When I was touring colleges as a high school senior I met someone who had gotten into MIT but whose family could only afford to send one kid to an elite college, him or his sister. He decided to go to a state school which was a lot less expensive but whose academics weren't close to the same level. This stuff matters to people.
Most students go into debt to attend college. I fell into a bracket where I didn’t get any financial assistance but my parents didn’t want to/couldn’t pay for tuition. I got personal loans for everything. I think this is a common scenario.
Same here. I paid "full price" for my degree coming from a normal middle class family. Fortunately I was able to pay it all off a few years out of school with my first job.
This was more than several years prior to that, I just tried to look up the financial aid of previous years and for some reason couldn't find it. If someone else finds it, I'd be curious to take a look.
I'm the first person in my family to have gone to college, and we never really had any money.
Still, I've always been interested in science growing up. I was programming video games and building little robots before I was 10 and envisioned myself being a robotics engineer when I got older. I got into Johns Hopkins for a double major of physics and astronomy, I couldn't actually afford it, didn't win enough scholarships (they only awarded a very small subset), and my family didn't have the money.
In the end I ended up going to a local college for computer information systems, and while I love my IT job, it's well under six figures, and I'm $60,000 in student loan debt that I'm probably gonna be paying off for the rest of my life.
Damn that is absolutely brutal. I dropped out of college after about 1 year and just learned by watching YouTube videos and installing Linux on a spare computer and running a homelab. Had to hop through a couple of lower paying IT jobs to accumulate some experience for the resume, but am now making low 6 figures in DevOPS, fully remote.
I recomend job hopping if you haven't in a while, that's the only way to really get those 20-40% raises from what you're making at the moment.
I met him when I was at MIT for Campus Preview Weekend when accepted students visit the school. Is it necessary to assume things in such a cynical fashion?
Tons of middle class folks are too "rich" to qualify for aid, but not quite wealthy enough to avoid going into severe debt. There's a lose-lose sweet spot that's larger than you think.
I wonder, too. In 1965,
3580 applied, 1532 were admitted, and only 929 enrolled. How many of that 39% had better options than MIT, knowing about the draft?
While I think this is well meaning, I’d be much more impressed by institutions actually cutting costs, The ratio of administrators to students is insane as is the faculty ratio at most universities, not to mention the outlays for extravagant projects like sports centers and student centers.
Thank you for this comment; articles on the rising costs of college almost always uncritically treat it like a law of nature, and rarely have I seen articles that attempt to study in-depth the extent to which college administrations have become bloated, self-perpetuating jobs programs. All while at the same time departments are cut, professors are expected to do more with less, and more and more classes are pushed on to adjunct faculty who get paid a pittance. Until this is addressed, any efforts to improve the ways in which students finance their education is just a band-aid.
> not to mention the outlays for extravagant projects like sports centers
Just a note that for a lot of schools the sports programs (football especially) are actually a profit center, not a cost center. Situations obviously vary, but it's entirely plausible that a new sports center could be an investment that pays itself off rather than an extravagant expense.
Right. I tend to wonder sometimes if the bigger football schools are actually football teams first, and educational institutions second. The rise of legalized/mobile gambling seems to have supercharged it.
Yeah my school was a -lot- less nice 20 years ago when I graduated. I was amazed visiting my nephew in his dorm. It was like something out of an extremely nice hotel and concurrent works space for students to lounge and study, and the sports stadium was insanely improved. He said almost all the dorms were that nice or better. I can’t help but feel all that likely came out of his an other students back pockets, as the state has only been cutting funding for public universities. And yes I realize this has more than one cause, but virtually unlimited student allows allow a large portion of the out of control tuition costs.
This is a great step in the right direction. I can't speak directly for MIT, but there are issues with how these programs don't apply to parents with small family businesses. My parents had a small business, with my father taking home a salary of $XX,XXX. Duke University used the business assets to determine the EFC (expected family contribution) of literally 90% of the salary. Essentially saying to sell off the family business for the college fund, which was a non-starter.
Small businesses are allegedly the backbone of America, and I feel these tuition support programs overlook this segment of the middle-class.
