Faust May Boost Aid to Graduate Students

The University has already spent millions of dollars since 2004 eliminating tuition, room, and board for undergraduates who qualify for the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative. Now, it will turn its attention and resources to easing the financial burdens on the more than 13,000 students in its nine graduate schools, University President Drew G. Faust said in an interview yesterday.

“We need to widen this inquiry to include issues of post-baccalaureate education,” she said, noting that for many professions, graduate training now seems “as imperative” as a college degree.

Faust highlighted the prospect of expanding the University’s financial aid programs in her letter to the Harvard community yesterday, writing that there is “much more still to do...not just in the College but across the schools.”

During the interview, Faust expressed particular concern about students who are forced to make career choices based on their financial situation.

“We’re looking hard at ways of making graduate schools more affordable, particularly in areas that go into public service or other kinds of careers that aren’t highly remunerative,” Faust said.

This is not the first time a Harvard president has made graduate school financial aid a priority. Under former president Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard organized a University-wide lending program through Citibank, allowing all graduate students to borrow money at discounted interest rates, Summers said yesterday in a phone interview.

Summers also created a task force charged with investigating ways to raise money for graduate financial aid, and he launched Harvard’s Presidential Scholars program, which uses the president’s discretionary funds to subsidize the costs of 75 graduate students each year.

Each school is typically in charge of raising its own funds for financial aid—part of Harvard’s “every tub on its own bottom” philosophy. As a result, schools whose graduates tend to go on to more lucrative careers have more robust financial aid programs.

Summers said that raising money for graduate school financial aid on a University-wide basis would help correct the imbalance.

“The University has to take this on as a University-wide priority, which means that alumni from the College and the Business School in particular will have to be asked to provide support for the University more broadly,” Summers said.

David T. Ellwood ’75, the dean of the Kennedy School of Government, said Harvard needs a University-wide initiative “to ensure that people’s choices about what they do are affected by their highest and best aspirations, and not the size of their debt.”

The incoming dean of the Graduate School of Design, Mohsen Mostafavi, said he intends to make increasing financial aid one of his priorities when he takes over in January.

“The financial aid at the moment is fundamentally limited to American students,” Mostafavi said in an interview last week. “I think it would be very important to look at ways in which financial aid would be more available to the best possible students who are in need of resources.”

Summers said that his plan as president was to make graduate financial aid a component of the University’s upcoming capital campaign, which stalled during his term.

“There had been in the last campaign tremendous energy for undergraduate financial aid,” Summers said. “I was trying to channel that energy into an even larger cause.”

Faust said that raising money for financial aid for graduate students will be an important facet of the next capital campaign, although she added that it was “a little premature” to lay out specific targets.

“There’s no way that we would undertake an effort of that magnitude without that being absolutely central,” she said.

There are already signs that work in this area is being done.

The incoming vice president for alumni affairs and development, Tamara E. Rogers ’74, told The Crimson earlier this month that University-wide financial aid will be an ongoing fundraising focus even before the capital campaign begins.

—Staff writer Claire M. Guéhenno can be reached at guehenno@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Laurence H. M. Holland can be reached at lholland@fas.harvard.edu.