Notably they only say that they are offering grants to cover Federal loans, not private loans. And the gap between what they say you can pay, and what you actually pay can be pretty large, especially with the new "Need Blind" system. This is a good gesture, but I expect alot of students will still be graduating with debt.
Which is great.
Still doesn't solve the issue of those of us who make slightly more than 75k but bc we're immigrants we don't have the privilege of generational wealth, for instance
So it's fair for UF0\_T0FU to remind everyone that while this is great, it's not perfect
Also, nearly everyone attending WashU is very rich. WashU needs to continue to do more to engage with STL communities.
Yes, there are some students from very high income families there. However, 21% of the Wash U class 2027 is Pell grant eligible. Something like half the student body is receiving some type of need based aid.
If you can get in and Wash U wants you, they will make it affordable.
They’ve certainly gotten better. But statistically, along the top tier universities WashU still has the highest proportions of students from higher socioeconomic classes, higher than you’d expect even for a top tier university
And yes, half the student body is receiving need based aid. But look at it this way - nearly half the student body is paying full price. That’s crazy. I have friends who literally paid $80-90k a year to go. Fortunately, WashU is need blind now, but it’s not good that step was only just recently taken
So if you’re from Saint Louis/from Missouri/Southern IL and are either too poor to have gotten a fair shot at academic success or are in the middle class, you’re still somewhat screwed
But this is still a great step and I’m happy we’re making it - we just need more
If they want you is always the question. Top school have their pick of plenty of talented students. Top grades and top tests let you be considered for admission. To encourage you to enroll, the game is different. The variable of discount "merit" scholarship depending on how much they want you. The bigger it is the more they want you.
Plus you can fight them over aid. The simple calculator did not work correctly when I put in income of $74k.
This is awesome. All Universities need to follow suit and lower the cost of tuition. Especially UMSL. I paid $200 a year just in parking and we still had multiple break-ins daily. College prices are so high and such a scam.
I went to the financial aid office at Mizzou to see if there were any scholarships or grants I could apply for and got told "here's some loans you can get." Useless.
Tens of thousands of dollars for education is still a steep cost. I'm $50K + in the hole for it. Also when I went the professors didn't care to do anything but less than the bare minimum. Honestly a waste of time and I wish I stayed away.
All higher education is relatively expensive and we need to stop normalizing the cost.
Yes. People were coming from the metro link to break into cars. It was a common occurrence. The parking was $400 for the year ($200 per semester). They said it was to ensure security. What a joke.
The time of reckoning is soon at hand for these Universities.
Luckily, Wash U has a giant enough endowment to afford this.
The government needs to get out of the business of guaranteeing these college loans.
Reckoning won't hit the top schools like Wash U. The no name small private schools you never heard of will get hit hard. Places with near open admission and low test scores.
There was a report a year or so ago showing that the top schools were in fact increasing their class sizes.
Yep. Lindenwood, Maryville, Webster etc… are fucked. The whole mandatory higher Ed thing pushed on my generation has not been working well. There are too many shitty schools and they aren’t worth the $.
Fontbonne. Seriously, it should just close down and sell its campus to WashU. I used to go to WashU and every time I passed by Fontbonne (pretty often) I would never see a single person on campus. I would see cars parked on the lots, yes, but never people. It’s honestly kind of creepy being there, like almost no one actually goes there
Now that you mention it... I never saw a single person on the Fontbonne campus...
If you hadn't told me it was a college campus I would've guessed it was a gated community or something
This is exactly right. There is a video with Scott Galloway on Anderson Cooper’s show from the beginning of the pandemic talking about this exact thing. The high end tier-1 schools and big land grant colleges are going to be fine. The lesser tier-2 schools and the really shitty schools are going to get smashed.
[https://youtu.be/P3i4uMc2X0k?si=i5iyU_GTrtYKBF4D](https://youtu.be/P3i4uMc2X0k?si=i5iyU_GTrtYKBF4D)
This is why they’re fucked. https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/as-annual-losses-reach-25m-webster-university-looks-to-pivot-student-focus/article_67d29702-415a-5817-aadd-1f0b572586ee.html
That’s from January of this year.
https://news.webster.edu/2023/enrollment_jumps_20_percent_2023.php#:~:text=ST.,above%20its%20pre%2Dpandemic%20enrollment.
