Yale Daily News

Who cares? The ivies are pre-Copernican.

-Townie

It is preposterous that this does not help graduate students. What a phony plan.

my parents are divorced and both remarried. how will my family's income be calculated?

The $200,000 exemption in home equity may seem like a lot to someone living in Connecticut, but it is peanuts to almost anyone living on the west coast. You cannot buy a one-bedroom house (or even a condo) in an urban area for less than $400,000.

Remember that home equity considerations include the amount outstanding on a home mortgage. So it's basically only the part of your home that is already paid off that counts as the equity, and after that, it counts something like 1-3% of that value against your financial aid (and only after the first $200,000). Quit whining.

Yale will now give financial aid to people with income in the top 5% of all families. Now that this aid is in place, it is CRITICALLY important for the university to implement more recruitment and economic affirmative action-based efforts to enroll more 'average' middle class students and lower-income students now that admission will become significantly more competitive (as the stakes are much higher).

Thank you, 2:34. This is a good step, but if Yale really is committed to economic diversity, which I certainly hope it is, it needs to spend money on recruitment. Perhaps the money for the 180-200 category would have been better spent proving college support in urban areas -- but that would not have made as good headlines.

To the "phony plan" commenter: what are you talking about? Isn't undergraduate tuition, room and board a legitimate subject for a financial aid plan, without regard to what is done for graduate and professional students? The considerations are certainly quite different for 5300 undergraduates than for the various graduate and professional programs. While parents are deemed to be responsible for contributing to the tuition of undergrads, they aren't for graduate and professional. And there is variation in tuition among graduate and professional students. Music School is tuition-free, right? Law and SOM certainly aren't (and shouldn't be). What is the tuition/grants situation for grad students in the arts and sciences?

The posters and commentators who are concerned about recruiting low-income and working-class students certainly have valid concerns--those folks are certainly woefully underrepresented now. But the idea that the best way to have a higher percentage of students at Yale be lower-income is to keep Yale barely affordable/unaffordable for many middle and middle-upper-income families, I guess to discourage those students from applying or attending if they are accepted, seems like the wrong approach. There was and has been a problem of getting low-income students to Ivy League schools and I think it's going to take initiatives closer to that of Amherst College--expanding their class specifically to admit more low-income students and giving those students the support to succeed--to change that. But putting hundreds of middle-income parents into (literally) lifelong debt is a problem in and of itself and certainly not a "solution" to the problem of low-income recruiting. So good job, Yale, doing what Yale always does, finally catching up to the competition...

To 2:31: I wouldn't necessarily call 2:02's comment "whining." His point about the $200K exemption is very valid -- I live in the Los Angeles area (and no, not in a rich area like Palos Verdes or Pacific Palisades or Newport Beach, so don't try that) and $400K over most of the LA area will get you VERY little. And fine, Yale only counts the part of the home equity that you have only paid off, but this seems to me to create its own problems, to penalize people who have been working for many years (in the case of my parents, 20 years) to pay off a house. Why should people who have worked hard and saved up money to pay off their house be asked to consider the value of their house in the calculation? My parents bought their house in the 1980s, and it has appreciated in value considerably, and now it appears as if we have enough money to buy a house in the high hundred thousands, which is certainly not the case.

Besides, the idea of home equity counting in aid calculations is somewhat ludicrous in itself: we're not going to sell our house to pay for my tuition, clearly. I understand if a family owns more than one home, because than those are investments, but if there's only one house that's somewhat absurd.

Thank you, 8:53. The median income in my community is $60,000 while the median home price is $580,000 (down 17% from a year ago). Obviously, few people making $60,000 can qualify for a very large loan on their equity, let alone afford to buy the house they currently live in.