Harvard University announced on Monday that it would significantly increase the financial aid it offered to middle-class and upper-middle-class students, seeking to allay concerns that elite colleges are becoming too expensive for even relatively well-off families.
The move, to go into effect in the next school year, appears to make Harvard’s aid to students with household incomes from $120,000 to $180,000 the most generous of any of the country’s prestigious private universities. Harvard will generally charge such students 10 percent of their family household income per year, substantially subsidizing the annual cost of more than $45,600.
Officials said the policy would cut costs by a third to 50 percent for many students and make the real costs of attending Harvard comparable to those at major state universities.
Hallelujah. As one with college for three children looming on the horizon, I hope this catches on elsewhere.
T his is a very bad decision by Harvard and will have all sorts of unpleasant repercussion. The proper place to start is to list en to the Lehrer News hour of several nights ago on this subject. First and most obvious, this hurts small, limited-endowment colleges in their ability to survive.
Second, this will pressure the well-heeled colleges, especially the Ivies, to copy Harvard. If they do, then the amount of money available for those who truly have no money will grow smaller, and the conditions will favor the Big Deal Colleges to limit their acceptance to students from richer and richer families, a condition already present. The spokesman for Harvard remarked that more than one half of Harvard’s student body is already made
up of such families. In this regard, I once again recommend readding the discussion at the end of The Bell Curve of the effects of the confluence of the very bright and the very rich. This is undesirable in every respect.
Third, but hardly last, this practice will permit the rich colleges to increase their tuition – which has already reached astronomical heights – even further, and this will limit every more those who can apply to such schools. My son just graduated from Colby, and in four years, the tuition went from #38,000 to $44,000. This isn’t exactly the cost of living increase. And Colby is already a country club school because the students there are so uniformly well-heeled beyond anything most of us are likely to attain. To call $180,000 middle class is egregious arrogance. I might add that 4X $44,000 is $176,000 and this is merely for the opportunity to go to Colby. The rest of the costs for four years adds (roughly) another $50,000 on to the four year costs. What students will Colby take in, given these charges? Those students whose families are already richrichrich.
Harvard, with its endowment in the many many billlions, is acting with that arrogance for which is is justly reputed. LM
I’m sorry, but I don’t think any undergraduate education is possibly worth $45,000(+) a year times 4(+) years.
#3. And you are right. Larry