Towards a New Deal

For years, films such as Stealing Harvard have peddled the perception that the College is prohibitively expensive for low-income students. Indeed, Tom Green’s film about an uncle who resorts to convenience-store robbery to pay his niece’s tuition found a comfortable place in the pantheon of commercials, television shows and movies that assume Harvard’s gates are only open to the wealthy. But, as any actual Yardling can tell you, the College isn’t only need-blind, its financial-aid program is one of the best in the country.

And it just got better. This week, University President Lawrence H. Summers announced an impressive new financial-aid plan that will do a lot for low-income undergraduates. Under Summers’ plan, parents earning less that $40,000 a year will not have to pay anything for their child’s education, and parents making between $40,000 and $60,000 will receive significant reductions in the tuition they pay.

We are glad to see Summers prioritizing undergraduate financial aid. This new initiative is a promising step in the University’s ongoing struggle to improve socioeconomic diversity on campus and ensure that everyone admitted to Harvard can afford to attend.

Still, there is more Harvard can do. An important way to improve Summers’ package is to do away with student loans, just as Princeton’s did in 2001. While Harvard graduates students with significantly smaller loan debt in comparison to the national average, eliminating loans completely would get rid of applicants’ anxiety about having debts to pay before even leaving college. Debt can be a daunting hurdle to clear, regardless of the amount. Harvard should do all it can to empower lower-income students during their four years here on campus and after they graduate. Burdening its undergraduates with debt does not fit with this goal.

Harvard should also eliminate the work-study program. Poorer students should have the same opportunity to participate in extracurricular pursuits as those fortunate enough not to require financial aid. For many students at the College, Harvard offers a fantastically unique opportunity to delve deep into a vast array of opportunities and resources; no undergraduate should have to let relative wealth determine extracurricular pursuits.

But there is also the issue of Harvard’s image—and this is one of the biggest problems Byerly Hall has to face. For a school with such a solid stance on affirmative action, Harvard’s socioeconomic diversity is particularly lackluster. At Harvard and other top-notch schools, only 3 percent of students come from the bottom income quartile, and only 10 percent come from the bottom half of the income scale. Compare that to almost 75 percent of students at the nation’s elite colleges from the top income quartile. Harvard, as well as its colleagues, have to do more to ameliorate the perception among low-income students that elite higher education is unaffordable. The College’s admissions staff should be recruiting even more heavily in low-income areas, for instance. With Summers’ new plan in place, recruiters should find it even easier to advertise Harvard’s strong financial-aid programs and better those socioeconomic numbers.

With a real effort, the College can make even Tom Green seem out of touch.