Aid for the Affluent

My natural reaction when I read that a family making $180,000 per annum will possibly qualify for financial aid is to cringe. But Harvard’s recent announcement that, along with eliminating all loans, it will provide aid for some families earning between $120,000 and 180,00, gave me new rise. In some cases, a family earning $180,000 might only be responsible for paying ten percent of their income, which is not even half the cost of a full tuition. My gut tells me that it is a lot of money, earned by a small percentage of the populace, and that it is money that could surely be better spent. But given the average price of attending a private school it is hard to argue against any sort of financial aid.

Then, on an open-list, I read a seemingly valid argument against giving such aid to the upper middle classes. The argument goes something like this: Families earning $180,000 per year with long-term spending habits that don’t include saving (presumably because they are conspicuous consumers), are going to be effectively subsidized by Harvard under the new policy. The flipside, of course, is that more “modest” families of the same income will have significantly more savings and, therefore, be held accountable for a great portion of their tuition. The injustice!

Or at least that’s what I decried the next day at lunch, when, upon reading a Crimson article on the subject, I decided to try out my newly adopted theory on a few friends. They were not impressed. One commented that the type of argument I had just made might be applied to financial aid in all scenarios. After all, technically, financial aid is a “lifestyle subsidization.” Of course, for most, that term would be insulting. Financial aid is something recipients need to attend school, enough said. But, again, what about for someone who’s family is making $180,000 per year?

Well, as it turns out, a discussion of a middle class spending habits may have a place in financial aid policy, but that is not a reason to deny it to anyone. The goal of financial aid should be facilitating attendance, not condemning irresponsible spending. After all, in most cases, students are financially dependent on their parents, and probably have little say in how their parents spend. No matter what parents make, if they prefer cars and flat screen televisions to paying tuition, that may only be reflected in the total height of the mountain of loans their child accrues—something Harvard should try to prevent at all cost.

And there are many “legitimate” reasons why people with a median upper-middle class income might not have liquid assets, including reoccurring medical bills or a large number of dependents. Does that make a family not worthy of financial aid? It is not like Harvard financial aid is operating on a zero-sum basis—more financial aid for the affluent does not mean less for the poor and lower to middle classes. In fact, lately, it has meant more for all of the above. Given that, and the enormity of the endowment, it is hard to argue that we should deny aid to some middle class recipients in order to pacify the complaints of others.

More importantly, paying private tuition is a burden for many who take it on. And I sympathize with those who have saved just enough, or earn just enough each year, not to qualify for aid. This is wrong, and considering Harvard’s resources and the importance of education in general, it is a problem that should be addressed aggressively, and not just here but across the entire country.

In the meantime, maybe the real issue is that some people want to impose personal, moralistic ideals of spendthrift on everyone-else. And, to me, right or wrong, this hardly seems like the duty of the financial aid office.



Robert G. King ’09-’10, a Crimson editorial editor, is a history concentrator in Winthrop House.