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Private & Independent Schools
Finances of large universities and SLACs are completely different. We were specifically talking about Brown as an example. I will repeat that nobody cares about SLACs. |
The financial aid programs are identical despite one group having none of the subsidy sources you cite that you claim fund financial aid. So that is not the distinguishing factor. And it doesn’t even make sense that federal research grants, which are strictly audited, function to subsidize undergraduate financial aid. As we can see by the massive cuts in federal research funding, the university doesn’t make up for those cuts with its own funds. The volume of research and doctoral students just declines. Your tuition dollars to Cornell of $100,000 per year are no doubt subsidizing the average $58,000 per year grant nearly half of undergrads receive, which cost $470MM per year. Cornell can only safely withdraw $14,500 per student per year from endowment returns. That’s $229MM from the endowment, at most, going toward aid. Guess what is making up the $241MM difference? Revenue. |
At a large university like Cornell, that isn’t how any of this works. You are way out of your depth and you don’t seem capable of understanding any of this. You are wrong about all of it but this is already too far off topic for this thread for me to continue. |
Good grief I literally do higher ed financial aid as part of my job. Specifically elite higher ed financial aid. But glad to know *this* is where you draw the line on getting “too far off-topic.” Once you’ve been objectively proven wrong. |
This can’t be your job. You don’t even understand basics. |
+1 |
+1. I feel like I’ve seen the “higher ed financial aid” poster here before and they don’t seem to have the most basic understanding of university finances, how tuition credits are applied to reach net student tuition and fees, or how money is fungible. |
| Enjoy your 30% private school subsidy while you can. You will get your big fat student loan in college. Enjoy! |
You know that many schools are charging zero tuition to families with HHI under 250k without regard to home equity, retirement assets, and 529 balances, right? |
If you understand that money is fungible, you should definitely understand that the tuition revenue you pay is being used to subsidize those who receive financial aid and thus generate less revenue. But apparently you only understand that in the K-12 context. Then it evaporates for you. Except for, I guess, liberal arts schools, where you concede there’s a subsidy but insists “nobody cares.” |
I’m not the “nobody cares” poster. What you don’t understand is the extent and complexity of university revenue. Net tuition and fees from undergrads is a small percentage of revenues at the top large universities. You have a hyper-simplistic view of university finances (and still don’t understand fungibility). |
The difference is sources of income. Universities have lots of sources of income which makes the price they set for tuition more arbitrary since they are covering costs with a lot more than just tuition, even income from things like the athletic department and executive education, but lots of faculty research grants and federal program grants, that they can easily balance the budget and fund financial aid other ways. The price of tuition is pretty arbitrary and set to maximize what the market will tolerate. For local K-12 private schools, they mainly just have tuition and philanthropy. Other sources of income are tiny and can be ignored. It is clear how their financial aid is funded. |
It also ignores the expenditure side of the equation, in that most financial aid doesn’t need to be explicitly funded (there is no distribution of it) but simply results in lower revenue. Which can also be (and often is) absorbed through lower expenditures as well. This is why the whole framework of “this money comes from this pot and goes to that purpose” is completely out of whack with how budgeting works. |
You think the price of K-12 tuition is not similarly arbitrary and what the market will tolerate? Just like with college, schools in the same tier all charge roughly the same. To be clear, you wouldn't be angry about K-12 financial aid if the your child's school had a larger endowment or the school was getting grants from the National Science Foundation? Anyway, you should check out the form 990s for K-12s. You'd be surprised how many sources of income they have. You should also transfer your kid to Deerfield so you can stop melting down about financial aid on the regular. |
You understand that this support there being no difference between K-12 aid and college aid. |