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

Started looking and found out there's some much worse, and far more obvious cases that need to implement these reforms. [1]

UPenn is THE most obvious. Sitting on a $20,000,000,000 endowment fund that went up +170% over 10 years while Philadelphia rots with drug use, poverty, and gun violence.

BTW, amazing site to be horrified by gun violence (and vaguely fascinated). Look upon the awfulness of Philadelphia. [2] Sitting in their safe little haven while East and South is wounding murder land with overlapping murder / wounding statistics. (12k from 2014-2023, 190/100000 urban) [3] Northwestern and the violence everywhere South in Chi-town is maybe a personal second choice. ($13,700,000,000, +74%, 26.9k, 280/100000 urban) [4][5]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...

[2] (Guns, Philadelphia) https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...

[3] (Location, UPenn) https://www.google.com/maps/place/University+of+Pennsylvania...

[4] (Guns, Chicago) https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-sh...

[5] (Location, Northwestern) https://www.google.com/maps/place/Northwestern+University/@4...

So if a university has money, learning there should be free?

If you don't have guns, you won't have gun violence, but I guess the second amendment won't be changed any time soon.

> So if a university has money, learning there should be free?

Not an unreasonable proposition. The purpose of the university is ostensibly to provide an education, not to continue hoarding more and more money.

> purpose of the university is ostensibly to provide an education

One of the purposes. They’re also centres for learning and research and repositories of knowledge.

I disagree. I think teaching is the sole purpose of a university. Research is ancillary to that, and if an organization only did research but didn't teach I would not say they get to call themselves a university any more.

You can disagree but that doesn't change anything. Most major universities are research institutions that also teach people, and hopefully bring up some through the ranks to further research/academia/human knowledge.

Without research there would be nothing new to teach, Without research diseases wouldn't be cured. A lot of amazing things we have came from universities.

Medical research is a profit center for many universities, not a cost center. They get funded by grants from external entities like the NIH and get to skim off the top of each grant for overhead. As one outsized example, my alma mater got $583MM in NIH grants in one year. I'm not saying universities don't fund research from their own coffers, but it's important to understand how much funding comes from the government and from other sources.