I can understand why they might do this. Many people who own a small business underpay themselves significantly and use the extra funds on the business to build up assets. This defers taxes and allows the funds to be reinvested without tax. They might even take out loans on those business assets. The same way the wealthy will pay themselves a tiny salary and just live off the asset value of their stock. Someone who owns their own business could also easily drop their salary significantly for the year prior to applying to college.
As an owner of a small family business, I have to pay close attention to making sure my salary and that of my other family members involved is "generally commensurate with our duties" or the IRS will be up my backside pretty quick. I obviously try to minimize it as much as possible, but if you drop it to something insignificant and the IRS notices, they'll adjust your income and expenses reported to reflect your non-compliance with tax code.
> This defers taxes and allows the funds to be reinvested without tax.
All business funds are re-invested without tax, this is actually a good thing. Also for the majority of business owners taking a loan against your assets to pay yourself is a terrible idea, yes it may defer taxation but that tax will still come due and now you have to pay interest.
> Someone who owns their own business could also easily drop their salary significantly for the year prior to applying to college.
This could be a problem but i think the amount of difference this would make would be negligible - most people don't plan like this. You could also emancipate your 17 year old or have them live independently for a period of time (my friend actually deferred his entry and worked for a year in order to get a full ride)
(this may be an overly naïve or slightly overloaded question) would it make sense to treat salaried individuals as one-person businesses? this approach could grant them access to opportunities like these which typically reserved for businesses, especially considering that in many countries, businesses are increasingly being granted the same rights as individuals.
Heh, for my jurisdiction, to get gov financial aid for a 2nd degree, they expected me to withdraw from retirement savings to fund it, but no similar expectation if you had a locked-in defined contribution pension plan (lol I wish).
Nor would they expect you to take a line of credit against the equity in property if you owned any, but stocks are always a rich person luxury that you can sell!
Kinda cemented that we’re rewarding a failure to save and rewarding a failure to save in something liquid.
The "mistake" is that the assets themselves are the source of income. Sell them off, and the income goes away too. It's the equivalent of expecting the parents to use 100% of their income to put their kids into college, which is impossible.
Is it a small business netting the owner 100K a year with 500K in the bank?
That's different than a small business netting the owner 75K a year but the trucks and equipment for the landscaping business (easiest example, replace as needed) being worth 200K...
Why are such things in the US so complicated? Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone!
That's the only fair way. Also, a set of well educated people pays itself back later in the form of mostly income and added value taxes, which provides money to keep studying for cheap for the next generation.
Because the US government will loan people very large sums to attend, which allows the universities to raise prices at will. The buyers are price-inelastic, which means that they want to go regardless of price, because they are surrounded by people that tell them that going to college is the right thing to do - and the more prestigious the better.
College in the US would be a lot cheaper if the government didn't inflate it. If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive.
>Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone!
I'll go out on a limb and bet people in your country earn much less than the average American, too. Why? Why don't companies just pay these people more? IT all comes back in income and value added taxes.
American universities sell their students a lot of amenities that aren't really necessary for study. Not to mention the bloated admin class. You want to feel "in" when it comes to social justice? Here are your administrators that do the rituals of social justice as a full-time job, but they demand salaries.
As for amenities, back in Europe, many universities don't even have a campus, just a scattering of buildings all around the city, acquired randomly as the school grew (that includes dorm buildings, often quite far from one another). You will spend some extra time commuting among them, but the university saves money - and, indirectly, you too.
Getting from dorm to lectures usually took me about 30 minutes each way - on foot, then subway, then on foot again.
Roger Freeman, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan's education advisor, was afraid that educated voters would turn the United States towards communism.
One of Ronald Reagan's campaign promises was dismantling or breaking the department of education, similar to what he had done to California's state universities by limiting their budgets and moving the burden of tuition to students.
At the time this was quite popular as it lowered taxes.
the ideal is that college should be very expensive for rich people and cheap, free, or at least more affordable, for less wealthy people.
american universities get closer to this ideal than you might expect. the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away, at least for undergraduate degrees.
it would make more sense to do this redistribution through taxes if possible, but many US institutions are private so that doesn’t really work. so the colleges basically have their own privately-run means testing programs, and like all such programs there are flaws and loopholes.
Some prominent universities in the US have ballooned with administration in the past 20 years. MIT in particular has a $1.2 billion administration cost out of a $4.5 billion annual budget.
