<p>MITChris, Does MIT understand that middle income families are hit the hardest? We practically have zero scholarship because “we make too much”. MIT somehow figures that we need to contribute 50% of our take home pay to the tuition. That’s tremendous. We still are really going to try because our son really loves the school. If it doesn’t work out next year, we will have no choice but to transfer him to a cheaper school. My next door neighbor has a son who just graduated from MIT. He also had no scholarship and had to work part time and throughout the summers the entire 4 years, while some of his classmates squandered their “free money” from MIT, and never worked for anything, just because they came from “low income” family. Unfortunately the whole society (including MIT and many elite schools) is moving toward penalizing the people who have worked so hard to build some wealth (the so-called “share the wealth”). The school evaluated our family contribution by reviewing our retirement money, our investments, etc… i.e. everything we’ve worked hard for all these years. Imagine that – we’ll be down over $200K by the time our son graduates from MIT. That’s just about equal to everything we’ve saved up from our previous 20 years. Nice calculations. Sorry for being so sour, but that is really the truth, as we see it.</p>