Re:The University Has No Clothes
by nkassis on Sunday May 22, 2011 @02:00PM
(#2573789)
Financial aid is pretty hard to obtain now days. Your parent's must be in the lower range of salaries combine for you to obtain anything other than unsubsidized loans. Pell Grants and other such things are pretty uncommon from what I've gathered. Once I managed to become independent as a student, I was making too much (35k a year) for any student aid so I had to pay full price (albeit I was smart enough to go to school in a state were education is pretty cheap, Florida if you have to know).
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So the relevant qualifier to my statement above is top 50 institutions in the country. Florida isn't among them. To make the qualifier more precise, I was thinking of institutions that are members of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE, http://web.mit.edu/cofhe/) which is a group of private universities that behave similarly.
Florida is also relatively cheap to begin with, as with many state schools (GA Tech alum myself, hehe). The big numbers are posted by private schools. However, the top private schools have great financial aid. Under $120k/year, Harvard and Yale are free. The aid phases out after that, but doesn't phase out completely until $250k+.
Source?
For Harvard, your numbers appear to be high by a factor of 1.5 to 2. http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k51861&page...
From what I've heard, financial aid is much easier to get at Harvard than, say, FSU.
For who? Did you mean to pick a different state for your example?
For Florida residents, Florida state colleges are tuition-free for all qualified applicants, but these schools pad enrollment with students who do not show college-readiness but choose to attend and pay (subsidized) tuition anyway.
http://www.floridastudentfinancialaid.org/SSFAD/factsheets/B...
Harvard is tuition-free for all but the wealthiest few who can easily afford their share without sweating.