Graduate Schools Aim High for Aid

The numbers are rolling in—President Lawrence H. Summers’ promise to bolster aid at the University’s graduate schools is likely to be both costly and complicated.

In his installation speech and in interviews since, Summers has said he hopes to coordinate a University-wide effort to put graduate student financial aid on fiscally sound footing.

“Inability to pay does not constrain students from coming to Harvard College and it should not constrain the most able students from coming here to Harvard to become scholars, or doctors, architects or teachers,” Summers said.

According to officials at the various schools, any serious attack on student aid problems is likely to cost tens of millions of dollars annually.

University officials stress that Summers’ initiative is only in its earliest fact-finding stages. Harvard’s graduate schools are pulling together data on current aid and explaining their unmet needs in response to a questionnaire sent out by the central administration.

A survey of three of the schools considered neediest by University officials shows that to meet “full need” for those schools alone would mean an increase of over $30 million dollars in aid, annually.

One University insider said increases to aid overall could exceed $50 million, and that even with some non-endowment sources, such a goal would require in excess of $1 billion dollars in newendowment.

It took the University six years and a surging economy to raise the $2.6 billion it raised during its biggest and most recent capital campaign.

Summers won’t say whether a similar capital campaign is an option now, calling such speculation premature. But Summers has said that ultimately, financial aid in the graduate schools would have to be addressed by sources of permanent funding, stressing that opening the schools to a diverse student body is a University-wide value.

Money however, is not the entire story.

Deans and financial aid officers from the various schools describe widely differing aid programs and ways to boost them, explaining why increasing graduate student financial aid will be a complex but worthy goal for the first-year president.

Students eagerly await more aid as well.

“Any improvements would be welcome,” said Shaun L. Rein, co-president of the Harvard Graduate Student Council. “It’s important that students don’t have to take into consideration financial concerns.”

Summers has been vague in describing his goal for graduate school financial aid—with good reason, many said.

At the College, students are admitted on a need-blind basis. The school pledges to make Harvard affordable through direct aid, work study, loans and other school-sponsored means. But Summers has not said what putting the graduate schools on the College’s level would practically mean.

In an interview, Summers noted that the differences between the schools defy easy generalization.

Some schools rely heavily on loans rather than grants—the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) offers 68 percent of its total aid as grants, while loans make up more than three quarters of aid at the business, law and dental schools.

Some mirror the College in considering only need in calculating aid packages, while other schools facing more intense recruitment pressures—GSAS, for example—offer scholarships and grants based entirely on merit, designed to woo the best students to Harvard.

Some schools, like the Graduate School of Education (GSE) offer a combination of both.

And the total amount of aid offered varies from $71 million at GSAS to under $10 million each at the dental, design and divinity schools.

Summers says he’s concerned with improving aid at all the schools. But one University source said Summers is likely to focus on schools in which large debts burden students in their future professions, and in areas in which the prospect of an eternal tab discourages some from even attending.

Loan relief for students who go into low-paying professions and public service is a therefore a top priority.

Joel C. Monell, dean for administration and academic services at GSE, said that the loan burden there is a severe problem.

While merit awards cover tuition for a majority of first-year doctoral candidates, support beyond that is insufficient, Monell said. “We’re nowhere near covering the needs of our students if you count in cost-of-living expenses.”

GSE calculates a cost of living for students of over $40,000, including tuition. The maximum entrance award is $32,000. The grant for those on full aid drops to $28,000 after the first year, and many students get much less than that, Monell said. The gap is filled by student loans—to the tune of $10 million a year.

The problem is, Monell said, “that students are going out to jobs that aren’t paying like a doctor’s or lawyer’s would.”

One result is that students are pressured to take term-time jobs off-campus, jobs that Monell said tend to subtract from educational experiences.

Monell said that he hadn’t heard any specifics of how GSE would be affected by a drive for increased aid across the University.

“We use the number of $10 million of unmet need,” he said. “I don’t really expect President Summers to say ‘OK, here’s the money.’”

At the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), administrators face a similar dilemma—how to fulfill the school’s educational mission of training students for important but often low-paying public service jobs.

Because resources are severely limited, KSG Associate Dean Joseph J. McCarthy said, students have to take out too many loans to finance their education.

KSG has a need-based aid program, and tries to meet identified need, but, McCarthy said, “we don’t succeed.”

The average KSG student leaves with $42,000 in debt. When faced with a presidential management internship paying $38,000 a year or a six-figure salary for consulting, McCarthy said, “students’ choices are constrained.”

He said that the financial aid office calculated that limiting the debt burden to one the typical KSG-grad federal worker can handle would mean increasing the financial aid budget by 25-30 percent, or $2-3 million.

But fulfilling full need would cost far more than that.

Further proof that Summers faces a multitude of different barriers to increasing aid is the School of Public Health (SPH). James H. Ware, SPH dean for academic affairs, said that funding international students is the school’s biggest financial aid problem.

While the government provides one third of the school’s overall tuition in the form of training grants, international students are not eligible for that money.

“As a result, we are not able to achieve the type of diversity we’d like,” Ware said.

—Staff writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.