Nanyang Technological University has received a donation of 150 million Singapore dollars, or roughly $117-million, for a new medical school it is building with Imperial College London, reports Channel News Asia. The gift is from the Lee Foundation, which was established by the Singapore businessman Lee Kong Chian. Half of the money will be used to help disadvantaged students, and the rest to support the advancement of medical education and clinical research. Thanks to a government program that matches private contributions to Singapore universities, Nanyang will receive a total of more than $311-million.
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4 Responses to Singapore University Receives Big Donation for New Medical School
davidsheridan - July 18, 2011 at 8:42 am
Yes, all aid adminstrators have seen cases of wealthy students qualifying for aid (my favorite from my experience was a student whose family’s adjusted gross income was less than $20,000…the fact that they were part owners of a major market NBA franchise didn’t come up until we dug a little deeper). But this is not because the FAFSA is too simple, it’s because our tax laws provide rich people with 1001 ways to hide their money.
Schools are forced to change the way they distribute their own aid and even Federal campus-based aid all the time because of changes in formulas, allocations, institutional priorities, etc. State grant agencies can do the same. For every rich kid who gets a few grand in Pell because Daddy has a smart accountant, there might be 100 poor kids who don’t even go to college because nobody in the family can figure out how to file the FAFSA. Time to stop talking about simplification and just do it!
sciencegrad - July 18, 2011 at 10:06 am
Wow that story is crazy. I think the whole FAFSA system needs to be fixed. My biggest beef with it is that it appears that 50% of a student’s personal income automatically goes into the EFC. My parents made about $70k when I was in college, but didn’t support me at all. Therefore I had to work as much as I could so I could eat. But because of the FAFSA, this means that I got less and less aid each year, forcing me to work more and more, causing me to get less aid, etc. It’s not easy to maintain a decent GPA while working that much just to survive.
jesor - July 18, 2011 at 11:20 am
I find myself having conversations about what need looks like all of the time. It’s hard to explain to a family with a six figure income that “yes I understand you have very little extra money by the time you pay your expenses. Have you thought about selling the ski boat and redirecting the payment money to your child’s tuition?” The far more frequent conversation involves “the federal formula assumes that your child will be receiving support from you while going to school until they are at least 23″. Many parents disagree with that philosophy and choose to express that disagreement by refusing to support their student. It is their call, however do they really expect someone who was just able to start working a few years ago to actually come up with the cash for that expensive college they bragged to their friends at dinner parties about? Not to say anyone’s parents are particularly selfish, but that’s how it tends to look on the other side of the desk.
The one real problem though are folks in sole-proprietor businesses where all the business income shows up as personal income even though it’s not real income to the person (you have to re-purchase inventory, pay wages, etc. after all). These are the folks that get hammered in the tax code and thus in the FAFSA.
whm3113 - July 19, 2011 at 1:39 pm
So, because your parents refused to support your desire for an education, the taxpayer should have to pay more?