[lg]

I can tell you from experience: people making upper-middle income don't get much aid from the ivies. If you're poor, it's free, and if you're rich, who cares, but if your family's income is in the low six figures, you're looking at big loans.

[dragoon]

I know that. I was saying that in reference to his claim that 55% of Yale students receive financial aid, which is a bit of a red herring, because the vast majority of Americans qualify for some (but often not much) aid.

[carbocation]

Why does the fact that most Americans qualify for some aid make the Yale's 55%-on-financial-aid stat a red herring?

(I suspect that, in what I write below below, I must not be responding to your actual point, but can you clarify what your point is?)

It's not like Yale is giving lip service to aid - it's giving $92,000,000 annually. This means that, on average, each Yale student gets $17,700 per year.

But since we know that 55% receive financial aid, it means that among those who do receive aid, the average package is $31,000 per year.

55% of Yale students get almost their entire tuition paid for by the university. This is not counting outside scholarships, etc. This isn't just "some" aid - this is a huge amount of aid on an annual per-individual basis.

[sabj]

Good parsing of the numbers here.

The stat that is traditionally used to show socioeconomic diversity (or lack thereof) is the % of students receiving Pell Grants, and in this department Yale remains weak, but it's not for lack of effort...

While median / average family income at Yale remains fairly high, financial aid is huge. I'm someone who gets crushed in the fuzzy middle range, but I still appreciate its generous policies. Wish that they were more generous, or that the cost of living in the greater Boston area was lower so that my family income was lower and aid was correspondingly higher. That's one big bummer - something reasonable in one part of the country might make you rich in Oklahoma, but that can't be, or isn't, taken into account.

:(