Originally Posted by Bostonian
Some commentators will call gapping unfair. Schools that don't gap will charge very different prices to students from families at different income levels, and the parents paying full freight may consider that unfair, since it does not cost more to educate their children. There are multiple plausible definitions of fairness.

Please note that I did not call it unfair. I called it hypocrisy! Gapping lets colleges call thir admission system needs blind, pretending they do not care about how much parents can pay, while engineering the actual intake via the fiancial aid office.
It is not fair to have a student depend on his parents for college admission anyway - which is why I am a big fact of schemes like graduate taxes - an additional percentage of your income tax as soon as income reaches a certain threshold,one year for each semester. And those schools who prepare their kids well for the workplace can really rake it in then.

there are so many tangible and intagible benefits high SES status parent can confer on their kids, should there really be such crude buyer advantages in higher education? Why should a less gifted kid have an advantage in an educational decision over a more gifted kid because he or she happnes to be born to richer parents? Private colleges, not subsidized by taxpayer money, are perfectly in the right to do so of course - it is the hypocrisy about it I decry.

Last edited by Lewis; 09/15/14 08:31 AM.