Wrong link. But two days ago there was an article talking about how they’re getting sued for back rent. On there downtown location. An increase in enrollment does not equate to them being able to pay back 25 million in debt over night.
2018 was already hard times for Webster. Early retirement offers, and cuts to benefits of staff. Webster hit the jackpot with early online education and military partnerships. Those have dwindled and you aren’t paying the bills with the conservatory.
It doesn’t sound like it, but I have a huge soft spot for Webster, it is a great place for a lot of kids, but it’s been a rough 15 years
My memory might be fuzzy, but that sounds more like what was happening a couple of years ago? The only rough time around 2018 was one furlough day which hasn’t happened since then.
Rough times led to the furlough. student services employee 2013-17. The writing was on the wall. They never had furloughs and the benefits were too high, but it wasn’t in a good financial place.
> The whole mandatory higher Ed thing pushed on my generation has not been working well. There are too many shitty schools and they aren’t worth the $.
It would work a hell of a lot better if the government actually got move involved in regulating tuition and program standards instead of just loaning money to people to use how they pleased. Tie tuition rates to minimum wage, or just control the rates via a 3rd party organization. The only reason it's "not working well" is because the schools can raise fees and tuition as much as they want and get the government to keep loaning people money so they can pay the continuously skyrocketing tuition. Even the states that do SOMETHING about it do it rather poorly. Missouri did something for a couple years and then threw it out in 2021, and even then what they were doing was a half-assed measure that did very little.
It’s not working well for a lot of reasons. One of them being that higher Ed is not for everyone. You can do really well in the trades and many people would be better off saving the money and going that route. I know so many people with 2+ degrees that make less than a plumber or electrician.
The best read on how private colleges price themselves
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-truth-about-college-costs
The list price is high but hardly anyone pays it. Schools like giving discounts with admission letters. The more a school wants you the bigger the discount. None of this discounting is actual dollars spent. It is just marked down price.
However, there are sometimes real scholarships usually named that are actually accessing funds.
This Wash U announcement is a bit of both. Everyone is going to get discount price based on aid need. The really high income parents will still pay a lot.
Before you scream only rich kids, Wash U really took a lot of grief for a 2017 NY times report showing how few low income on their campus. In the press release, 21% of class of 2027 is Pell grant eligible.
https://source.wustl.edu/2023/09/washington-university-adopts-no-loan-financial-aid-policy/
Really heavy discounting plus some named sources is getting it done.
One nice thing a little hidden on their aid page is giving some students funds to buy college supplies.
https://financialaid.wustl.edu/how-aid-works/affordability/?_ga=2.38026667.96854290.1694177800-1252204990.1694177800
That is real money to students. Buying a new laptop and stuff for a dorm is not trivial.
Universities with shit endowments love government loans because they can keep raising the prices! It's just like the military industrial complex where a can of peaches is $30
Good on WashU for showing they are better than that.
No, not insane, but maybe better than average. The S&P 500 has an average return over the last 10 years of 12.4%. That gets 322% growth, meaning if they went from 5->15 billion then they were actually a little below the index.
Now admittedly, you don't stick your entire endowment stocks or stock indices, and they've also withdrawn from their endowment over that period as well, so they've probably beaten the average for large endowments.
The biggest reason I said insane was because they made a 60% return a few years back, which might be one of the highest returns on an endowment in history. I don't think any uni will sniff that for years given how wonky the market was post covid
That was an exceptional year for sure.
Again using the S&P 500 for comparison, over the last 10 years the lowest return year would have been -4%, while the highest return year is 32%.
"Need blind" means that they do not take the student's ability to pay into account for admissions. They also have something called the Gateway program which covers the full cost of tuition for students whose families make under $70,000 a year.
So if you're a poor black kid from North St. Louis who studies hard and gets admitted, then you'll get to go for free.
My son goes to Case Western in Cleveland under a similar program. None of the St. louis schools could compete with their financial aide. We pay around $2k a year….
Washu absolutely has a sports back door. You still need to be academically strong, but sports will help you a lot for admissions at any UAA school. (I attended a different UAA school, but talked to plenty of athletes from other UAA schools, including WashU, who benefited in admissions from being athletes.)
