Harvard’s Aid to Middle-Class Families a Signal for Change
In December Harvard University announced it would begin offering increased financial aid to students of middle and upper-middle class families. Those families earning between $120,000 and $180,000 will only have to pay about 10 percent of their income, or no more than $18,000 of the $45,600 traditionally charged for tuition, Jonathan D. Glater of the New York Times reports (“Harvard’s Aid to Middle Class Pressures Rivals,” Dec. 29, 2007).
For a school like Harvard, with a $35 million endowment, the gesture is reasonable, and other schools have followed suit: the University of Pennsylvania, Pomona College, Swarthmore College and Haverford College. But smaller liberal arts schools are beginning to find similar cost-cutting discounts to be less than feasible.
Schools Fail to Financially Compete
Harvard’s competitors are finding that the Ivy League school’s change in financial aid policy is affecting their students as much as its own. Small, but competitive liberal arts schools have been receiving comments from concerned parents and students asking for equivalent financial aid offers.
“Harvard has started to redefine the financial aid landscape, and it’s redefined it in a way that is quite beneficial to the wealthiest institutions,” Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Bryn Mawr, Jenny Rickard, told the Times. “It’s just a handful of schools that can really respond this way, but it leaves others kind of pulling their hair.”
William D. Durden, president of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, says his school is one of the many finding it difficult to compete.
“A lot of us are going to be under huge pressure to do these things that we just can’t do,” he tells the Times.
Durden, along with other college president’s like himself, say Harvard’s move could also end up taking away financial aid opportunities from low-income students, making tuition pricing seem even more arbitrary, and causing schools to raise already increasing tuition costs to account for the additional financial assistance.
College Costs at the Heart of the Issue
Harvard officials made their decision in part because they noticed students from middle-class families were simply not applying. Although Harvard allows almost any student from a household making less than $60,000 to attend the school almost for free, Harvard’s Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons noticed that his school was missing out on some “exciting” middle and upper-middle-class students, most likely because of the school’s high price tuition.
“People were voting with their feet,” Fitzsimmons said in the Times article.
But others see Harvard’s efforts as capable of reversing admissions trends. Donald E. Heller, director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University, says an increase in middle-class students to Harvard could bump out lower-class students from the school’s acceptance pool.
Some of the arguments surrounding Harvard’s recent tuition discounts are turning into the chicken and the egg type discussions. While some officials have used Harvard’s move as an example of why schools need additional federal funding, others fear that parents and students will point their fingers back at the institutions arguing that they’re clearly charging too much for an education.
“It will educate those parents into thinking, ‘Eighteen thousand dollars a year is what we ought to be paying; why should we have to pay any more than that?’” the president of Ursinus College, John Strassburger, asked in the Times article.
And perhaps that’s where the real problem lies: college affordability. There’s no saying when and if college costs will ever be overhauled, but in the meantime it looks like the only people winning in this situation are those Harvard students whose families make just the right amount of money.