Tuition: A Price Too High

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I hear tuition just went up to $9,000. Two thoughts struck me upon reading that:

First, I am glad I graduated last year. What a stroke of good fortune that I was born in 1958, rather than in 1960 or 1961. Too bad, I suppose, for everyone else.

Second, when I was at Harvard, I used to complain, along with many others who shared the "Harvard Experience" circa 1975-79, that the place wasn't worth $7,000. For $7,000 I got second year grad students as teachers, large impersonal lectures, a department famed for its second class status in the Ivy Leagues, bad food, and a terrific dorm room senior year. I was fortunate that there were enough good people, many of whom could just barely afford to come to Harvard, to make the whole thing seem worthwhile, and in the end, a good four years.

But at $9,000, I couldn't have made it. And how many will now simply go elsewhere with their gifts and their talents, because their parents don't make enough to pay; or make too much to qualify for a full scholarship? So much, I guess, for diversity. Joseph B. White '79