The short answer is greed, plain and simple. Higher Education has not been an institution for the people in the US for a long, long time. It may never have been, actually. It's a business, same as our Healthcare industry and businesses run on maximizing profit margins so that is their primary goal.
Because America is a place where people have been indoctrinated to believe that misery is the cost of freedom. It's a place where half the population would rather read your obituary or donate to your fundraiser than simply have a healthcare system that people can use in a timely manner without worrying about cost.
We have plenty of cheaper schools too, and they’re fine.
The expensive schools are for the richest people to say they went to school next to the best students who get in free.And for the best students to meet rich people.
>but there are issues with how these programs don't apply to parents with small family businesses.
That's a "happy accident". The college educated bureaucrats who joined hands with academia to create these programs were perfectly fine omitting the plumber's children. They sure weren't gonna do a huge amount of work to find away to avoid an edge case they were ok with.
Same problem for families with multiple kids of similar age - never saw discount for those.
Also, no discount for the cost of living in a specific area…
Had the same problem (with MIT among others). Somehow I heard farmland was treated a bit more generously (a recognition that you can't just sell the land to pay for college & remain a going concern). For a small biz with 4 employees, though, the math was impossible. Good thing Caltech was cheaper.
s1artibartfast below is saying that it seems intentional. But how can someone with a small business sell the assets, eliminating their own income in the process, and provide for the remaining children/themselves/etc? Sacrifice is one thing; killing the job you created is another and far too short-sighted.
Politically, there are so many policies across the board that make having a small business untenable as compared to a normal salary. As time goes on, these policies increase in amount and severity.
Looking around me I see the effects. Year over year small businesses continue to disappear.
Tuition for undergraduate studies should be affordable. Not for a small number of very rich universities that can afford it. But to all universities, as it is in most of the world.
Parents should not be allowed to support their kids in college. Make the kid like away from home buy thier car if they want one. work jobs not for the family. don't let them take loans for more than their yearly income.
On the flip side, it’s possible to sell a business for 7+ figures and then have little to no income in subsequent years in which case quite wealthy families would qualify for assistance.
Similarly, I wonder how they’d consider shares of a non public company. Probably a common situation for people on HN, that take a pay cut to work as early employees at a startup.
You wouldn't have to sell the business. You could convert it from an LLC to an INC. Yes it's a lot of work but it's a better alternative to selling it.
It’s incredibly difficult to structure these rules in a way that doesn’t discriminate against small businesses while not opening a giant loophole for the rich.
Started looking and found out there's some much worse, and far more obvious cases that need to implement these reforms. [1]
UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.
BTW, amazing site to be horrified by gun violence (and vaguely fascinated). Look upon the awfulness of Philadelphia. [2] Sitting in their safe little haven while East and South is wounding murder land with overlapping murder / wounding statistics. (12k from 2014-2023, 190/100000 urban) [3] Northwestern and the violence everywhere South in Chi-town is maybe a personal second choice. ($13,700,000,000, +74%, 26.9k, 280/100000 urban) [4][5]
Is there a coherent argument tying A to B here? Schools have large endowments and are also sometimes located in violent cities. Is it your contention that one causes the other, or even could in theory affect the other? Otherwise I don’t see the point, you might as well bring up the number of potholes in Philadelphia too.
Also Northwestern is in Evanston, not Chicago. Two different cities.
This is inequality - allowing some entities to accrue out of the world wealth while others starve.
The US has the philosophical stance that this is accepted. However, history shows that is is a balance that will collapse into civil war eventually if allowed to skew to far.
> UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.
Why is it UPENN's responsibility to solve these issues? This is Philadelphia's problem, the university is just a business operating in the city.
I think that speaks to the low bar we have come to expect from our endowed institutions today more than anything else.
American Universities, historically, are supposed to improve not just their students’ lives but also society as a whole, especially as serving as boosters for the city they’re in and their immediate neighbors. That’s why they’re nonprofits. That’s also likely their strongest lifeline to remain relevant in the future rather than as the hollow alumni clubs and gatekeepers their critics say they are, with AI/the internet/online schooling/topic of the day breaking down socioeconomic barriers to knowledge access
That’s why the Carnegies and Mellons built libraries, museums, and the very literally named Carnegie-Mellon university, back then. Now it seems like the first thing billionaires today do is isolate themselves and their wealth from the masses as much as possible.
