Recent email from the president of the Queers for Palestine version of MIT:
The interesting part:
MIT now pays a 1.4% tax on that investment income. The current Senate version of the bill would hike this endowment tax rate to 8%. To give you a sense of scale, for MIT that proposed tax hike is equivalent to our entire annual undergraduate financial aid budget, which provides aid to about 60% of our undergraduates or about 2,600 students every year.
In other words, the university needs the massive endowment to fund “financial aid”. Also, only 8% of the income from the endowment is actually used for financial aid.
Note that what the elite schools call “financial aid” is referred to in Econ 101 as “price discrimination”, in which each consumer is charged the maximum that he/she/ze/they is willing to pay; if the school determines that a family has $X in free cashflow annually the entire $X will be extracted by MIT. From Wokipedia:
Price discrimination (differential pricing, equity pricing, preferential pricing, dual pricing, tiered pricing, and surveillance pricing) is a microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of. Price discrimination is distinguished from product differentiation by the difference in production cost for the differently priced products involved in the latter strategy. Price discrimination essentially relies on the variation in customers’ willingness to pay and in the elasticity of their demand. For price discrimination to succeed, a seller must have market power, such as a dominant market share, product uniqueness, sole pricing power, etc.
Wissenschaft
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research-university
So is Mindy the crippler on Jack Dorsey’s new app BitchAt?
lion: I hadn’t heard of this, but it does seem like a great service for female canines!
Who does the “financial aid” actually aid? If MIT gives each student say $20k in aid, then the students give it all back to MIT, is that really aid? Or just accounting fiction?
Anon: That’s a great point. I can become the most charitable person on the planet in a couple of weeks. I’m offering math tutoring to local high school students. My standard rate is $10,000,000,001 per hour. I am providing financial aid, though, of $10 billion per year, thus resulting in a net cost to parents of $1/hour of tutoring (maybe a little more than my services are worth!). After 40 hours of work I will have given away $400 billion, i.e., more than any of the richest say-gooders and do-gooders.
And of course, the vast majority of parents and students cannot afford to pay Philip $10 billion. That is when the government, i.e.: everyone except Philip, steps in to issue loans, creating long-term financial burdens for families. Philip gets richer and richer, while parents and students fall deeper and deeper into debt. Yet Democrats continue to wonder why the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.
“Dr” Phil:
“Note that what the elite schools call “financial aid” is referred to in Econ 101 as “price discrimination””
Discrimination…right up your alley…like a “pure” right-winger you’ve never seen some discrimination you don’t like.