Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

The article claims 80% of American households meet this threshold. I wonder what % of their incoming class (say restricted to Americans) meets this threshold.

That's a great question, I'd bet it's fair to say that 80% of their applicants would not qualify, and yet it opens the door for some really deserving humans. (Not being able to afford it is why I didn't go to MIT, I also wasn't accepted at Cal, yet UCLA (and all of the UC system for that matter) was under 4,000 a year and that's what my folks and I could afford so that's where I studied.)

Princeton has had a similar rule since 2001. Their current number is $100k. 25% of students pay nothing to attend. [0]

[0] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2024/03/29/princeton-trustees... (go tigers)

Approximately 60% of American households earn less than $100K. That's quite a difference in relative size.

Households with earners in their 20's and early 30's don't tend to have a lot of children of university age. One would want to use the median income of households with university-aged children.

(Median income by age rises sharply from 20->40, then flatlines... the median age of a mother is around 27?)

Use College Navigator for these types of questions:

https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=MIT&s=all&id=166683#...

That link says 72% of incoming freshman in 2022-2023 received financial aid. Also has a full-time beginning net cost average of just under $22,000 in 2022-2023.

It's not a perfect source of data, but there is enough on College Navigator to let you dig into it a bit and compare to other schools.

Note that aid includes federal student loans though. They may have needed to come up with $22,000 out of pocket but also have taken on thousands more in loans that will need to be paid back. If they don't have the $22,000, then private student loans at much worse terms are likely required.

The article actually goes into more detail:

> Last year, the median annual cost paid by an MIT undergraduate receiving financial aid was $12,938 , allowing 87 percent of students in the Class of 2024 to graduate debt-free. Those who did borrow graduated with median debt of $14,844.

The population of people who apply to a nice college, or even college at all, is probably not representative of the average american household