UPenn is a land-grant institution, they are not "just a business" they were given land and money specifically to serve the public good. They're why we have engineering degrees, the government specifically wanted institutions that taught practical marketable skills and to do research in those fields.
> UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.
Also, an endowment is meant to be perpetual, so only a small fraction of it is spent every year to ensure the principal amount doesn’t go down. “Don’t kill the golden goose” in other words.
Just want to point out that Philadelphia’s homicide count is down ~40% from last year. And Penn’s “haven” looks similar to the other affluent commercial corridors throughout the city.
That's actually fair. Philly's 2022 numbers were 503 murders / 1793 woundings, and 2023 numbers were 422 murders / 1376 woundings. 84% murders / 76.5% woundings. Definitely trending in a better direction. If the 2024 numbers arrive and Philly's still looking better than maybe things are changing for the positive in that area.
Or, crazy idea, have the government pay all tuition up front for everyone and then collect an extra .5% on your income tax for every semester you attend (or .33% for every quarter). Obviously you'd have to put some limits on what colleges can charge to get paid from that pool of money.
Then you can't go broke from debt because it's a percent of your income, but it's also not "free" to address those who have concerns with that.
You could apply it to all outstanding school loan balances too. Get your loans paid off in exchange for an extra 4% income tax.
I actually quite like the system we have in the UK.
Graduates pay roughly 9% of their income above £27k towards debt repayment, and the remaining balance is written off after 30 years. Typical tuition fees are just over £9k per year.
This strikes a nice balance between encouraging people to carefully consider alternative non-university careers whilst also not preventing too many people from not being able to afford it.
Note my numbers are approximate because they can vary depending on when & where a person went to university a couple of other factors. Also I do think the system could be slightly improved (especially around maintenance loans) but on the whole has a good structure.
Australia's system is similar, albeit the tuition fees are higher (capped depending on the degree and set by the government). You take out a government-backed loan and which is around CPI and then pay it back at an increasing % based on your income, between I think 1.5% above a certain threshold and 10% by a second, higher one.
There's been some issues with it, but no system is perfect and the thrust of it is aligned with the dual public-private structure that Australia seems to prefer (see also: medicare vs private health insurance).
That subsidizes useless degrees, low quality colleges, and punishes people who work in vocations (likely providing more value to society), among some other issues.
The article claims 80% of American households meet this threshold. I wonder what % of their incoming class (say restricted to Americans) meets this threshold.
That's a great question, I'd bet it's fair to say that 80% of their applicants would not qualify, and yet it opens the door for some really deserving humans.
(Not being able to afford it is why I didn't go to MIT, I also wasn't accepted at Cal, yet UCLA (and all of the UC system for that matter) was under 4,000 a year and that's what my folks and I could afford so that's where I studied.)
That link says 72% of incoming freshman in 2022-2023 received financial aid. Also has a full-time beginning net cost average of just under $22,000 in 2022-2023.
It's not a perfect source of data, but there is enough on College Navigator to let you dig into it a bit and compare to other schools.
Note that aid includes federal student loans though. They may have needed to come up with $22,000 out of pocket but also have taken on thousands more in loans that will need to be paid back. If they don't have the $22,000, then private student loans at much worse terms are likely required.
Another way to save money is to rent an apartment and make that your permanent address freshman year than to pay out of state tuition and room and board. I always thought this scheme could never work until I met someone who played it and saved tens of thousands in the process.
It might be a "scheme" the school and the state quietly approve. Students living in the community should be more likely to set down roots with employment, social groups, or marriage. Brain theft, instead of brain drain.
I've never heard of anyone doing this either, but it is true and it's a pretty reasonable rule in my opinion. If you're an "independent student" then you don't need to report your parents' income, and the government is fairly generous about who qualifies as independent: https://studentaid.gov/help-center/answers/article/independe.... You can definitely game some of these qualifications, but that's fine, the overwhelming majority of people who qualify for this are legitimately independent from their parents and should be considered for financial aid.
It's not really something new; most top universities like CMU already have a similar policy. MIT has had it as well, they just raised the threshold for qualification.
Maybe it has something to do with the incoming Trump administration and federal student loans. They seem to want to reduce government spending and may see federal student loans as waste, especially since some were forgiven. Maybe there is some amount of arm-twisting involved. Better for the universities to not mention any of that and appear altruistic.
