Harvard Hits The Rich-Poor Gap

Based on my experience for the 2008-09 financial aid year, your numbers on page 54 for are way off for Yale in the 120-160K range. I am paying for a child at Yale now roughly about what your table on page 54 says, but I have TWO children in college. I have been told by Yale that when my non-Yalie graduates in 2009-10, that in the 2009-10 school year that the parental contribution will about DOUBLE. The older child is also attending a elite school that significantly boostd its aid. But together they are taking about 20% of my 2007 estmy adjusted gross income.

I will be a senior in high school this fall and have already started deciding where to apply next year. Unfortunately, the financial aid situation is actually prohibiting me from applying to many colleges I might actually have a chance of getting into. Our family is comfortable middle-class and thus wouldn't be eligible for any financial aid whatsoever from many universities that have a smaller-than-Harvard's endowment. This makes the cost of these universities entirely prohibitive. I wholeheartedly support any new initiative to offer more aid to the middle class...just as low income students shouldn't have to view money as a barrier to their dreams, neither should middle chass students be deterred by prohibitively high costs of education. At this point, my only hope is merit-based aid, which is viewed by many as extra money being thrown at the rich. Believe me, my family is hardly rich, and merit-based aid is basically the only way I will be able to go to schools such as Duke or Emory. I'm not even bothering to apply to Dartmouth or Brown...even if I got in, I just can't afford to go there. In my opinion, money should never ever be a barrier to a good education. In what kind of country are we living?