Private school is enough to make a well off person feel poor. $50k/year is after tax money. If you look at it pretax, it’s about $90k/year. God forbid you have more than one child in college at the same time. If you’re making $200k/year, that $90k/year is a sizable chunk. Then again, you can still afford to pay for it.

There’s one caveat about being at a rich private university. Most of the other students are rich, so there are very few people with the same socioeconomic status at you. I know personally. You can’t help but feel different, because they never have to worry about financial matters or deal with people who aren’t from the same socioeconomic group. I overheard a group of young ladies talk about homeless people in San Francisco in a way that dehumanized them. It kind of broke my heart, but I excused them, because that was something totally new to them. It’s kind of like all the Japanese people staring at you as you walk the streets when you’re a big black guy in teaching English in Japan.

I’m a bit skeptical about the motivations for providing financial aid to low income people. First, some senator said some strong words about universities not making use of their tax sheltered endowments. Second, it is a way to saying something in your demographics. Private universities have to operate like a business. Making your rich alumni happy and getting new rich alumni is a necessity.

I love the United States. If I lived elsewhere, my chance of getting into a college would be a lot less. My mother reads me articles about degrees from colleges in China being worthless and how parents commit suicide after their one child gets into college, because they can’t pay for it. I don’t know how much is exaggeration and how much is true, but I do know my parents were denied education as a result of the cultural revolution.