Readit News
In many developed countries higher education costs the same as high school.
Still, I've always been interested in science growing up. I was programming video games and building little robots before I was 10 and envisioned myself being a robotics engineer when I got older. I got into Johns Hopkins for a double major of physics and astronomy, I couldn't actually afford it, didn't win enough scholarships (they only awarded a very small subset), and my family didn't have the money.
In the end I ended up going to a local college for computer information systems, and while I love my IT job, it's well under six figures, and I'm $60,000 in student loan debt that I'm probably gonna be paying off for the rest of my life.
I recomend job hopping if you haven't in a while, that's the only way to really get those 20-40% raises from what you're making at the moment.
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So they were rich enough that he didn't get exempt from tuition but still could only send one kid to an elite school?
I wonder if the guy was just pulling your leg.
https://www.goacta.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/The-Cost-o...
Just a note that for a lot of schools the sports programs (football especially) are actually a profit center, not a cost center. Situations obviously vary, but it's entirely plausible that a new sports center could be an investment that pays itself off rather than an extravagant expense.
Small businesses are allegedly the backbone of America, and I feel these tuition support programs overlook this segment of the middle-class.
All business funds are re-invested without tax, this is actually a good thing. Also for the majority of business owners taking a loan against your assets to pay yourself is a terrible idea, yes it may defer taxation but that tax will still come due and now you have to pay interest.
> Someone who owns their own business could also easily drop their salary significantly for the year prior to applying to college.
This could be a problem but i think the amount of difference this would make would be negligible - most people don't plan like this. You could also emancipate your 17 year old or have them live independently for a period of time (my friend actually deferred his entry and worked for a year in order to get a full ride)
When you say them living off the asset value of their stock, you mean the dividends from the stock?
Nor would they expect you to take a line of credit against the equity in property if you owned any, but stocks are always a rich person luxury that you can sell!
Kinda cemented that we’re rewarding a failure to save and rewarding a failure to save in something liquid.
I dont think this was an oversight or mistake. I think the expectation was that yes, people should sell assets if they have them .
For someone not in your system, the expectations that seem normal to you sound absolutely insane to others.
Is it a small business netting the owner 100K a year with 500K in the bank?
That's different than a small business netting the owner 75K a year but the trucks and equipment for the landscaping business (easiest example, replace as needed) being worth 200K...
It's complicated.
That's the only fair way. Also, a set of well educated people pays itself back later in the form of mostly income and added value taxes, which provides money to keep studying for cheap for the next generation.
College in the US would be a lot cheaper if the government didn't inflate it. If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive.
High cost and exclusivity is the entire point.
A university open to all with a fraction of the price would be a poorly ranked one in every competitive measure.
I'll go out on a limb and bet people in your country earn much less than the average American, too. Why? Why don't companies just pay these people more? IT all comes back in income and value added taxes.
As for amenities, back in Europe, many universities don't even have a campus, just a scattering of buildings all around the city, acquired randomly as the school grew (that includes dorm buildings, often quite far from one another). You will spend some extra time commuting among them, but the university saves money - and, indirectly, you too.
Getting from dorm to lectures usually took me about 30 minutes each way - on foot, then subway, then on foot again.
One of Ronald Reagan's campaign promises was dismantling or breaking the department of education, similar to what he had done to California's state universities by limiting their budgets and moving the burden of tuition to students.
At the time this was quite popular as it lowered taxes.
american universities get closer to this ideal than you might expect. the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away, at least for undergraduate degrees.
it would make more sense to do this redistribution through taxes if possible, but many US institutions are private so that doesn’t really work. so the colleges basically have their own privately-run means testing programs, and like all such programs there are flaws and loopholes.
The expensive schools are for the richest people to say they went to school next to the best students who get in free.And for the best students to meet rich people.
That's a "happy accident". The college educated bureaucrats who joined hands with academia to create these programs were perfectly fine omitting the plumber's children. They sure weren't gonna do a huge amount of work to find away to avoid an edge case they were ok with.
Specifically, what percent of the business would have to be sold off? My reaction is very different for 5% versus 50%.
s1artibartfast below is saying that it seems intentional. But how can someone with a small business sell the assets, eliminating their own income in the process, and provide for the remaining children/themselves/etc? Sacrifice is one thing; killing the job you created is another and far too short-sighted.
