I went to an Ivy League college, and my parents are by no means rich, or even upper middle class. What happened was the college tried to use any excuse they could possibly find to deny "financial aid". One time I was denied because of a rounding error in my parents' tax returns. Literally a rounding error. The only reason I managed to graduate was because a lawyer I happened to know threatened to sue the school.

If the Ivies want to say, "we're a school for the rich, tuition is $XXXK, put up the cash or don't come here", that is 100% their right as private institutions. But if they promise that aid will be provided to anyone who needs it, and they then revoke that promise on a whim when someone is already partway through their degree, they are lying bastards and need to be called out on it.

I just wanted to corroborate this as an attendee of a school you'd recognize.

I received a large financial aid package structured as an institutional scholarship. My dad's business failed my freshman year. He liquidated its assets, as those had served as his modest "retirement" fund. This windfall left me ineligible for financial aid, which means I lost that scholarship. Forever. It was not eligible for renewal the following years--no matter how little my parents earned.

Prior to accepting the offer, I called the financial aid office asking questions I thought would help me determine the money would be there. They gave every assurance it would. Nothing was in writing. There's no contract to read and sign. How's a 17 year-old first gen student supposed to navigate that?

I did not graduate.

You speak of the Ivies as a group which has wronged you, but I don't necessarily think your experience is representative of the group as a whole.

Certainly my experience at another Ivy has been that this one goes out of their way to make sure students are funded, and will usually accept even egregiously late paperwork with no reduction in financial aid.

I would further posit that, in addition to differences among the various schools, you are often times at the whim of individual financial aid officers, who have full authority to accept or reject the applications they are processing.

:-/ sorry your experience sucked, mine was very different.

Every semester they cut _me_ a check; I graduated without loans; and they didn't include my intern salaries in my earnings (so even though I was making more in a summer than my parent did in a year, it didn't affect my financial aid).

The schools have to look out for themselves.

What I saw was that since the schools give a lot of grants / reduced tuition to students that come from families that make less than $X, a lot of parents tend to rig their returns to make less than $X.

If you own your own business, it's easy to game your income.

There's a big difference between looking out for yourself and denying financial aid because of a discrepancy of less than a dollar. Intent matters, and it's hard to argue that someone is trying to fleece you for $1 at a time.

Intent matters to... software? It's literally just a formula and someone plugs in numbers and gets a green screen or a red screen. The people doing financial aid probably aren't enabled to change the screen colors once a response comes back. Bureaucrats are bureaucrats -- you have to bypass them to get anything done.

I'm sure it's much easier to make those policies when your endowment is $22.2 billion.

Lots of policies are easier to make when you have cash. The flip side of being forced to spend down the endowment is an increasing focus on the short term. For an institution that's supposed to have some insulation from whichever way the wind is blowing today, that's not such a good thing.

$20B is much more than "some insulation."

Also helps that they only accept a small proportion of such students.

It's clearly a token effort at disguising their elitist admissions procress. If they let in too many poor people the rich wouldn't send their chilren there. The whole point of these Ivy League schools is to prove membership in the club of the elite.

Admission to all the Ivy League schools is need blind, so I don't think letting in too many poor people is a big concern for them.

When I was in grad school at an Ivy League university in the early 80s, it was reported in the school paper that about 50% of undergraduates were legacies.

Has that changed?

Yes. It was far easier to get into college in the '80s, in part because far fewer bothered to attend; this resulted in more legacies then than now (I believe the percentage of legacies at Harvard is in the single digits).

According to this article, 16% of the Harvard class of 2019 are legacies: http://features.thecrimson.com/2015/freshman-survey/makeup-n... (The survey was voluntary, and there is no mention of the percentage response. Apparently Harvard does not publish the actual number of legacies.)

So yes, things are better than in my day. I would say that the number of people who would not have bothered to attend Harvard in the 80's was very small indeed.

You don't need to come up with a conspiracy here. Ivy League schools simply don't care about providing as many people as possible with a good education.

The goal is rather to be the best in research, education and in the experience of studying for the people that do attend. They achieve that goal by significantly limiting how many people are allowed to attend, especially poor students that take money away from the school.

