For a Raise in Tuition.

The following communication in today's Bulletin was suggested by a CRIMSON editorial, concerning Harvard's need of unrestricted endowment, which was reprinted in the Bulletin last week:

"Your article in last week's edition on Harvard's Need again calls attention to a pressing and important subject. We are told once again that the endowment of the College does not keep pace with its expansion, that it gives faster than it receives. May this always be its policy!

"The hope to meet the increasing need by receiving increased endowments is natural, and in view of the immense sums recently given to new Western colleges, one wonders why the oldest is by comparison overlooked, but is there not a possible source of income, in the increase of students fees which has not been explored? Everyone knows that the fees paid by a student only meet a fraction of the cost of his tuition, but is it known whether the parents of our students are able and willing to bear a larger proportion of this cost? There are colleges where the cost of tuition is almost nothing and yet they attract few students while neither the fees nor the costliness of living in Cambridge seems to deter students from flocking to Harvard. Can larger fees be paid without detriment to the true aims of the higher education?

"The fee in the Medical School is $200. Technology charges $200 and both are over-crowded. Why should Lawrence Scientific charge only $150? Surely the lower fee is not a confession of inferiority.

"Suppose the tuition of 3000 students was raised to $200; this would give an income of $150,000 equivalent to an increased endowment of $5,000,000 at current rates of interest.

"Would this increase keep away from the College any considerable number of desirable students? This is a question which perhaps the College officials can answer, perhaps can only be settled by experiment.

"If in spite of the recent large increase in scholarship funds, increased fees would bar out students of small means, could not the difficulty be met by creating a number of University scholarships of fifty dollars each, or to put it in another way, the faculty could be authorized to remit fifty dollars of the fee for tuition to a certain number of students?

"Objections to this plan readily occur, but is it not worth consideration and discussion?