If your parents run a struggling corner store then you should be eligible, but if they own a successful chain of stores, maybe not.
Why not just say Income of 200K, or if you own a business then income + pre tax profits <=200K and book assets <500K or something?
Looking around me I see the effects. Year over year small businesses continue to disappear.
Tuition for undergraduate studies should be affordable. Not for a small number of very rich universities that can afford it. But to all universities, as it is in most of the world.
That is prove the kids are really responsible.
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UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.
BTW, amazing site to be horrified by gun violence (and vaguely fascinated). Look upon the awfulness of Philadelphia. [2] Sitting in their safe little haven while East and South is wounding murder land with overlapping murder / wounding statistics. (12k from 2014-2023, 190/100000 urban) [3] Northwestern and the violence everywhere South in Chi-town is maybe a personal second choice. ($13,700,000,000, +74%, 26.9k, 280/100000 urban) [4][5]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...
[2] (Guns, Philadelphia) https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...
[3] (Location, UPenn) https://www.google.com/maps/place/University+of+Pennsylvania...
[4] (Guns, Chicago) https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...
[5] (Location, Northwestern) https://www.google.com/maps/place/Northwestern+University/@4...
Also Northwestern is in Evanston, not Chicago. Two different cities.
The US has the philosophical stance that this is accepted. However, history shows that is is a balance that will collapse into civil war eventually if allowed to skew to far.
Why is it UPENN's responsibility to solve these issues? This is Philadelphia's problem, the university is just a business operating in the city.
American Universities, historically, are supposed to improve not just their students’ lives but also society as a whole, especially as serving as boosters for the city they’re in and their immediate neighbors. That’s why they’re nonprofits. That’s also likely their strongest lifeline to remain relevant in the future rather than as the hollow alumni clubs and gatekeepers their critics say they are, with AI/the internet/online schooling/topic of the day breaking down socioeconomic barriers to knowledge access
That’s why the Carnegies and Mellons built libraries, museums, and the very literally named Carnegie-Mellon university, back then. Now it seems like the first thing billionaires today do is isolate themselves and their wealth from the masses as much as possible.
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Who's responsibility is it? Have you seen how the government operates? Why wouldn't UPENN want to help solve it?
(Drugs) https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/mexico-depicts-phi...
Endowments have strings attached that limits the use of funds, the endowed money isn’t just a general slush fund: https://www.acenet.edu/Documents/Understanding-College-and-U...
Also, an endowment is meant to be perpetual, so only a small fraction of it is spent every year to ensure the principal amount doesn’t go down. “Don’t kill the golden goose” in other words.
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If you don't have guns, you won't have gun violence, but I guess the second amendment won't be changed any time soon.
Not an unreasonable proposition. The purpose of the university is ostensibly to provide an education, not to continue hoarding more and more money.
For the federal government, they can choose how they allocate grants. Withholding grants from greedy schools is one option.
Then you can't go broke from debt because it's a percent of your income, but it's also not "free" to address those who have concerns with that.
You could apply it to all outstanding school loan balances too. Get your loans paid off in exchange for an extra 4% income tax.
Graduates pay roughly 9% of their income above £27k towards debt repayment, and the remaining balance is written off after 30 years. Typical tuition fees are just over £9k per year.
This strikes a nice balance between encouraging people to carefully consider alternative non-university careers whilst also not preventing too many people from not being able to afford it.
Note my numbers are approximate because they can vary depending on when & where a person went to university a couple of other factors. Also I do think the system could be slightly improved (especially around maintenance loans) but on the whole has a good structure.
There's been some issues with it, but no system is perfect and the thrust of it is aligned with the dual public-private structure that Australia seems to prefer (see also: medicare vs private health insurance).
[0] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2024/03/29/princeton-trustees... (go tigers)
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=MIT&s=all&id=166683#...
That link says 72% of incoming freshman in 2022-2023 received financial aid. Also has a full-time beginning net cost average of just under $22,000 in 2022-2023.
It's not a perfect source of data, but there is enough on College Navigator to let you dig into it a bit and compare to other schools.
I feel like the timing is too close to be a coincidence—does anyone know if there's a link?