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Trustees approve 3.3 percent increase in fees, $1.36B budget
Published: Monday, January 25th, 2010
The opinions expressed here are those of the individual commenters and do not necessarily represent the views of The Daily Princetonian Publishing Company, Inc. We do not take responsibility for the opinions, facts, or claims presented by individual commenters, and reserve the right to moderate or delete inappropriate comments.
The university is moving towards perfect price discrimination. Soon, they will charge $200,000 and offer 99% of students financial aid.
Seriously? This is f*cking ridiculous. I'm from a middle-class family; my parents have saved up SINCE I WAS BORN to send me to a private university. That's right, no summer vacations or fancy clothes or any of that. My parents have saved up JUST enough to send me to Princeton; even so, senior year, money's going to be extra tight. So now, I have to pay even more, subsidizing even more of my friends who come here for free? I'm sorry. This is bullsh*t. I have three close friends who pay NOTHING to come here (and even get checks from the University...they get a stipend for books and if they don't spend all of it they get the remainder in cash) and spend hours shopping online for Coach bags and get weekly $100 checks from their parents and don't work (instead they opted to just pay the University the amount they would've made working), and they can afford to do all of that just because they happen to have a single mom or are Hispanic or come from a place where barely anyone's even heard of the Ivy League.
Princeton's Financial Aid needs to stop punishing those of us who went without our entire lives and saved up so that we could come here, and it needs to stop rewarding those kids whose families indulged them so much that when time comes for college there's not enough left in the bank to pay tuition.
The system is so f*cked up.
Why did they save up since you were born, dude? What a waste! They should have just split up and sent you to live in the ghetto. You would've been a lot better off -- Coach handbags and all that.
You're ridiculous.
@'12
Yeah, your post is coming off as completely insensitive. First of all, financial aid at Princeton is entirely need-based, and isn't used as a recruitment factor for athletes, minority students, or students from high schools with fewer resources. It just happens that the need for financial assistance is often tightly correlated with those.
If you really went without your entire life in order to save for college, then you're not the only one. MANY of the finaid students grew up that way as well, and probably spent the end of high school worrying about whether they'd have to forgo an Ivy League education, or go to a different school and study something that wasn't their passion because it was the only way to get a college degree.
Do you really think you would have been better off growing up with only one parent to take care of you? Also, have you voiced your anger to these friends you speak of? If you haven't, then you should, and see if they agree with you. It's possible that their financial circumstances and financial history aren't as carefree as you think they are.
@@12
I'd agree that '12 is a bit over the top, but the truth is often somewhere in between. There are people at princeton whose families are very wealthy, there are people at princeton whose families are very poor, but for the people in the middle, those that saved are sometimes punished. Many peoples families pay more because they saved than families who spent more of their money and had less for college.
Another interesting thing is that people with very old parents often get a lot of financial aid despite being very well off. I had a friend whose dad was 72 and retired, so their families listed income was the money his mom made teaching kindergarten and he was on a decent amount of aid despite the fact that he wouldn't have been had his dad still been earning his previous salary.
I would end though by saying that the system is NOT so f*cked up. A system that would require somebody to take on 200k in debt for a bachelors degree would be (though in that system there would be more outrage about tuition).
@Scarlet Knight,
Exactly, the costs of college (whether public or private) have completely gotten out of hand. More people need to be on aid because the cost of education has risen twice as fast as increases in wages. In 1980, Princeton cost under 9K, less than 1/5 of today's cost. More importantly, the average US household income in 1980 was 17,700, about half of Princeton tuition cost, while today household income is about 48K, nearly the same as tuition cost. This level of growth is completely unnecessary since the university is actually collecting fewer tuition dollars (just look at the school's annual report, tuition revenues have fallen dramatically over the past decade) and tapping into more of its endowment as more students need to go on aid due to rising costs (kind of like taking money from your right hand and putting it into your left hand).
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/h...
http://www.princeton.edu/~spectatr/vol2/march97...
Price discrimination is not a bad thing. If Princeton charged $20k a year (including room and board) and gave no financial aid (which roughly translates into the same amount of revenue), I wouldn't be here and neither would many of those on heavy financial aid.