Hi, is this Jimmy McIndigent? This is the NYU Admissions Office calling! Listen, we know you've worked so hard in high school all these years to get into the college of your dreams, but looking over your family's financial profile, it's gonna take a lot more than your summer job at Mi-T-Mart to make this nut. Now, we're not encouraging you to back out or anything—though if you did there's probably still time for us to find one more rich kid to take your place. It's just that not everyone is the right "financial fit" for NYU, which currently costs over $50,000 a year. Yeah, that's a lot, but have you seen that new Kimmel Center? We just had Ra Ra Riot play there; it was sick! Anyhoo, we've just been calling 1,800 of the 7,300 accepted students who qualified for financial aid with this little "heads up" to make sure they're seriously going through with "mortgaging their future" with all these loans! Just food for thought, k? TTYL! more ›

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A reader sent us a scan of a flier she found at NYU's student center, "It’s a flier for a NYU financial aid plan that basically tells students that can’t afford NYU to go to CUNY," and points out it's crazy that "NYU can’t give its students decent financial aid even though John Sexton flies to Abu Dhabi every other week and we keep buying new buildings all over the city." The school's tuition is around $50,000. more ›

For three years straight, NYU has dominated the annual Princeton Review "College Hopes and Worries" survey, coming in as the #1 “dream school” for college-bound students. But now NYU’s reign of dreams has turned into a humiliating nightmare, as the 2008 survey shows the university plummeting to the #4 slot, bested by Harvard, Stanford and Princeton. more ›

Columbia University has a new financial aid plan for undergraduate students whose families make between $60,000-100,000. Following in the footsteps of other Ivy League schools, they will significantly expand the aid currently offered to lower and middle income students. The VP of Arts and Sciences Nicholas Dirks said, “Our new financial aid policies reflect a more realistic view of the challenges that lower- and middle-income families face in paying for college.” more ›