| Okay, I've run up against the inevitable positive experiences of others. I'm sure that lots of families get financial packages that are very good for them. This wasn't my personal experience, and it wasn't the experience of many other people I know who were MIT admits. Since our evidence is all anecdotal, I suppose that it's pretty difficult to say which is really more common.
But I think that, in some sense, this establishes a point similar to my original one: when a significant portion of families are able to afford the school, and an also very significant portion isn't, the evidence suggests that financial aid is indeed in "marginal" territory. As long as admitted students' "ability to pay relative to financial aid" falls into a statistical distribution that isn't positively pathological, this indicates that small improvements in financial aid would make big differences, swinging many from one category (immense hardship) to another (doable expense). My intuitive image is of some sort of bell curve - I'm sure ability to pay relative to financial aid doesn't follow such a nice distribution, but if it's remotely similar the effect would be the same. |