Helen Anderson

A member of the Philip Greenspun's Homepage community since April 21, 2000

If you were to log in, you'd be able to get more information on your fellow community member.

April 21, 2000, on Tuition-free MIT:
The purposes of schools like MIT are to provide high quality education for an exclusive group of students and to create knowledge (usually the results of research, inventions or discoveries) for the world. Exclusiveness is achieved, in part, through the low acceptance rate of student applicants and through the high sticker price. Exclusivity and expensiveness build the MIT brand, which then helps bring in the research funding and the top faculty, and the cycle continues. It would be bad to do something which would stop that creation of knowledge. Eliminating tuition is fundamentally different from eliminating exclusiveness. It would be possible to build the MIT brand even further by saying that only the top students get in, but once they are accepted, it's free. That would be a really neat fund-raising campaign to the alumni. Endow tuition, not financial aid. On the other hand, if MIT provides the educational product to a wide audience, the brand could lose its perceived ...