Stanford Offers Free Tuition to Middle Class Kids

Starting this autumn, Stanford University will give free tuition to any student whose family earns less than $100,000 a year. That’s a $36,000 freebie. Room and board, books and such will still cost, however. The move is welcome, but America can do better.

Stanford, like its Ivy League counterparts, can afford it. It’s sitting on top of a $17.1 billion endowment. One wag said that Harvard, the Stanford of the East, is a massive hedge fund with a college attached to it, and Stanford is no different. The move will boost Stanford’s budget for need-based scholarships to $97.2 million next academic year from $76.5 million. That increases represents 0.12% of the endowment. “No high school senior should rule out applying to Stanford because of cost,” university President John Hennessy explained.

Interestingly, if one is accepted (and only 11% of applicants are), Stanford could prove to be cheaper for a lot of kids than California’s state schools. A family with an adjusted gross income of $55,000 would pay around $4,500 to attend UC-Berkley. Stanford would be free. About one-third of Stanford’s students could qualify for a free ride.

Mark Gomez of the Mercury News wrote, “In December, Harvard declared a plan to cut costs for families earning under $180,000. Harvard families earning $120,000 to $180,000 pay no more than 10 percent of their income toward college. At Princeton, families who make $120,000 to 180,000 contribute 16 percent of their income, on average, toward school.”

Clearly, there is a value to a college education, just as there is to primary and secondary learning. In America, K-12 is free. Surely, the time has come to consider extending that policy to university and techincal training. America might not have to import engineers from India or China if it invested in creating American-born scholars. Who’ll pay for it? The whole country benefits, so the whole country pays. An educated workforce earns more, so it pays more in taxes, possibly at lower rates. It is a better rate of return, in any case, than the country currently gets from burdening a 22-year-old with debt.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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