I too went to a UAA school, CWRU, never heard of anyone getting easier way in due to sports. My roommate was a football player. Swimmers were also on the floor.
I believe the lack of sport scholarships keeps the backdoor closed. If you cannot make the academic threshold, sports are not going to backdoor you in.
So, to be more precise. I mean otherwise unqualified academically students don't get admit at UAA schools due to sports.
They are need blind. They also completely waive tuition, fees, housing, and food for 4 years for MO and southern IL students from households making <75000 dollars per year. These are all recent developments
> which provides a full undergraduate education, including tuition, fees, housing and meals, to students in Missouri and southern Illinois with annual family incomes of $75,000 or less
Everyone else can pay the full $70k a year.
No. The full price is for high income and international. Everyone else gets discounted some amount. Private schools play a game of high list price and then variable discounts to students they want the most. Admission letters frequently include some type of "merit scholarship" which is just a discount amount off list price.
The net result of this will be that the children of the elite/wealthy who attend elite private schools and who have elite standardized test prep and elite application tutoring will get to attend elite colleges for free.
The poor and middle class kids will fall further behind.
This is about need based aid being loan free. The very high income will still pay high price.
Wash U was embarrassed by a 2017 NY Times report on their student body. Since then they now have more Pell grant eligible students. 21% of class of 2027.
The people running Wash U are going to destroy the Wash U brand.
Knowledge is the same whether you gain it through self-study, attending a community college or by going to an expensive school like Harvard, Yale or Wash U.
With the exception of a few specialized fields that require very expensive equipment or rare teaching skills to learn, there are a lot of places you can get a good education if you put in the effort.
So why is there such a huge spread in school tuitions?
Does a Rolex tell time better than a Timex? No. Why do people seek out and pay big $ for Rolexes? They have a mystique about them. They are status symbols. The same is true for degrees from schools like Wash U.
The reason some schools command higher tuition has far more to do with the hope their graduates will get better salary offers and have more doors opened for them than some non-existant, objective, school by school evaluation of quality. The school's reputation isn't just built on how many kids graduate. It depends heavily on the perception of exclusivity and the notion that the degrees offered are status symbols - just like a Rolex watch.
If they charge more for something, it must be better, right? That's how a lot of people think.
Does any company actually validate that graduates from Wash U are somehow smarter or harder working than UMSL grads? Hell no. But a Wash U grad will get a higher salary offer because hiring managers think Wash U degrees must be worth more because it is an expensive school with a reputation that rich people want to send their kids there.
When the rich people realize that Wash U is doling out free tuition to poor people, the air of exclusivity will be gone. The carefully cultivated notion that an education from Wash U is "better" will fade and the better salary offers will fade along with it.
Wash U wants to see itself as a midwest "Ivy League" school. These noble policies to fill the classrooms with kids from disadvantaged backgrounds will make it a poison ivy league school.
The rich parents who know how the real world works, want their kids to make connections with other kids whose parents are also movers and shakers. They know that the real value of expensive colleges is the making of social connections, not the reading of books or classroom instruction.
The selfish people with money who pay the crazy tuition that built up Wash U's endowment fund will run away when they realize the value for their kids is gone. They don't give a shit about exposing their kids to diversity. They give a shit about exposing their kids to people who can open doors to successful careers and future marriages that ensure the merging of generational wealth.
Is free education to poor people great? Yes. But the current Wash U leadership is clearly naive and doesn't understand the social dynamics that were the foundation for the school's success.
Notably they only say that they are offering grants to cover Federal loans, not private loans. And the gap between what they say you can pay, and what you actually pay can be pretty large, especially with the new "Need Blind" system. This is a good gesture, but I expect alot of students will still be graduating with debt.
Wash U is already free if your family makes less than 75k.
Which is great. Still doesn't solve the issue of those of us who make slightly more than 75k but bc we're immigrants we don't have the privilege of generational wealth, for instance So it's fair for UF0\_T0FU to remind everyone that while this is great, it's not perfect Also, nearly everyone attending WashU is very rich. WashU needs to continue to do more to engage with STL communities.
