I saw this going viral: Harvard says tuition will be free for families making $200K or less.
According to Harvard’s website, the average annual tuition for an undergraduate student is $56,550. But with the addition of housing, food, health services and other student services, the annual cost of attending Harvard is $82,866, according to the university.
About 55% of Harvard undergraduates receive some type of financial aid, according to the university. In the 2023-2024 school year, families of students receiving financial aid paid an average of $15,700 toward education costs, school officials said.
What a huge discount. My thoughts:
-Ivy League admittees are mostly composed of the middle class, not the elite. There is a sort of coping mechanism or cognitive dissonance among people who are not that smart or would have not have qualified, to create a comforting narrative that they would have been rejected for not being elite or wealthy enough, not that they are not smart enough. Excluding the handful legacy admittees and the occasional billionaire heir, the majority of admittees are selected on academic qualifications. Although obviously there is also a large luck component.
To parents of prospective students, is your child writing and maintaining code on GitHub? Placing well on math competitions? Is your child’s admissions essay at the level of being published? That is what it takes these days to have a good shot at getting into a top school, on top of test scores and GPAs. Taking ‘calculus in high school’ is no longer going to cut it, as similar to the ubiquity of the “4.0 GPA”, that too has become too easy and saturated.
From the recent post, Claims of college grade inflation and dumbing-down are overblown:
To have any hope of distinguishing oneself requires good placings on difficult competitions that makes community college calculus a breeze by comparison (math competition problems, despite not requiring advanced-level math, are harder due to time limits and technique needed to find the shortcuts).
-The more prestigious the school, the more generous the discounts and other aid. The ROI from a top-20 school degree is high enough that it’s a no-brainer. From the perspective of the college this makes sense: Graduates from top-ranking institutions have the best job prospects and becoming wealthy alumni who will easily pay back the tuition and much more through donations.
-The cost is not the issue, but rather it’s navigating the low odds and deciphering the black box of being admitted, beyond just grades or test scores. This is why the actual elite spend so much money on admissions consulting to try to boost those odds, typically with mixed to poor results.
-The sticker tuition price is almost never paid in full. This is why a degree is a better deal than the doom and gloomer pundits insist. Not only are there huge discounts on the tuition-side, but also tons of forbearance and payment plans after graduating. There are many people with homes, 6-figure jobs paying off loans slowly and gradually, while enjoying career success and a high standard of living compared to those who do not have degrees.
-With federal student loans, you are borrowing at close to the prime rate, but for average people, not hedge funds. This is a great deal assuming you graduate; even humanities degrees from middling schools confer a positive ROI despite student loan debt. People complain about student loans being predatory, but it’s nothing compared to the double-digit rates typical of private loans and credit cards for average people.
-I mention ‘graduate’–and this is where the ‘college doubters’ are right. For low-ranking private colleges that will admit anyone who can pay the tuition, the dropout rates are too high, signifying a low level of preparedness. In the past, high school prepared people for college, or the course work was more commensurate with college-level work, so those who were academically disinclined or ‘not gonna make it’ had a clear indication during high school. But due to dumbing-down and grade inflation, they now learn the hard way during college. This is the worst possible way of going about it, and is waste of money and human capital.
-As much as ‘the right’ on Twitter/X may dislike elite colleges, compared to those low-ranking private colleges, at least elite college graduates get a much higher ROI (this includes public prestigious schools like UC Berkeley and UCLA). More anger needs to be directed at those those crappy private colleges that charge too much for tuition and do not reject enough unqualified applicants.
-The strongest counterevidence against college I could find is that low-skilled workers, typically those without degrees, saw a pay bump relative to college grads post-Covid, as evidence of a slight narrowing of the college wage premium. True, college dropouts have a 4-year head start in the job market, but this is negated by a higher unemployment rate for dropouts and fewer promotional opportunities by not having a degree.
-Regarding the typical objection of unemployed or struggling college grads, the same is true for people without degrees who are also struggling. The difference is, having a degree bumps the odds of success. The existence of unemployed college grads does not change the math on the debate.
But for whatever reason, people think this is a strong argument against college, when it’s just confirmation bias or cherry picking of data or anecdotes to confirm the underlying bias or agenda of whoever raises this objection. A millionaire athlete who goes broke due to gambling or whatever, does not mean all millionaires must eventually go broke, or that millionaire are predisposed to gambling or have worse lives compared to non-millionaires, but this is the sort of reasoning that passes for discourse regarding the claimed negative ROI of college degrees. Or that someone knows someone who has a high IQ who is a loser at life, as evidence against the otherwise well-established link between IQ and achievement, as if this anecdote can be generalized to all smart people.