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!

A recent slew of phone calls from the NYU admissions office to low-income families presumably went something like that (the quoted phrases above seem to be actual quotes), and some incoming freshman are now offended. According to the Post, recently-accepted students who were the first in their families to attend college were likelier to get the calls, and 19-year-old financial aid student Eli Kraicer tells the tabloid, "It makes sense for the university to check up, but if that's the case, why don't they call everybody? It's a bit discriminatory. When people get these calls, it's added pressure. I'm sure it's enough to make some people think twice about coming to NYU [and] if that happens, that's not fair at all." Oh no, there they go with everything having to be fair, again.

Officials at NYU, which will distribute $175 million in financial aid in the next school year, say the phone calls were simply intended to make sure families understood their often complex financial aid packages. But an editorial in the school newspaper says the whole thing stinks: "If promising and motivated students choose not to attend, and any student able to pay the bill fills their spot, NYU risks undermining both its prestige and its socioeconomic diversity. NYU must turn inward and ask itself which quality it values more in its students: motivation, or financial solubility?" Which values do you think NYU will choose?