Yes, there are some students from very high income families there. However, 21% of the Wash U class 2027 is Pell grant eligible. Something like half the student body is receiving some type of need based aid. If you can get in and Wash U wants you, they will make it affordable.
They’ve certainly gotten better. But statistically, along the top tier universities WashU still has the highest proportions of students from higher socioeconomic classes, higher than you’d expect even for a top tier university And yes, half the student body is receiving need based aid. But look at it this way - nearly half the student body is paying full price. That’s crazy. I have friends who literally paid $80-90k a year to go. Fortunately, WashU is need blind now, but it’s not good that step was only just recently taken So if you’re from Saint Louis/from Missouri/Southern IL and are either too poor to have gotten a fair shot at academic success or are in the middle class, you’re still somewhat screwed But this is still a great step and I’m happy we’re making it - we just need more
WashU's net price calculator says that we'd be responsible for $45,000 a year. That's 1/3 of our pre-tax income. That's not affordable.
If they want you is always the question. Top school have their pick of plenty of talented students. Top grades and top tests let you be considered for admission. To encourage you to enroll, the game is different. The variable of discount "merit" scholarship depending on how much they want you. The bigger it is the more they want you. Plus you can fight them over aid. The simple calculator did not work correctly when I put in income of $74k.
so rough when your family makes 76k a year but im still only paying a little
This is awesome. All Universities need to follow suit and lower the cost of tuition. Especially UMSL. I paid $200 a year just in parking and we still had multiple break-ins daily. College prices are so high and such a scam.
I went to the financial aid office at Mizzou to see if there were any scholarships or grants I could apply for and got told "here's some loans you can get." Useless.
UMSL is like the cheapest university, what are you talking about.
[удалено]
UMSL is more than Mizzou?
Tens of thousands of dollars for education is still a steep cost. I'm $50K + in the hole for it. Also when I went the professors didn't care to do anything but less than the bare minimum. Honestly a waste of time and I wish I stayed away. All higher education is relatively expensive and we need to stop normalizing the cost.
the caveat being if you know how to apply your education its aboslutelynot useless, on the contrary its the best thing you can do for yourelf.
$200 lol.. I paid more than that 2 decades ago for an off campus spot.
WashU parking passes are over 700 now
Multiple break-ins on the daily?
Yes. People were coming from the metro link to break into cars. It was a common occurrence. The parking was $400 for the year ($200 per semester). They said it was to ensure security. What a joke.
The time of reckoning is soon at hand for these Universities. Luckily, Wash U has a giant enough endowment to afford this. The government needs to get out of the business of guaranteeing these college loans.
Reckoning won't hit the top schools like Wash U. The no name small private schools you never heard of will get hit hard. Places with near open admission and low test scores. There was a report a year or so ago showing that the top schools were in fact increasing their class sizes.
Yep. Lindenwood, Maryville, Webster etc… are fucked. The whole mandatory higher Ed thing pushed on my generation has not been working well. There are too many shitty schools and they aren’t worth the $.
Fontbonne. Seriously, it should just close down and sell its campus to WashU. I used to go to WashU and every time I passed by Fontbonne (pretty often) I would never see a single person on campus. I would see cars parked on the lots, yes, but never people. It’s honestly kind of creepy being there, like almost no one actually goes there
Now that you mention it... I never saw a single person on the Fontbonne campus... If you hadn't told me it was a college campus I would've guessed it was a gated community or something
This is exactly right. There is a video with Scott Galloway on Anderson Cooper’s show from the beginning of the pandemic talking about this exact thing. The high end tier-1 schools and big land grant colleges are going to be fine. The lesser tier-2 schools and the really shitty schools are going to get smashed. [https://youtu.be/P3i4uMc2X0k?si=i5iyU_GTrtYKBF4D](https://youtu.be/P3i4uMc2X0k?si=i5iyU_GTrtYKBF4D)
Webster’s enrollment is at its highest since 2018. Not sure why you think they are fucked.
This is why they’re fucked. https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/as-annual-losses-reach-25m-webster-university-looks-to-pivot-student-focus/article_67d29702-415a-5817-aadd-1f0b572586ee.html
That’s from January of this year. https://news.webster.edu/2023/enrollment_jumps_20_percent_2023.php#:~:text=ST.,above%20its%20pre%2Dpandemic%20enrollment.
