Comment by jqgatsby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jqgatsby | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Sorry, what you call a 'crack in the best system available' is the life I've had to live. I've had to take less societally-beneficial jobs because they paid more, while my loan-free friends were off joining the Peace Corps or teaching. I think the world is made a worse place when people like me are turned into mercenaries.

MIT thinks it's okay to boil down someone's financial future into a single dominant number (parental income). What if your parents had a lot of debt because of a major illness or death? What if that supposedly high income is counter-balanced by living somewhere expensive because that's where the high-paying jobs are? The fact that none of that is taken into account means it's not about bad luck, it's about an unjust system.

MIT could afford to make tuition free, but the popular misconception that they're levying a tax on the rich means they won't. If you want to control how much one generation passes on to the next, there are far better mechanisms to do that than college tuition.

You take no responsibility for your situation. You talk like MIT just happened to you. You turned yourself into a mercenary by attending MIT and accumulating the debt with full knowledge that you would take high-paying jobs to pay it off-jobs that you could get thanks to your MIT credential.

Once your debt is paid off you will have one less excuse to go do whatever it is you claim you really want to do. The only question is whether you will actually take advantage of that or whether you continue to whine about the world of opportunities that were somehow foisted upon you when you willingly chose to attend MIT.

I willingly took the best deal I could get, and I would make the same deal with the information I have today. At the same time, a system that arbitrarily indebts some students and gives others a free ride is unfair and needs to change. Also, I think calling my position whining is a pretty low level of discourse.

How could MIT sustainably afford to make tuition free? Genuine question. That's a pretty bold assertion.

That's an interesting problem.

I have a few ideas 1) Replace tuition with taking x% of income for y years following graduation. I'm not sure how this would work in regards to low-income degrees / departments. For example, would the low return on investment for an arts department mean it would get less funding? I suppose this would cause universities to optimize their education for earning potential of graduates. Could have interesting effects. Not all beneficial.

2) Could they use their endowments to essentially provide interest free loans? I'm guessing their would be lots of problems with this that I can't see.

3) You pay nothing while in school, but you pay a straightforward fraction of the school's operating costs for the next x years. I like this concept. If you make x long enough, your graduates have an interest in ensuring future students are able to contribute to the cause. Of course, they also have an interest in keeping costs low. That could create poor dynamics. Improvements would have to come from donations, not be a part of the budget.

Presumably using the proceeds of the hedge fund they're running on the side.

Have you actually done the math to show this works out in the long run?

http://web.mit.edu/facts/financial.html

In 2015, tuition accounted for only 10% of MIT's yearly revenue (~$331M), so you have to cut the rest of the budget by 10% to give everyone free tuition.

One natural area to focus on is yearly administrative costs, which in 2015 were $763M.

If you gradually cut administrative costs by building fewer beautiful buildings for undergraduates to be indebted in or hiring fewer administrators, you can afford for every undergraduate to attend tuition free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com