Admitted but broke

Here's another example. My friend Maggie is far more disciplined and hardworking than me, and, like me, she graduated in the top 10 of our high school class. She emigrated from Russia when she was 5. Her dad is a limo driver and earns just enough to support their family of four. Maggie has been accepted at Bard College, which gave her a significant aid package, but she is still responsible for $8,000 a year. Bard assumed that she'd be able to get a loan for that. She applied for a dozen and was rejected for all of them.

The school suggested to Maggie that she defer for a year to give her time to come up with the cash. But the reality is an 18-year-old would be lucky to get a job paying $10 an hour. And the college expects her to save $8,000 in 12 months? Her family finally raised the money, paying Bard in installments from assets back in Russia. But what about next year?

This year, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the average American's savings may be near .0% of their disposable income. What this means is that in a startling number of households, college is even more out of reach, even without an unexpected expense such as a mother with cancer, a grandparent who requires live-in help or even dental work or repairs on the car that a parent needs to get to work.

Combine that with the difficult economic times we're in and it makes little sense to me that financial-aid policies consider an income large enough to pay the bulk of tuition large enough to afford it. Colleges need to recognize the difference between the two.

The schools that accepted my friends have endowments -- Johns Hopkins' is nearly $3 billion, and its website says that it is "a community committed to sharing values of diversity and inclusion." Something is not adding up. The university has billions of dollars and seeks a diverse student body. But it must mean "diverse" with an asterisk: It only applies to those who can afford $52,578 a year, or the very few who are both impoverished and qualified.

An annual college bill that exceeds the median household income, and an income level set too low for families like E.G.'s to qualify for aid, seem designed to exclude the middle class.

With the $30,875 that E.G. is responsible for each year, he says that by the time he's a junior, he will have dried up all the money his father has saved over 25-plus years. I asked him how his 15-year-old sister was going to pay for college. He said he would "make it back" and help her.