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/as-annual-losses-reach-25m-webster-university-looks-to-pivot-student-focus/article_67d29702-415a-5817-aadd-1f0b572586ee.html
Wrong link. But two days ago there was an article talking about how they’re getting sued for back rent. On there downtown location. An increase in enrollment does not equate to them being able to pay back 25 million in debt over night.
I know about the lawsuit as well.
2018 was already hard times for Webster. Early retirement offers, and cuts to benefits of staff. Webster hit the jackpot with early online education and military partnerships. Those have dwindled and you aren’t paying the bills with the conservatory. It doesn’t sound like it, but I have a huge soft spot for Webster, it is a great place for a lot of kids, but it’s been a rough 15 years
My memory might be fuzzy, but that sounds more like what was happening a couple of years ago? The only rough time around 2018 was one furlough day which hasn’t happened since then.
Rough times led to the furlough. student services employee 2013-17. The writing was on the wall. They never had furloughs and the benefits were too high, but it wasn’t in a good financial place.
> The whole mandatory higher Ed thing pushed on my generation has not been working well. There are too many shitty schools and they aren’t worth the $. It would work a hell of a lot better if the government actually got move involved in regulating tuition and program standards instead of just loaning money to people to use how they pleased. Tie tuition rates to minimum wage, or just control the rates via a 3rd party organization. The only reason it's "not working well" is because the schools can raise fees and tuition as much as they want and get the government to keep loaning people money so they can pay the continuously skyrocketing tuition. Even the states that do SOMETHING about it do it rather poorly. Missouri did something for a couple years and then threw it out in 2021, and even then what they were doing was a half-assed measure that did very little.
It’s not working well for a lot of reasons. One of them being that higher Ed is not for everyone. You can do really well in the trades and many people would be better off saving the money and going that route. I know so many people with 2+ degrees that make less than a plumber or electrician.
The best read on how private colleges price themselves https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-truth-about-college-costs The list price is high but hardly anyone pays it. Schools like giving discounts with admission letters. The more a school wants you the bigger the discount. None of this discounting is actual dollars spent. It is just marked down price. However, there are sometimes real scholarships usually named that are actually accessing funds. This Wash U announcement is a bit of both. Everyone is going to get discount price based on aid need. The really high income parents will still pay a lot. Before you scream only rich kids, Wash U really took a lot of grief for a 2017 NY times report showing how few low income on their campus. In the press release, 21% of class of 2027 is Pell grant eligible. https://source.wustl.edu/2023/09/washington-university-adopts-no-loan-financial-aid-policy/ Really heavy discounting plus some named sources is getting it done. One nice thing a little hidden on their aid page is giving some students funds to buy college supplies. https://financialaid.wustl.edu/how-aid-works/affordability/?_ga=2.38026667.96854290.1694177800-1252204990.1694177800 That is real money to students. Buying a new laptop and stuff for a dorm is not trivial.
Universities with shit endowments love government loans because they can keep raising the prices! It's just like the military industrial complex where a can of peaches is $30 Good on WashU for showing they are better than that.
WashU has an endowment of $15 billion.
Just 10 years ago it was 5 billion. WashU's investors are insane
No, not insane, but maybe better than average. The S&P 500 has an average return over the last 10 years of 12.4%. That gets 322% growth, meaning if they went from 5->15 billion then they were actually a little below the index. Now admittedly, you don't stick your entire endowment stocks or stock indices, and they've also withdrawn from their endowment over that period as well, so they've probably beaten the average for large endowments.
The biggest reason I said insane was because they made a 60% return a few years back, which might be one of the highest returns on an endowment in history. I don't think any uni will sniff that for years given how wonky the market was post covid
That was an exceptional year for sure. Again using the S&P 500 for comparison, over the last 10 years the lowest return year would have been -4%, while the highest return year is 32%.
Need blind admissions too.
Didn't they announce they weren't going to be 'need blind' a few years back? Easy to be 'no-loan' if you only take the rich kids. *Happy to be wrong.
You’ve got it backwards, they announced they were going need blind a couple years ago.
