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{"id":10800,"date":"2018-08-27T11:53:25","date_gmt":"2018-08-27T17:53:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=10800"},"modified":"2018-08-27T11:53:25","modified_gmt":"2018-08-27T17:53:25","slug":"family-income-of-61001-no-u-of-i-free-tuition-for-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/08\/family-income-of-61001-no-u-of-i-free-tuition-for-you.html","title":{"rendered":"Family income of $61,001? No U of I free tuition for you!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"\"$ <\/p>\n

The University of Illinois is getting in on the \u201cfree tuition\u201d game:\u00a0 as reported by NBC Chicago<\/a>, incoming students from families with less than the Illinois median income (now $61,000) and assets of less than $50,000 (excluding home equity and retirement accounts) will be eligible for free tuition and fees<\/a>, so long as their family income stays within 10% of the threshold in place at time of admission.<\/p>\n

If your family income is $61,001 or if your family has assets of $50,001, no dice.\u00a0 You\u2019re left with the standard financial aid options.\u00a0 If your family income drops below $61,000 (or the equivalent threshold in the future) while you\u2019re a student, you can\u2019t receive the benefit.<\/p>\n

Where does the money come from?\u00a0 The university\u2019s website doesn\u2019t say, nor does a Tribune article<\/a> on the plan, which reports that the program will cost $4 million per year, presumably a smaller figure than it otherwise would be because a sizable number of affected students are already getting financial aid.\u00a0 Perhaps that\u2019s a drop in the bucket, as the overall budget for the three-university system is $6.5 billion<\/a>.\u00a0 Doing some quick additional digging, in 2015, the budget specifically for the Urbana Champaign campus was $2 billion<\/a>, and tuition revenue was $682 million, or 33% of the total.\u00a0 Ignoring the increases since then, the proposed cost of this new program is 0.6% of the total; one presumes that, when all the calculations are said and done, this new program will result in net tuition for everyone else being 0.6% higher than it otherwise would have been.\u00a0 Maybe that\u2019s small enough that tuition-payers shouldn\u2019t begrudge the increase, if it benefits a worthy group of students.<\/p>\n

But what\u2019s particularly irritating is the endless profusion of these programs with harsh, unforgiving cutoffs.\u00a0 It\u2019s a system that cares about generating results, in this case, better metrics with respect to the number of in-state and low-income students attending the university, but not so much about individuals.\u00a0 The fact that such a program will produce serious angst for families at the margin, if they\u2019ve got a kid who wants to attend; the prospect that a family with assets they\u2019ve carefully saved, might decide to go on a splurge vacation in order to bring them down to $50,000; the idea that a parent would have to factor free tuition into the benefit of a promotion (or into a remarriage decision \u2014 since the FAFSA<\/a>, which this seems based off of, determines family income based on the custodial parent and spouse, but not a live-in partner) is of no importance if it doesn\u2019t impact the metrics and objectives the university has crafted for itself.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Image:\u00a0\u00a0University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Main Library. https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3AMainLibrary_Urbana_Illinois_4582.jpg; By Dori (Own work) [GFDL (http:\/\/www.gnu.org\/copyleft\/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 us (http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0\/us\/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"