



Is Professor Nocera's solar brew a savior or a wishful thinking?














Comments     Threshold


RE: Greatness
By UNHchabo on 11/24/2008 5:25:08 PM , Rating: 6
Some people already do. It's called "tuition".

RE: Greatness
By Gzus666 on 11/24/2008 5:27:14 PM , Rating: 4
I highly doubt their tuition is sent in sacks with $ on them. If they did though, that would be quite sweet.

RE: Greatness
By quiksilvr on 11/24/2008 6:56:32 PM , Rating: 2
Have you SEEN how much it costs to go to MIT? They practically do have $ signs on them.

RE: Greatness
By DaveLessnau on 11/24/2008 8:11:00 PM , Rating: 3
Just for informational purposes:

Undergraduate Tuition and Living Expenses

Nine months' tuition for 2007–2008 is $34,750; a Student Activity Fee of $236 increases the total to $34,986. In addition, undergraduate room and board is approximately $10,400, with actual costs dependent on the student's housing and dining arrangements. Books and personal expenses (including clothes, laundry, and recreation, but excluding travel) are about $2,800.,

That's from:

I don't see any mention of resident vs non-resident rates. I also assume the numbers are a bit bigger for the 2008-2008 school year.

RE: Greatness
By jeff834 on 11/24/2008 10:09:01 PM , Rating: 4
As far as I know private schools don't differentiate between residents and non residents. As for how expensive the school is $45,000 a year is high, but not outrageous for an elite school. I personally went to Boston University right across the river from MIT (applied to MIT, didn't get in), which in my freshman year (99-00) was $34,000 or so grand total. I would bet now it's probably at or over $45k. They were pretty generous with scholarships and such (I got half tuition), just about everyone in the engineering department had some kind of grant/scholarship money.

RE: Greatness
By Solandri on 11/25/2008 3:03:11 AM , Rating: 2
MIT was ~$21k/yr when I was there as a grad student (94-96). So it's been going up a bit more than 5% a year.

Dunno about undergrad, but I know most of the grad students had some form of assistance, be it grants, scholarships, or an RA/TA. I want to say about 60%-70%, but that's just the number which pops into my head. I can't recall for sure - I think I read it in The Tech while I was there. I was a full-RA, which paid all of my tuition and gave me a small stipend of about $1300/mo. If you're qualified, they will bend over backwards to make sure you can attend. Some departments have more money too, so what major you decide to go for does affect your chances of getting financial aid.

A friend of mine went to BU my last year, which had the ignominy of being the most expensive school in the U.S. at the time - around $32k IIRC. It made me think MIT was a bargain in comparison.

RE: Greatness
By nstott on 11/25/2008 1:41:21 AM , Rating: 3

MIT is a private institution, so there aren't separate rates.

RE: Greatness
By Chemical Chris on 11/25/2008 3:10:24 PM , Rating: 3
Whenever I complain about my tuition, I just think of the states, and feel better. Thank god I live in Canada, where even though tuition isnt free (it should be, in all countries, for reasons too detailed to get into here), it is heavily subsidized. I pay about ~$5500/yr (Im third year undergrad in Biochem).
Im currently considering doing a masters, as many of my profs and TA's have told me I should, and it gets much better then, as one can get NSERC support (tuition paid for, monthly stipend of $1-2k a month), which isnt bad.
Basically, undergrads are treated like crap, only once you prove your ability and become a grad student are you treated with respect, and the financial onus largely removed.
But nearly 40 grand a year for post-secondary! No wonder there is such a large gap (and growing) between the haves and have nots; by denying post secondary education, you are creating a society of rich and poor, with no middle class. And those that do manage to work up to a College degree, spend the rest of their life paying it back, meaning only their children will have half a chance at 'the american dream'. Sickening.
In the old days, the people were kept in line by severe means; threats, enforced poverty and total lack of education. Now, they just raise the price so only the 'social elite' can rise above, everyone else is kept in the low class as the price of getting out is just too high.
It just makes me so mad.



RE: Greatness
By masher2 (blog) on 11/25/2008 4:13:31 PM , Rating: 1
> "by denying post secondary education, you are creating a society of rich and poor"

No one is "denied" a post-secondary education -- they're simply being denied one at MIT. Anyone who gets accepted to a public university can afford to go, between all the various scholarships, grants, and loans offered.

Even for private universities like MIT, a substantial number of their students are attending either free or close to it. The bar is much higher, obviously -- but if you score well enough to make MIT "want" you, your tuition will be the last of your worries.

An entirely free education for any and all seems to have been a very poor policy. The largest problem in any public high school in America is simply keeping students to hang around long enough to graduate. People respect what they have to work for. I suspect that, were we to make college literally 'free', it would treated with the same lack of respect.

RE: Greatness
By jeff834 on 11/25/2008 9:57:23 PM , Rating: 1
Plenty of affordable places to go in the US definitely. I wasn't able to get into MIT, and I had scores and grades higher than a girl in my graduating class who did, but I was offered free tuition and room and board at both Rutgers University and The College of New Jersey. I just didn't want to go to either of those schools. There isn't really any financial reason people can't get a college education if they want it enough.

