[Kephael]

The marketing departments at these schools have done wonders. People whose families have modest incomes of 100-150k annually are going to pay a very large sum of money to attend these schools. It is only the very poor and very wealthy who do not have issues funding their education at one of these schools.

[noprocrasttemp]

Except that the median household income in the US is ~55k. There is very likely a middle range of people too wealthy to get financial aid, but not wealthy enough to easily afford it, but calling it 99% is laughable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

[sotojuan]

Stanford takes care of tuition for families under $125k of assets, but even that means the upper middle classes will spend tons because they'll fall out of that range.

[Kephael]

Exactly, less than 125k in assets is absolutely nothing. The reality is that a married couple consisting of two working professionals will not qualify for any of these reduced tuition schemes.

[nitrogen]

It would help if they also considered whether that income was from one or two people, and divided it by the number of kids so larger families with parents working multiple jobs aren't penalized.

[sokoloff]

assets and income are two different things.

[nitrogen]

But correlated. A two-parent, four-income, six-child family in a house just big enough to hold everyone might have $125k in assets, but in no way would they be able to help their kids pay for school, especially the older kids.

[sokoloff]

They can probably pay for some of the kid's food (because they have been up until now, possibly more efficiently than a college meal plan, but in any case, the household expenses go down when the 18 year old moves out). Some of that money can go to college costs.

I assume GGP was posting the "at no cost" threshold and that doesn't mean that $125,001 in assets and you get no help.

It's been a long time since I appli d for financial aid, but I do recall that other kids in college (though perhaps not college-bound) was definitely a factor in financial aid calculations.