20000 in 2024.

This isn't just an MIT problem. The undergrad populations of the top universities (Ivy league and similar) have hardly grown over the decades despite a large increase in student population overall in the US, not to mention the very large increase in foreign students over the past 25 years. This is by design to create increasingly exclusive brands.

Deep dive into this: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-university-of-impossibl...

Is there a term for doing beneficial things for a tiny fraction of people and coasting off of the PR for it?

What's this going to do for people that aren't good enough to be in the top .1% of merit? Why do we care?

80% of American families... but what % of MIT students?

The poor regards will study for free at MIT.

One more reason to select deferred comp!

What's the logic for choosing 200k

wow that’s amazing

Yeah, education should be free. Record all lectures and put them out there. Charge a small fee to view them if you must but lecturers repeating themselves is not my idea of a great use of their time. Yes, I know lots of lectures are already published.

Just read an adjacent banger that interrogates the underlying reasons why our (US) education system is broken, how it got that way, how it's influenced culture beyond our (individual) control, insinuates why these institutions are so preposterously expensive, and proposes thoughts on how to fix it (TL;DR prolly won't get fixed)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/meritoc...

https://archive.ph/OC81c

Sorry, but this is peanuts for MIT and merely a performative stunt.

Time to tax these endowments.