If you really want to help poor people, ignore what the rich are doing, ignore inequality and identify who those poor people are, what problems they have and fix them. That will be far more beneficial than attacking the "elites".

Source?

The Revisionist History podcast has two great episodes on the subject.

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/05-food-fight

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-...

Revisionist History is Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, not a reliable source for anything.

https://www.boston.com/news/education/2016/07/15/bowdoin-col...

Every podcast is someones podcast, that doesn't mean anything nor does it make podcasts in general or this podcast specifically unreliable.

Additionally this critique is laughable and if anything proves Gladwell's point. It's not about the food, it's about spending money on things that aren't relevant to education. Gladwell could have made the very same podcast and talked about expensive sports programs instead of food.

Maybe Bowdoin isn't wasting money on food and that was a bad example to make. They're still spending a lot of money and not on financial assistance. If they felt confident about what they're spending it on, they would have brought that up and mentioned that they're not spending as much on financial assistance but instead have some large education or research project going on but they're not doing that either. Bowdoin is wasting money and they clearly know it or they would have responded differently.

My daughter is at Yale. They basically say: "How much do you make? Give us 20%". While painful, I do think it is the most fair approach.

Only for this year? Or for your net assets? Because I'm totally willing to go on a four year sabbatical to get free tuition for my kid :)

Probably cheaper to marry then off. Students with spouses don't have their parent's income considered.

Of course my wife won't let me try this at home.

A friend and I considered getting married for a similar reason. We actually both were receiving Pell Grants, but married students are allowed to live off campus and drop the meal plan, which would have saved us another ~$7,000 each (mostly in loans).

As far as bad plans go, it wasn't exceptionally terrible, because we actually had an exit plan. Wisconsin allows you to annul a marriage if you haven't consummated it after a year. (I might not be 100% correct on that point, but the law was something like that.)

Pretty glad I didn't go through with that plan.

I'm from Bangladesh -- arranged marriages are still an option!

(not really)

Believe you me - I am VERY tempted. I suggested that to my wife more than once.

So thanks for sending me down this rabbit hole :)

Assuming Yale uses the IM calculation for financial aid, the problem isn't current income: it is savings and home equity. The financial aid formula actively penalizes savings in any form, as well as home ownership. If you have a meaningful nest egg in, say, the 1M+ range, you are guaranteed to have to pay full sticker price.

Therefore, in addition to being unemployed when my kids make it to college in 2035-36, I'll either have to blow our retirement funds before we turn 50, or persuade my kids that the Ivies just aren't worth it. Given my slacker tendencies, they'll pick up on the latter course of action via osmosis; never before have I rooted so much for nurture over nature!

I've always wondered why they don't use this to price discriminate even more. They always say the "actual value" of the education is way more than $55k per year or whatever, because the endowment contributes significantly to the operating budget as well.

So why not make the list price $100k? If your example is correct, this would only affect those who make between $250k and $500k (where 20% of their income is between $50k and $100k).

The list price is darn close to $100K.

I don't think your analysis is quite correct. Assuming is $100K and they ask for 20%. If I make more than $500K, then I pay $100K. If I make $50K then I pay $10K.

But please note that I'm GREATLY simplifying things here. It's not simple "Give us 20%". If it was, it would be like PA income tax - one page - give us 4%. It's more like NY income tax - dozens of pages with lots of special cases and loopholes.

For the same reason I like PA taxes, I like Yale financial aid. It's closer to the PA model than to the NY model. I don't approve of thresholds like "Income less than $100K - you pay nothing". I could even argue that an Ivy is such a privilege that the "give us 20%" should have no upper bounds ;)

The need to make the price low enough that graduates who do well feel an inclination to make $10m contributions back.

The additional income isn't worth the Sanders activists screaming about college tuition costing X years of minimum wage.

o.o why is it the parent's responsibilities to pay for the child's tertiary education?

Whose else should it be? Going to an ultra-elite country club university whose operating expenses are on the order of 50-100k per student per year is a luxury, not a necessity or some sort of human right.

