Most students go into debt to attend college. I fell into a bracket where I didn’t get any financial assistance but my parents didn’t want to/couldn’t pay for tuition. I got personal loans for everything. I think this is a common scenario.

* in the US.

In many developed countries higher education costs the same as high school.

Same here. I paid "full price" for my degree coming from a normal middle class family. Fortunately I was able to pay it all off a few years out of school with my first job.

The large majority of MIT undergraduates graduate debt free.

When was this? MIT's financial aid was already very generous when I was applying (in 2008); IIRC the no-tuition threshold was 100 k$ back then

This was more than several years prior to that, I just tried to look up the financial aid of previous years and for some reason couldn't find it. If someone else finds it, I'd be curious to take a look.

I'm the first person in my family to have gone to college, and we never really had any money.

Still, I've always been interested in science growing up. I was programming video games and building little robots before I was 10 and envisioned myself being a robotics engineer when I got older. I got into Johns Hopkins for a double major of physics and astronomy, I couldn't actually afford it, didn't win enough scholarships (they only awarded a very small subset), and my family didn't have the money.

In the end I ended up going to a local college for computer information systems, and while I love my IT job, it's well under six figures, and I'm $60,000 in student loan debt that I'm probably gonna be paying off for the rest of my life.

Damn that is absolutely brutal. I dropped out of college after about 1 year and just learned by watching YouTube videos and installing Linux on a spare computer and running a homelab. Had to hop through a couple of lower paying IT jobs to accumulate some experience for the resume, but am now making low 6 figures in DevOPS, fully remote.

I recomend job hopping if you haven't in a while, that's the only way to really get those 20-40% raises from what you're making at the moment.

> I met someone who had gotten into MIT but whose family could only afford to send one kid to an elite college, him or his sister.

So they were rich enough that he didn't get exempt from tuition but still could only send one kid to an elite school?

I wonder if the guy was just pulling your leg.

I met him when I was at MIT for Campus Preview Weekend when accepted students visit the school. Is it necessary to assume things in such a cynical fashion?

needlessly adversarial. financial aid is a best effort kind of thing, and plenty of people with unusual situations fall through the cracks.

I don’t see it like that. People bragging about getting into MIT but not being able to go for some reason is an old meme, it always turns out that they didn’t really get in.

Right no one has ever gotten into MIT but couldn't afford it. This has literally never happened.

Tons of middle class folks are too "rich" to qualify for aid, but not quite wealthy enough to avoid going into severe debt. There's a lose-lose sweet spot that's larger than you think.

I wonder, too. In 1965, 3580 applied, 1532 were admitted, and only 929 enrolled. How many of that 39% had better options than MIT, knowing about the draft?