EXTRA EXTRA EXTRA BONUS: Colleges who do not have $10+ Billion dollar endowments (most of them) still have to compete with the Ivy League-tier schools for Professors, Facilities, and more — they just don’t have the investment returns to help pay for it. What’s the only source of income they have left? Tuition.

So both the Big Dogs and the Small Dogs in the yard have an incentive to keep Tuitions unaffordable — the little guys are still relying on capturing all the surplus Wealth from America to keep the doors open (again, see: my first essay). If I were a Small Dog, though, I’d be very worried about the future.

You can’t compete with Compound Growth when you’re only collecting linear returns.

CRITICISM: “There is no statute in the body of tax law that specifies you must be offering aid to 50%+ of your students in order to qualify as a Charity, so a core point of this essay is in fact incorrect."

I’ve edited in an extra sub-bullet in my intro bullets clarifying the structure of my argument a bit. But while this criticism is definitely factually true, it perhaps suggests a different view of our legal framework in America (and its fluidity) from the view I have, where the letter of the law and the Tax-Sheltered status of these orgs is somewhat mutable and has already been subject to prior challenge by the DoJ. By bringing up the prior challenges by the DoJ — which was a case the DoJ lost based on Charity-arguments put forth by MIT — I hoped to highlight that the current status of the Institute as a “provider of Charity” was court-sanctioned based on those exact arguments.

I.e. Because MIT responded to the lawsuit by pointing to the number of students receiving “aid” and the degree of that “aid”, and because they won the case on those merits, Common Law precedent is created that bounds them and suggests that the case could perhaps be re-litigated were that “aid” no longer needed. Certainly the worry must exist.

I suggest this might be driving the magical 58% of students who receive “aid” every single year.

Instead of responding further to this critique in my own words, I hope it's okay to link to two other comments who I think addressed the issue in a better way that I did.

Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18793049

Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18794785

Since the discussion has moved on from the front-page of social media, I wanted to include these links for people who might end up here in the future without editing the post itself. Hopefully that's okay!