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Harvard Discriminates Against Middle-Class Kids
(www.wsj.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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I did not read the story, but I am upper middle class with two kids in college. I don’t know that discriminates is the right word, but college is a huge burden on middle class families. If your income is low enough then you qualify for federal aid, and the vast majority of scholarships are class/race/gender based so it is difficult to get much support for middle class students.
My kids did qualify for a small merit based scholarship that the collage provided. But in spite of having very good grades, and very high SAT scores, neither got any other assistance.
The reason I don’t call it discrimination is two fold.
the assistance is there to try and help make it possible for lower income students to go to college. This is not a bad thing for our society and we should not be turning on each other crying unfair.
the real problem is that college is unaffordable. If it cost $10k to get a 4 year degree then middle class parents would have little trouble paying for it. When it is closer to $50k-$100k, then that is out of reach and no one can really bear the cost.
We need to focus on making colleges more affordable (probably by making them simpler, with less “perks”), and not focus on who gets the smaller slice of the pie.
How is college any different than child care?
Where I live childcare is like 4 years, at 3-4K a month. Lets assume 40months of care. That's 120K at 3K a month. College tuition at a state university is about the same, it's about 30K a year.
Upper middle class people can afford these kinds of costs. Where I live upper middle class is 250K+ a year. Pretty easy to afford 50K college tuition if you simple skip the luxury cars for a few years.
The people who can't afford children at the ones making under 100K a year.
A quick google search puts the middle class between $50k-$150k a year for a 4 family income. We’re closer to the top end of that but don’t have a lot of disposable income.
Our two luxuries are not thinking about money every day, and eating out more than we should. We both work so cooking is tiring.
With all of that our savings is nothing to get exited about. Especially now that we have two kids in college. It is less than 10k.
We could pay $10k a year to college without making a radical change, but it would be a real struggle.
I’m not sure you know what middle class looks like, I think your assuming were rich. Obama has an interesting show on Netflix that looks at a few businesses and profiles the lower, middle, and upper class employees. It is an interesting watch and does a good job of showing just how much or little the middle class has.
Finally I feel that low cost or free child care would be one of the best things the government could do. My wife wanted to stay home with the kids, so we struggled financially but did not need to worry about child care (we both made the same amount at the time, it cut our income in half). But we had plenty of friends struggling to pay the daycare. Being able to go back to school or work when you have kids would be a big plus to the economy, as well as a great way to help lower and middle class people get a small leg up. A great investment in my mind.
In our state schools spend around $10k a year to keep a kid in public school. My guess is that kinder and daycare cost about the same. They only add a few extra years of schooling, so we’re talking a 20% increase in the school budget to let everyone have daycare after the first year.