Very few other countries in the world have schools this prestigious, by the way, so it's not necessarily valid to compare them.

Edit: by the way, I highly doubt that there is any country in the world with universities that operate completely independently, with virtually no State oversight over budget, admissions decisions, curriculum, or degrees granted, and which can charge students however much they want, such that the State also pays the education bill for students.

Usually the student takes out a loan for themselves.

Ah okay, I assumed you were implying it should be the responsibility of the State.

IMO the state should pay (up to) a fixed amount per student (say, $5k a year). Anything above that needs to come out of the student's own money/loans/strings to pull.

My concern is with bringing in parental income to the situation.

You don't pay - but you do contribute.

This is America

Having multiple children sure is expensive.

Typically in a need-blind financial aid model, the family's expected contribution is all-in. Your kid's twin sibling would hence be 'free'. At least in theory.

You mean sending multiple children to Yale is expensive.

The entitlement in this thread to ultra-elite luxury goods is insane.

It actually cost significantly less (almost half) for me to attend an Ivy League than both nearby state universities, given the Ivys' excellent financial aid.

Penn State wouldn't even give me a merit scholarship, regardless of my (rather stellar) high school academic credentials, community service and social work, and extracurriculars (worthy of Ivy League admissions), so I was looking at the full 25k/year sticker price. IIRC, their honors college had even more tuition fees than the regular college.

UPitt also gave me a meager financial aid package and initially refused to honor their own UPitt Science Fair merit scholarship that they awarded me while I was still in high school for winning first place (they insisted it was already included in the "federal grant money"-only financial aid package that they gave me, though it seemed suspect, it felt like they "forgot" about it entirely until I called the right people; THEN I got my scholarship included as additional financial aid).

Especially in the latter case, I'm not sure where the entitlement was; I won a merit scholarship awarded by the state school, and then the state school "forgot" about it and then tried to substitute it with federal grant money.

I went to the Ivy.

EDIT: Staying on topic, on the note of the expense of having multiple children: My sister went to the state school, and it effectively tripled the amount of money my parents and I were paying per year to go to school (and it put all four of us in debt; I helped my sister out because I graduated before she did and managed to land a great software engineering job right out of school with a starting salary significantly higher than my parents' income -- I'm still paying off student loans four years later now).

It should be exponentially more expensive per child. Not specifically in relation to college, but in relation to taxation in general.

We want to encourage the population to grow in sustainable ways, not only in some families that make having lots of kids a priority.

You posture that an effective policy to put downward pressure on fertility is to deny access to education. A policy whose effects specifically target individuals who didn't make the decisions you want to disincentivize. I think you might want to re-think your policy positions :) In general, I don't think inhibiting access to quality education is ever an appropriate response to any situation.

I meant precisely what I stated. A child doesn't have a choice about where it is brought in to being. Unstated: all children should have a good education/etc.

Now, the /parents/. They do have a choice. The general system outlined in Larry Nivin's science fiction universe where exponentially higher costs were associated with children past the first free one (there were also lotteries to fairly distribute most of the rest of the population sustenance quota, as well as the option of emigrating off of earth to unrestricted colonies).

Mostly, however, is the issue that today there are many who do not /have/ children because the imbalances in today's society make them feel unworthy or simply unable to do so.

Perhaps the worst part is how few students who could truly use that financial aid simply don't apply to Ivy League schools since they think they'd never be able to pay for them.

I didn't know this until long after starting college.

It doesn't help that there's a long line of very angry people telling anybody who will listen "you'll never get in, only rich snobs go there".

Are you trying to say that the real issue here is bias against the rich and powerful?

Telling lower middle class students that they shouldn't attend or even apply to elite schools seems like a poor strategy to reduce the power of the elites.

I mean, this kind of only works for Ivy League because they're pairing up the unbelievably privileged with the extraordinarily talented. When you're just mixing a bunch of middle class people together, not only will you not have enough money to actually keep the <$65k kids funded, but those extra-talented kids are still all at more prestigious schools.

Perhaps a pedantic point, but regardless of income, there is no financial aid for families with assets over a certain amount.