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How Colleges Are Pushing Out the Poor To Court the Rich
An anonymous reader writes "A change from 'need' based financial aid to a 'merit' based system coupled with a 'high tuition, high aid,' model is making it harder for poor students to afford college. According to The Atlantic: 'Sometimes, colleges (and states) really are just competing to outbid each other on star students. But there are also economic incentives at play, particularly for small, endowment-poor institutions. "After all," Burd writes, "it's more profitable for schools to provide four scholarships of $5,000 each to induce affluent students who will be able to pay the balance than it is to provide a single $20,000 grant to one low-income student." The study notes that, according to the Department of Education's most recent study, 19 percent of undergrads at four-year colleges received merit aid despite scoring under 700 on the SAT. Their only merit, in some cases, might well have been mom and dad's bank account.'"
For instance, if your parents make less than $65k/year (approx. 150% median U.S. household income, or 300% the cutoff for "poverty level") you can attend Harvard for free. Assuming you can get in. Which, in the grand scheme of things, sort of makes it a "merit based" scholarship after all.
The study doesn't actually say that, at least not according to the chart on page 4. It says that 18.8% of the students in college who had scores of 0-699 got merit aid. Not that 18.8% of all the students in college received aid with such low scores.
Get off my launchpad!
Fun question here... how is your nephew going to school, and where?
I've known folks who paid their own way through school, who got their Bachelors' 8 years after they started, but they paid their own way along, CLEP'd out of the drudge-work classes, used the GI Bill, used employer-sponsored tuition reimbursements, got their undergrad at the local (read: cheaper) community college but their BS at the state uni, etc.
There's the traditional (and IMHO stupid) way of doing college, and then there's the smart way to do it. Do it traditional, and (sadly) prepare for the consequences.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
because it doesn't cost near what we pay to operate them. Stuff like this is what made me a socialist. The rich are going to find a way to use the government to their benefit and our detriment. I don't see any reason to pretend they'll not. So if we're going to have a powerful government that hands out socialism to the rich why not just get some of it for the rest of us? Start by making education in all forms free, and keep going from there.
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In reply to yourself and the AC above you, let me provide a decent snip of the conclusion of a rather detailed study from Berkley:
Full PDF link
There are many theoretical reasons to expect that education reduces crime. By raising earnings, education raises the opportunity cost of crime and the cost of time spent in prison. Education may also make individuals less impatient or more risk averse, further reducing the propensity to commit crimes. To empirically explore the importance of the relationship between schooling and criminal participation, this paper uses three data sources: individual-level data from the Census on incarceration, state-level data on arrests from the Uniform Crime Reports, and self-report data on crime and incarceration from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.
All three of these data sources produce similar conclusions: schooling significantly reduces crim- inal activity. This finding is robust to different identification strategies and measures of criminal activity. The estimated effect of schooling on imprisonment is consistent with its estimated effect on both arrests and self-reported crime. Both OLS and IV estimates produce similar conclusions about the quantitative impact of schooling on incarceration and arrest. The estimated impacts on incarceration and self-reports are unchanged even when rich measures of individual ability and family background are controlled for using NLSY data. Finally, we draw similar conclusions us- ing aggregated state-level UCR data as we do using individual-level data on incarceration and self-reported crime in the Census or NLSY.
Given the consistency of our findings, we conclude that the estimated effects of education on crime cannot be easily explained away by unobserved characteristics of criminals, unobserved state policies that affect both crime and schooling, or educational differences in the conditional probability of arrest and imprisonment given crime. Evidence from other studies regarding the elasticity of crime with respect to wage rates suggests that a significant part of the measured effect of education on crime can be attributed to the increase in wages associated with schooling. We further argue that the impact of education on crime implies that there are benefits to education not taken into account by individuals themselves, so the social return to schooling is larger than the private return. The estimated social externalities from reduced crime are sizeable. A 1% increase in the high school completion rate of all men ages 20-60 would save the United States as much as $1.4 billion per year in reduced costs from crime incurred by victims and society at large. Such externalities from education amount to $1,170-2,100 per additional high school graduate or 14-26% of the private return to schooling. It is diffcult to imagine a better reason to develop policies that prevent high school drop out.
Highlights are mine.
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Or maybe his boss decided to cut expenses and pad his bonus while blaming Obamacare.
I see that all the time. Minimum wage goes up 10% and a company cuts jobs 50%, blaming minimum wage. Or the insurance was going up 20-30% per year from 1990 to 2010, and once Obama comes in, they change from one of the premium plan to a cheaper one, and blame Obama. I know my health insurance was cut the year before Obama, after having absorbed the cost previously, if they had lasted one more year, they could have blamed it all on Obama, and some more people would be ranting about evil Obama when he was unrelated to the issue, other than being a convenient scapegoat.
Learn to love Alaska
That leaves more than two thousand dollars per year. Now, one could realistically borrow this money, but who would lend it? I have a friend who was offered 13% interest. Fuck that bank.
Anyone can get $57,500 in student loans from Stafford loans. Since it cannot be discharged, you can get it even if you declared bankruptcy yesterday. The subsidized portion is 3.4% interest and the unsubsidized portion is 6.8% (not 13%). In this case you only have to make $10k per year; $8k if you spend your first two years in community college. Even if you do have to take out the full amount, your after college income only has to be about $6k/yr more to account for your $300k monthly college loan payment.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I am in college now, and familiar with tuition costs. Right now, a Va resident can attend basically any college in Va for ~ 10k / year. Thats tuition, books MIGHT add another 1-2k, but you can generally rent books for $50/class x 4 classes x 2 semesters.
Yes, if you cant cover that, you dont have the gumption. Sorry.
And I love how the headline demonizes merit based aid. Oh the horrors.
Lie? I remember hearing about something called "stop loss", where soldiers had to return to Iraq/Afghanistan even after their enlistment was up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-loss_policy
--PM