Financial need vs want

skrlvr
Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:38:18 +0000

Plus it satisfies the pervasive redistributionist liberal mentality of college administrations today to stick it to the higher earning parents.



My institution–not a state flagship–gives out $19,000 in need based aid for an undergraduate population of around 11,000 students. That’s really next to nothing given our student population.

Yet our tuition goes up every year. State support goes down most years. It’s not like we’re being ‘redistributionist’ here, at least not in the way you think. We give over 13 million dollars in merit aid, which is partially determined by ACT/SAT scores. Given that there is a very strong correlation between ACT/SAT score and income level, I am sure that the main beneficiaries of all this merit money are students from families in higher income brackets.

I know it helps to think that the problem with higher education costs rests on the backs of liberal ideologes who are trying to ruin the American dream of hard-working parents and encouraging laziness and entitledness amongst poor folks. It’s completely simplisitic to believe that a major cure-all to rising eduation costs is simply eliminating need based aid.

But stop using the financial aid policies of a handful of elite institutions with over 1 billion dollar in endowment as a proxy for the entirety of need based financial aid policies in higher education. For most institutions, especially those without very large endowments and of lesser selectivity, the need-based aid stinks. Dig deeper into common data sets, net price calculators, etc. if you really want to know about how need based aid works.