<p>It seems like today’s top colleges and universities spend way too much money giving out financial aid (aka welfare handouts). With the immense competition in college applications, the top 25 or so colleges could easily fill their class with competitive, full pay students, and therefore not spend vast amounts of money on “financial aid”, which could be used for much better purposes. It would make a lot more sense for colleges to use their designated aid money towards lowering tuition and the overall cost of attendance for everyone instead of giving the select few near free rides. After all, why should the full pay students have to pay a higher amount just to subsidize “needy” students? Seems a lot like socialism…</p>
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<p>College financial aid has nothing to do with socialism.</p>
<p>If one were to wish to associate college financial aid with a political ideology, the correct choices would be progressivism or egalitarianism.</p>
<p>The “why” of financial aid is clearly that the colleges wish to provide opportunities to attend to qualified applicants regardless of economic situation. Very few 18 year olds have amassed enough wealth on their own to fund a college education, so the ideology is an attempt to reward applicants based on who they are rather than who their parents or other benefactors are.</p>
<p>Let me guess, the top 25 that you wanted to attend didn’t accept you, and you would have been full pay?</p>
<p>Beyond what Bob suggests, the top schools have discovered that it is to the benefit of all for the top students from all income levels to study together. It is a benefit to society, and the primary purpose for forming these schools was to educate the best students, not necessarily the richest. It is not productive to teach the 100 richest students in a vacuum, away from the rest of society - they need to understand what they are learning in the context of the world in which they live. They need the perspective of each segment of society.</p>
<p>It is insulting to see student aid equated with handouts. The students who get aid to attend the top schools worked hard to get there, and have to continue to work hard to stay. It is hardly a handout, and the money comes from those who choose to contribute.</p>
<p>^Ooh. Well said, CTScoutmom! I couldn’t have said it better myself, and I fully agree with every word of your explanation.</p>
<p>At many privates, those who are full pay are not subsidizing the others. I agree that doing that is questionable. Usually, FA is from donors, endowments, etc…not from other students’ tuition. At many schools, the cost to educate is HIGHER than tuition…so really everyone’s tuition is subsidized. </p>
<p>So, right now, at many schools, tuition is already “discounted” for everyone. What you’re suggesting is eliminating FA and just do another tuition-wide discount so that everyone pays less. The problem with that is that the resulting lower amount would still be too high for many middle and lower class students. The result would be schools that are only enrolling upper-middle and upper class students. </p>
<p>If a private is now charging $40k for tuition (COA about $55k), then dropping everyone’s tuition to - say - $25k - still would have a COA of about $40k. That’s still too high for most Americans to pay. Even a COA of $20k is still too high for most Americans to pay.</p>
<p>The utter condescension and privilege coming from the OP is disgusting. Also, way to sound like a Fox News sheep, crying socialism and welfare handouts (neither of which apply to college or financial aid.) If you wanted to sound like a whiny rich kid, you succeeded.</p>
<p>How disappointing. One would have expected better from that tony university of yours.</p>
<p>Your pretentiousness is astounding. With an opening sentence like that I’m assuming you’re quite rich. And by that, of course, I mean your parents are. Higher learning is much more conservative nowadays and I’m sure that even the Top 25 universities would scoff at your calling financial aid “welfare handouts.” Remember that just because you can pay for college doesn’t mean you deserve to go. A friend got a 36 on his ACT and went to our community college because he was poor.</p>
<p>Lay off the teat of Fox Noise, my young friend. It’s not too late!</p>
<p>Son’s best friend: 4.0-plus GPA, 28 ACT, football all-star, great kid, goes to church and babysits his sister for his mom while she works second shift at Walmart. Father left when he was a baby, raised in low-income, single parent home.</p>
<p>Am I ok with him getting financial aid to go to college and have a shot at bettering his life? You bet your arse I am!!</p>
<p>Oh. Another thing.</p>
<p>DS’s best friend attended public high school. No ACT/SAT tutors. No life coach or college admission pro to help him figure a way through the college admissions process. Cannot afford to visit schools outside our state. (We took him with us on a trip though.)</p>
<p>Honestly, the tone of the OPs question really got my shackles up. Oh well, it’s a free country and we all have a right to an opinion.</p>
<p>I just love it when people scream “socialism” despite not knowing what the word means. Tells you a lot.</p>
<p>OP has a reasonable question so I am going to try and explain it.
Let’s see what we have.
A few universities and colleges are very expensive, yet they offer to meet full need of those who qualify - namely students who have great need but who have shown they can benefit from attending such a school.
Because the bar is so high for admission, students who have great need have already shown they can excel in challenging circumstances, which makes them * more desirable* to top schools than students who come from backgrounds so financially endowed that they would have to be serious muck-ups to not have excelled.</p>
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It doesn’t work like that; colleges don’t sit on hoards of money that can be used for anything they feel like. Most money is earmarked for a specific purpose. In this particular instance, the majority of financial aid funds at many colleges come from donors who intend their money to be used to help fund students from less wealthy backgrounds. Many of these donors were themselves once on financial aid. </p>
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Yep, it’s actually not that crazy. For example, NYU’s cavalier attitude toward financial aid is notorious. For people in the $0-30,000 income range, their average expected contribution ($25K) is as much or more than they make in a year! Needless to say, NYU has a very high percentage of wealthy students.</p>
<p>Free advice: take a politics class and learn what socialism actually is.</p>