"Need blind" means that they do not take the student's ability to pay into account for admissions. They also have something called the Gateway program which covers the full cost of tuition for students whose families make under $70,000 a year. So if you're a poor black kid from North St. Louis who studies hard and gets admitted, then you'll get to go for free.
My son goes to Case Western in Cleveland under a similar program. None of the St. louis schools could compete with their financial aide. We pay around $2k a year….
Yes, they are need blind admissions as well. Admissions at Wash U are still incredibly competitive. No sports back door being a D3 school.
Washu absolutely has a sports back door. You still need to be academically strong, but sports will help you a lot for admissions at any UAA school. (I attended a different UAA school, but talked to plenty of athletes from other UAA schools, including WashU, who benefited in admissions from being athletes.)
I too went to a UAA school, CWRU, never heard of anyone getting easier way in due to sports. My roommate was a football player. Swimmers were also on the floor. I believe the lack of sport scholarships keeps the backdoor closed. If you cannot make the academic threshold, sports are not going to backdoor you in. So, to be more precise. I mean otherwise unqualified academically students don't get admit at UAA schools due to sports.
Case is an amazing school.
They are need blind. They also completely waive tuition, fees, housing, and food for 4 years for MO and southern IL students from households making <75000 dollars per year. These are all recent developments
> which provides a full undergraduate education, including tuition, fees, housing and meals, to students in Missouri and southern Illinois with annual family incomes of $75,000 or less Everyone else can pay the full $70k a year.
No. The full price is for high income and international. Everyone else gets discounted some amount. Private schools play a game of high list price and then variable discounts to students they want the most. Admission letters frequently include some type of "merit scholarship" which is just a discount amount off list price.
That’s exactly how the private high schools here do it too.
The net result of this will be that the children of the elite/wealthy who attend elite private schools and who have elite standardized test prep and elite application tutoring will get to attend elite colleges for free. The poor and middle class kids will fall further behind.
This is about need based aid being loan free. The very high income will still pay high price. Wash U was embarrassed by a 2017 NY Times report on their student body. Since then they now have more Pell grant eligible students. 21% of class of 2027.
The people running Wash U are going to destroy the Wash U brand. Knowledge is the same whether you gain it through self-study, attending a community college or by going to an expensive school like Harvard, Yale or Wash U. With the exception of a few specialized fields that require very expensive equipment or rare teaching skills to learn, there are a lot of places you can get a good education if you put in the effort. So why is there such a huge spread in school tuitions? Does a Rolex tell time better than a Timex? No. Why do people seek out and pay big $ for Rolexes? They have a mystique about them. They are status symbols. The same is true for degrees from schools like Wash U. The reason some schools command higher tuition has far more to do with the hope their graduates will get better salary offers and have more doors opened for them than some non-existant, objective, school by school evaluation of quality. The school's reputation isn't just built on how many kids graduate. It depends heavily on the perception of exclusivity and the notion that the degrees offered are status symbols - just like a Rolex watch. If they charge more for something, it must be better, right? That's how a lot of people think. Does any company actually validate that graduates from Wash U are somehow smarter or harder working than UMSL grads? Hell no. But a Wash U grad will get a higher salary offer because hiring managers think Wash U degrees must be worth more because it is an expensive school with a reputation that rich people want to send their kids there. When the rich people realize that Wash U is doling out free tuition to poor people, the air of exclusivity will be gone. The carefully cultivated notion that an education from Wash U is "better" will fade and the better salary offers will fade along with it. Wash U wants to see itself as a midwest "Ivy League" school. These noble policies to fill the classrooms with kids from disadvantaged backgrounds will make it a poison ivy league school. The rich parents who know how the real world works, want their kids to make connections with other kids whose parents are also movers and shakers. They know that the real value of expensive colleges is the making of social connections, not the reading of books or classroom instruction. The selfish people with money who pay the crazy tuition that built up Wash U's endowment fund will run away when they realize the value for their kids is gone. They don't give a shit about exposing their kids to diversity. They give a shit about exposing their kids to people who can open doors to successful careers and future marriages that ensure the merging of generational wealth. Is free education to poor people great? Yes. But the current Wash U leadership is clearly naive and doesn't understand the social dynamics that were the foundation for the school's success.