Why Are Colleges Giving Financial Aid to Rich Kids?

ydat•about 1 hour ago

Meanwhile as a young man the financial aid system told me I was a dependent solely because I was under 24 (I paid my own bills, rent, worked and filed my taxes, and relied not at all on my parents, but hey) and that any aid would be calculated against the wealth of both myself and my family. My father isn’t exactly a wealthy man, but combining the wealth of late career man would have certainly made it seem like I was in some great economic position I was not.

apparent•about 1 hour ago

They make it hard to be considered separate from your parents because if it was easy, every student would do it upon reaching age 18.

What I found wild was that they felt entitled to 1/3 of my assets every year. The lesson is: spend your money before college or keep it under the mattress, because your college will take essentially all of it over the course of 4 years.

apparent•about 2 hours ago

This seems like an incomplete take. Part of the reason colleges want these kids is because their stats (GPA, test scores) help the college with their rankings.

Separately, I question how wealthy the families are that are contributing $60k/yr. They obviously have to have enough money to pay this much, but they may be largely bled dry by 4 years of tuition (per kid). This would be half a million dollars of post-tax money for two kids. That's a lot of money, but if it's half (or more) of your retirement savings, then it's not like you're not going to miss it.

One has to be truly wealthy ($5M+ of liquid assets) to not feel half a million dollars, and I assume if this was the type of family the writer was referring to, he would have indicated that these are truly wealthy people, not just someone who would be considered wealthy in Topeka or Duluth.

College has gotten so expensive that it's a big cost for pretty much every family. There have been many articles about how no one pays the rack rate anymore, so it's not really as expensive as it seems. The only way that could be true is if merit-based aid is in the mix.

orangecat•about 1 hour ago

Yeah, I've been amused at the recent outrage about the theoretical possibility of grocery stores using "surveillance pricing", when colleges have been doing that on a massive scale for decades, literally requiring families to list all their income and assets so they can decide how much to take.

apparent•about 1 hour ago

You misunderstand: they are requiring families to list all of their income and assets so they can decide how much of a discount to give you.

See, they're just trying to help.

throwitaway222•about 1 hour ago

NYT finally doing fraud investigations because Nick Shirley was right?

Why Are Colleges Giving Financial Aid to Rich Kids?

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