Ivy League Financial Aid

This is objectively wrong. The top-of-the-charts schools almost universally offer need-blind admission and great financial aid. A number of my acquaintances (middle and lower-middle class economically) graduated from Harvard, Princeton, or Yale without any loans and without paying more than $5000.On the other hand, being rich means you can provide better K12 education to your children, which makes it easier for them to get accepted in elite universities.

Many undergraduates and most graduate students do not pay tuition at Ivies, rather it gets covered by financial aid or research stipends. And whether you get admitted is decided independently from whether you get financial aid. Of course, being rich makes it easier to have the earlier education and CV necessary to get admitted, but that issue is unrelated.

Yes, Harvard disproportionately has many wealthy people compared to the population at large, but it also provides free educations to large numbers of people. Last I checked, the cutoff was around 60k (meaning, if your family makes less than 60k, Harvard will foot the entire bill). The challenge of overcoming this skew towards wealthy students has more to do with education in general and recruitment than the price tag when it comes to some of the wealthiest schools.

The financial aid available at top-tier schools is very generous, because so few low-income students make up the undergraduate body. If I recall correctly, at the top 120 colleges in the United States, only 3% of the student body come from families in the bottom quintile of household income.As a result, schools such as Harvard[1] and Stanford[2] pay for all tuition for students with a household income of less than $60,000.[1]: <a href="http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/financial_ai

Stanford may now have more students on scholarship than off. But I know many of the Ivies have 40%+ of their students receiving no scholarship money, and it takes a family income of 150k+ (often more like 200k+) to not receive scholarship or loans. That means more than 40% of these schools' students come from families earning in the top 5% of household income (the 95th percentile is ~$190k). That is to say, the schools that offer the best aid, that have the potential to be the most affordab

Hga is right about the vast sums of financial aid being given to those with low family income by top schools. Everyone isn't going to an Ivy league school because (1) clearly there aren't enough spaces, and (2) everyone isn't admitted. We could discuss the structural features that contribute to 1 and 2 (mostly 2). But where I think we should be able to find agreement is that those who are admitted are cared for quite well. You might be surprised at how many of them did indeed qualify for, and re

Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11069197 : the universities also want smart people, even when they are poor. (They are offering financial help for that, especially at the Ivy league.)

Interestingly enough, many elite schools have need-blind admissions and excellent aid if you are poor. If you are rich, it's affordable. As usual, it's the middle class that gets screwed.

The top universities (such as those in the Ivy League) typically give full financial aid to any admitted student who comes from a middle or lower class socioeconomic background. The "tuition problem" primarily exists at mediocre private universities (as well as those public universities that have significantly hiked tuition in recent years) which depend on squeezing every last penny from their students.

It is an obvious fact that majority of ivy league school students are coming from rich families. My argument is rather that (again with zero data to back it up) even if the ratio of full scholarship to full fee students is around 20%, a big majority of the ones who pursue an academic career (and become a professor) are the ones who got into those schools via scholarship in the first place while the rich kids mostly go back to running their family business or aiming for high paying jobs immediate