RE: Greatness


RE: Greatness
By Belegost on 11/25/2008 8:06:42 PM , Rating: 2
Wait, what?

As pointed out, MIT is a private school, they are free to charge whatever they would like. That in no way precludes the existence of publicly funded universities - and, in fact, there are many in the US.

I did my undergraduate work in EE at UCSD, a highly regarded school for engineering internationally. Currently I believe in-state undergraduate fees amount to about 7,500/year plus an additional 7k for housing. The fees are also the same for attending UC Berkeley, which is a school generally considered to have the same high reputation as MIT in science and engineering.


Yes. Exactly. Part of the point of the undergraduate program is to be a test of the student's will to succeed. This is why large percentages of starting undergrads never finish, they lack the motivation and discipline needed. It only makes sense to reward someone AFTER they have proven worthy of the reward.


Oh boy, I'm giggling like a school girl just thinking about that one. I'm sorry, I've seen way too many students who have free rides to agree to that. When something is given to you, it becomes commonplace, something to be assumed rather than earned. This breeds laziness and apathy.

Going through the undergrad program I saw a lot of my peers, who had parents paying the bills, goof off and waste their time, ultimately failing out of the program, or barely managing to graduate.

Meanwhile the people who paid their own way (like myself) tended to be far more serious about what they were doing. Perhaps it was the reminder that each lecture I skipped was $100 of my money gone, never to return. And had I failed a class, the cost would have been thousands of dollars. That is a definite motivating agent.


<sarcasm> I'm glad my dad is a highly important car painter; I can't imagine being denied my college degree.</sarcasm>

This is where your ignorance of the US university systems leads you to make asinine comments. There is no real barrier to a university degree in the US. There are community college systems in most places that allow students with poor prior academic performance to improve and transfer to a university. There are a variety of financial aid programs funded by the government that pay for many students. Most public universities are rather inexpensive. (My sister attends a Cal State university, her yearly fees are around $3000.)


I have about 25k in student loans to pay back for my undergraduate work. Since I was quite successful as an undergrad, my current graduate work is being entirely funded on fellowship, which further pays me $25k/year stipend. I'm hardly going to spend a lifetime paying back my school costs.

What the US system does do: separate people based on motivation - a separation between "do" and "do nots" so to speak. If you have the will and tenacity to struggle through the hard parts, you will be rewarded, and because of this, those that get through will earn something valuable - when I get that PhD certificate I will have proof of my ability to perform at a level above the wide majority of people. (To be honest, these days a BA/BS degree is so easy to get in the US that it's become about as valuable as a high school diploma - just something you are expected to have.)

RE: Greatness
By luhar on 12/15/2008 1:23:43 PM , Rating: 2
Just to add some more info to the tuition discussion. MIT will waive tuition (still require some work-study I believe) for all students who's families earn less than $75k a year.

I was there from 90-94 and most people I knew had some sort of aid. I believe the numbers have increased now. More and more of their costs are being covered by endowments. However, I don't know what the financial situation is given the market these days.


RE: Greatness
By nstott on 11/25/2008 1:38:00 AM , Rating: 2

That's actually how we paid it. They don't take credit card payments, which totally sucked.


P.S. Dan Nocera is so hyper it's like he's on crack, but he's not. He has a lot of brilliance to go along with his optimism, so this research will likely go somewhere despite the naysayers.

RE: Greatness
By Belegost on 11/25/2008 8:07:33 PM , Rating: 2
I'm glad UCSD isn't the only place that forces fee payments in cash...

RE: Greatness
By nstott on 11/25/2008 10:32:27 PM , Rating: 2
Oh, but that's just the beginning. MIT is a wacky place where cutting-edge technology is developed under a backwards, technology-adverse administration of primordial throwbacks.

The on-campus housing lottery when I was first there consisted of students filling out a form with their top three housing choices and the housing office then transferring those choices to index cards. Then, they tried to organize the cards on the top of a desk based on available housing and the choices of the students. The "system" finally broke down and the results were extremely delayed, so they let some "youngster" who did his PhD work at Princeton on creating digital databases make a computer program that used an algorithm to maximize receipt of desired housing and generated the results within a few seconds.

I had to pay my rent every month in person by cash or check, and we had to do course registration by hard copy with required signatures after pre-registration over the Internet. During undergrad at the University of Arizona, I paid my rent by credit card and registered for classes over the phone. It could all be done by phone or over the Internet by the time I graduated.

The technological backwardness of the MIT administration was a total shock. The first month there, my wife kept on saying to me, "This is MIT?!"

RE: Greatness
By Connoisseur on 11/24/2008 5:45:47 PM , Rating: 2
From what i'm told by a buddy who did undergrad and grad at MIT: The school has so much money and their financial managers are so good that they could technically afford to send their students to school for free. But they still charge tuition :P I'd say that's bag-fuls of money more or less. Dunno how much that's changed in the current financial climate.

