Hacker News Reader

Comment by apsec112 | Hacker News Reader

I went to an Ivy League college, and my parents are by no means rich, or even upper middle class. What happened was the college tried to use any excuse they could possibly find to deny "financial aid". One time I was denied because of a rounding error in my parents' tax returns. Literally a rounding error. The only reason I managed to graduate was because a lawyer I happened to know threatened to sue the school.

If the Ivies want to say, "we're a school for the rich, tuition is $XXXK, put up the cash or don't come here", that is 100% their right as private institutions. But if they promise that aid will be provided to anyone who needs it, and they then revoke that promise on a whim when someone is already partway through their degree, they are lying bastards and need to be called out on it.

View on HN

I just wanted to corroborate this as an attendee of a school you'd recognize.

I received a large financial aid package structured as an institutional scholarship. My dad's business failed my freshman year. He liquidated its assets, as those had served as his modest "retirement" fund. This windfall left me ineligible for financial aid, which means I lost that scholarship. Forever. It was not eligible for renewal the following years--no matter how little my parents earned.

Prior to accepting the offer, I called the financial aid office asking questions I thought would help me determine the money would be there. They gave every assurance it would. Nothing was in writing. There's no contract to read and sign. How's a 17 year-old first gen student supposed to navigate that?

I did not graduate.

You speak of the Ivies as a group which has wronged you, but I don't necessarily think your experience is representative of the group as a whole.

Certainly my experience at another Ivy has been that this one goes out of their way to make sure students are funded, and will usually accept even egregiously late paperwork with no reduction in financial aid.

I would further posit that, in addition to differences among the various schools, you are often times at the whim of individual financial aid officers, who have full authority to accept or reject the applications they are processing.

:-/ sorry your experience sucked, mine was very different.

Every semester they cut _me_ a check; I graduated without loans; and they didn't include my intern salaries in my earnings (so even though I was making more in a summer than my parent did in a year, it didn't affect my financial aid).

The schools have to look out for themselves.

What I saw was that since the schools give a lot of grants / reduced tuition to students that come from families that make less than $X, a lot of parents tend to rig their returns to make less than $X.

If you own your own business, it's easy to game your income.

There's a big difference between looking out for yourself and denying financial aid because of a discrepancy of less than a dollar. Intent matters, and it's hard to argue that someone is trying to fleece you for $1 at a time.

Intent matters to... software? It's literally just a formula and someone plugs in numbers and gets a green screen or a red screen. The people doing financial aid probably aren't enabled to change the screen colors once a response comes back. Bureaucrats are bureaucrats -- you have to bypass them to get anything done.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com