Harvard's new aid plan

[mnagowski]

The Pell Grant figures are pretty widely distributed. The big question is the distribution of students from families with incomes between $50k and $150k at these schools.

[Jim Hyla]

[quote metaezra]The Pell Grant figures are pretty widely distributed. The big question is the distribution of students from families with incomes between $50k and $150k at these schools.[/quote]

I guess your definition of lower income is different than mine. $50k to $150k seems mid to high to me.

[KeithK]

[quote Jim Hyla][quote metaezra]The Pell Grant figures are pretty widely distributed. The big question is the distribution of students from families with incomes between $50k and $150k at these schools.[/quote]

I guess your definition of lower income is different than mine. $50k to $150k seems mid to high to me.[/quote]
Depends where you live.  $150K is not all that much family income in the SF Bay Area if you've got a couple kids.  I'd call it solidly middle class here.  That same amount of money in rural Alabama is very different.

[Jim Hyla]

[quote KeithK][quote Jim Hyla][quote metaezra]The Pell Grant figures are pretty widely distributed. The big question is the distribution of students from families with incomes between $50k and $150k at these schools.[/quote]

I guess your definition of lower income is different than mine. $50k to $150k seems mid to high to me.[/quote]
Depends where you live.  $150K is not all that much family income in the SF Bay Area if you've got a couple kids.  I'd call it solidly middle class here.  That same amount of money in rural Alabama is very different.[/quote]

But I thought we were talking nation wide in reference to aid figures.

[mnagowski]

I think if you limit your population to households with college-aged children, $50k is a pretty good threshold for "lower income" and $50-150k works as middle income. $50k happens to be the rough threshold for students on Pell Grants.

Typically, at all of the top private schools you would be hard pressed to find any "lower income" students paying more than $5k out of pocket. The bigger issue is how you treat students in the "middle income" categories, and how many students fall into this category. This is where a sizable amount of recent aid money is flowing. And it's unclear as to how Cornell compares with a school like Dartmouth or Penn in this regard. Conventional wisdom would suggest that as Cornell has a higher percentage of students on Pell Grants, it would also have a higher percentage of students in this bracket as well -- speculation that would be reinforced by Cornell's character, reputation, history, and institutional purpose.

What's particularly telling at top schools is the number of students who don't even bother to apply for financial aid. If Harvard and Princeton are now awarding significant price breaks to students with family incomes as high as $200k, and 50% of students still aren't applying for financial aid, well, that tells you something.

[Scersk '97]

Thanks to both David and Metaezra for the calculation attempts.

[David Harding]

This is a link http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Feb08/SkortonLetter.html to aCornell Chronicle article on a 25-page financial report http://www.cornell.edu/president/docs/20080220_financeResponse.pdf that was Skorton's response to questions from the US Senate Committee on Finance.  It has lots of numbers to fuel any calculations that people might want to make. I won't have time for a couple of weeks to think about it any more, myself, but I would welcome further analysis by others.