Stanford offering free tuition
Some great news coming out of Stanford the last few days in regards to tuition for potential students from less affluent families. Yes, they’re offering free tuition, and in some cases free room and board on top of that. The requirements are pretty simple, if the student’s family makes less than $100,000 annually then you get free tuition. If the family is a low income family (don’t know what the price point is there) the student will get free room and board on top of free tuition.
That’s a value of $36,000 to $47,000 to help open doors for more students to attend Stanford. Yes, it’s a tough school to get into, but knowing that there is an attainable goal seems like it could have a huge impact on kids that are worried about even being able to pay for school if they do make the grades.
Nice work Stanford! I’m really looking forward to seeing how this changes other school’s policies on tuition and how that affects how hard students start working in high school. I know that many high schools are trying to motivate kids from less affluent areas to work towards getting into good colleges. Knowing that school could possibly be free seems like the perfect incentive.
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Comments
Wow! I did not realize that, thanks for filling me in on that.
The funny thing about Harvard and Princeton, since you mentioned Harvard, is that they are offering reduced rates for students who come from families who make between $120,000 and $180,000. Students from families that fall in that range have to pay no more than 10% of their families income at Harvard and 16% at Princeton. It’s a nice offer, but really not that big of an offer. I personally wonder what those two schools are offering to kids who comes from lower income families since they potentially couldn’t even afford the $12,000 a year for tuition plus room and board.
This is a very good subject. I dont know the stats or all the facts ; but I do know it is difficult for lower income high school students to enroll in decent colleges. I recently followed the difficulty of a local / neighbor girl who was very bright in high school and the difficulty she had finding a med college. She and her parents found the student loan ads on tv to be the only option. Fortionatly … a friend of a friend of hers saw her problems and wantted to finance the first year … hopefully once she is into the system she can find outher means.
The idea of requiring colleges to open some of their endowment money to help low income students is interesting.
Apparently this “generousity” is to avoid having Congress force them into spending at least 5% of their endowment per year. There is just no reason for Harvard to keep adding on to their $35 Billion, yeah with a B endowment. With that kind of money they could buy a controlling stake in any company not listed in the Fortune 100.