Beware of the Band-Aid

Hallelujah, hallelujah. Last week, the Harvard community rejoiced over news from Byerly Hall: effective next fall, the College will waive parental contribution for all students whose families earn less than $60,000 a year.

The Harvard Financial Aid Initiative (HFAI) previously waived tuition only for students of family incomes less than $40,000 a year. The news of this dramatic 50 percent increase in HFAI aid is not too shabby, to say the least.

Programs such as HFAI are of great importance to Harvard College and wealthy colleges everywhere. They demonstrate a commitment to providing educational opportunities to low-income students and to overcoming the assumption that such schools are only for privileged brats. Financial aid is a good thing.

Still, educational idealism sometimes goes too far. On these pages and on the pages of publications nationally, some romantics have come up with an oh-so-sweet idea: Harvard has so much money—it boasts the biggest endowment of any university in the country—that we should make attending Harvard College free for everyone!

This is a genuinely dim proposition based on several critical errors of false assumption. For one thing, although Harvard University has a huge endowment, Harvard College and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) do not. FAS is currently in a budget deficit of around $40 million, and its endowment was only $10 billion (at the time the overall endowment was $22 billion), a fraction of Harvard’s nearly $26 billion total. In fact, Harvard ranks behind peer institutions like Princeton and Yale in terms of arts and sciences endowment per student. And in fiscal year 2004, just 13 percent of the College’s endowment was unrestricted in use. Harvard cannot legally lift these donor-imposed restrictions to use the money for the College’s financial aid whims. We thought we were so loaded, but alas, no cigar: Harvard does not have an infinite well from which it could draw the nearly $200 million a year necessary to make the College free.

The College is serving the financial aid needs of its disadvantaged students adequately. In fact, making Harvard College free for all would be somewhat counter to the goal of boosting enrollment of low-income students.

On the 2003 SAT, only 14 percent of test-takers scoring above 1420 were from the bottom 40 percent of family incomes, and 46 percent of these students were from the top quintile of America. Though Harvard College uses criteria apart from SAT scores in admission—the College turns away perfect scores every year—Harvard students generally score quite highly on the test.

In other words, the group of academically admittable students is disproportionately rich. Assuming that Harvard’s admissions office operates on the need-blind meritocratic system it claims to, a free Harvard would still have a high composition of the white, rich kids from whom advocates of a tuitionless college are so hopeful to separate Harvard’s reputation.

Harvard is doing enough for low-income students on the financial aid front. Anyone from a family making less than $60,000 a year—by no means an income that is poor—can attend Harvard easily if qualified for admission. If Harvard College truly wants to improve the situations of low-income students, it won’t do so through ineffective publicity stunts like free tuition for its Burberry-clad undergraduates.

What emerges is the broader debate over low-income students. Now that the monetary needs of financially disadvantaged students have been squared away, Harvard should turn to a different sort of philanthropy by addressing the deeper problem of the correlation between low income and inadequate academic preparation.

To a large degree, HFAI is just a bandage. Low-income students typically come from shoddy school systems and arrive at Harvard unprepared for the College’s academic rigors. Genuinely improving the situations of low-income students requires Harvard to pursue a more laborious and selfless task than just lining its students’ pockets: it needs to begin aid at the precollegiate level.

This sort of assistance can be implemented in a variety of ways: investment in sub-par school systems; enrichment programs that teach students skills like writing and organization and provide SAT preparation; and initiatives like Teach for America that get Harvard graduates out into high schools to innovate school systems. Low-income students also need adequate college counseling and test preparation, advocacy for better implementation of educational legislation, and the overall academic base to which so many of them do not have access. If the College undertakes these efforts, their work will not necessarily breed a new line of low-income students clamoring to come to Harvard—some may decide to go to Stanford, or Yale, or Princeton—but this is the sacrifice that a college sincerely concerned with educational equality—not just admittance yields—will make.

In the end, Harvard’s success in this capacity will be a win-win for all. Disadvantaged students will be given the opportunities they deserve, and Harvard will have pulled off a publicity stunt far more impressive than saving rich students money.

Lucy M. Caldwell ’09 lives in Wigglesworth Hall.