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Post being replied to

On Points #2 and #3 by FL_Irish

#2 - As noted elsewhere in the thread, this is an exhaustively studided topic and the data have been broken down in just about every way imaginable. Graduates with $100K+ in loans are a single digit percentage of all borrowers. When that small percentage is further broken down as you suggest, it becomes apparent that $100K+ borrowers are heavily concentrated among those who attend law school and medical school. And note that typically these analyses are of "those who graduate with debt" and thus exclude the approximately one-third of college graduates who graduate with no debt whatsoever.

Any which way you want to slice it, there are simply not a meaningful percentage of students graduating from college with $100K+ in debt (much less the $400K figure vermin05 threw out).


#3 - As mentioned elsewhere, Notre Dame is among a group of elite schools currently being sued based on essentially the same argument you've made here. "They claim they're need blind, but as a practical matter they can't actually afford to be so they must be finding ways to take ability to pay into account." The specific allegation in the lawsuit most relevant to Notre Dame is (as best I recall) that they use sophisticated enrollment management software to project what a hypothetical admitted class will yield in net tuition based on non-income demographic information. There is also the fact that they give admissions breaks to "candidates of institutional importance" (i.e., those who can donate buildings). But while that might violate the relevant statutory law at issue in the law suit, it's not really the same thing as not being "need blind."

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