Harvard Schools Vary Widely In Level of Support for Veterans Aid

Harvard's schools have signed on to a new federal matching program to support financial aid for veterans, but the University's units differed widely in their financial commitment to the initiative—reflecting a tradition of decentralized decision-making at Harvard that current leaders have often sought to curtail.

The recently-approved Yellow Ribbon Program—part of a new G.I. Bill that promises to pay up to the maximum in-state public undergraduate tuition rate for veterans who have served at least three years after 9/11—allows institutions to enter into agreements with the Department of Veterans Affairs to pay up to half of the remaining tuition expenses with the VA matching that funding.

While Harvard Law School and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences have agreed to fund the full cost of tuition with the VA under the program—meaning that HLS will contribute approximately $21,000 per student—the University's other professional schools instead opted to commit $5,000 a veteran, according to Suzanne Day, Harvard's director of federal relations. Harvard College and Harvard Extension School have agreed to contribute $3,000, and the American Repertory Theater will contribute $1,500, Day said.

HLS spokesman Robert L. J. London '79 wrote in an e-mailed statement that Acting Dean Howell E. Jackson had managed to secure some additional donor support specifically for HLS's Yellow Ribbon commitments, which allowed the school to participate fully even in the current tough financial times.

"I think [Harvard's Yellow Ribbon participation] is a typical case of 'every tub on its own bottom,'" said Seth W. Moulton '01, a Business School and Kennedy School student who served four tours with the Marines in Iraq and worked as a special assistant to General David H. Petraeus. Nevertheless, he said he thinks participation in Yellow Ribbon is a "huge step in the right direction for Harvard."

"Most Americans don't realize that the original G.I. Bill legislation of 1944 has been slowly eviscerated over the years, so that now it only covers a very small portion of the cost of going to college," Moulton said. "Yellow Ribbon is a great opportunity for schools to make up the difference, to restore that contract that America had with its veterans."

While he applauded the Law School's and GSAS's generosity, Moulton said he was more wary about the Business School's participation, which he said seemed "pretty disappointing, considering how much money the school has." But due to the complicated mechanisms for assigning financial aid at each of Harvard's schools and within the Yellow Ribbon Program itself, he said he would refrain from judgment "until we see how individual aid packages turn out."

Susan Gilbert, director of MBA financial aid at HBS, said her school was happy to support such an important initiative and that $5,000 represented an "appropriate amount for the first year of our program."

Day said the University's decentralized approach has actually allowed for greater participation in the program among Harvard's various schools, which have different admissions timelines, tuition expenses, and institutional aid budgets.

"From the beginning we were concerned that if the VA required a one-size fits all approach across the whole campus...you could end up with a more modest level of participation," she said. "We thought it'd maximize it to have a more flexible approach, since schools handle their own aid budgets. Ultimately the decision came down to what deans felt they could do."

Day also noted that different schools at the University have widely varying aid policies, although all have a commitment to providing need-based aid. The College uses grant aid to meet the full demonstrated financial need of each student, Ph.D. students are often able to cover expenses through a combination of outside fellowships and University grants, and Harvard Business School uses a combination of need-based fellowships and loans to help students meet the cost of attendance, which exceeds $75,000 a year.

Sally C. Donahue, director of financial aid for the College, said that she felt $3,000 was "just right" to supplement an financial aid program that is already planning on providing $145 million in need-based scholarships for the next school year. She also pointed out that veterans traditionally form a smaller presence at the College—she said there were currently approximately six student veterans there—than at Harvard's graduate schools.

Maura Sullivan, a veteran who introduced Petraeus at a Harvard speech in April, said that roughly 9 percent of the Kennedy School's graduating class and 5 percent of the graduating class of the Business School each year is composed of former service members. Day said that there are currently between 85 and 90 veterans at Harvard, although in planning for Yellow Ribbon, financial aid officials used a "generous" estimate of up to 160 veterans arriving on campus.

Donahue and Day both said that the VA's late finalization of the Program's details complicated the University's participation this year.

"The VA finalized the program in March and April, and by then, most of Harvard's schools had admitted classes and generally provided some financial aid packages to their returning and incoming students. So their institutional financial aid budget was tapped out in some ways [when the program was finalized]," Day said. "That was difficult for some schools to maneuver, trying to maximize participation but also trying to predict what they could spend."

Next year, the University may find it easier to coordinate and expand participation in Yellow Ribbon because of experience gained from administering the program this year, potentially more funds to support the program, and greater flexibility in the aid budget cycle, Day said.

While reports earlier in the year had raised concerns that some Universities might shy away from Yellow Ribbon in the current economic climate, Keith M. Wilson, director of education services for the VA, said he was very pleased with the overall level of participation. He said he was anticipating a total of around 2,000 agreements with over 600 schools for the next school year—which he said was a particularly strong number given that tuition for some private institutions in areas with high in-state tuition may already be covered by the baseline GI Bill benefits.

He added that "it's very encouraging to see schools of the caliber of Harvard to be stepping up to the plate and helping veterans."

Moulton said for Harvard in particular, participating in Yellow Ribbon represented a great opportunity to change the tone of the historically "sordid" relationship the University has had with the military.

"I think the University is a step behind most of its students and a large portion of the faculty when it comes to its relationship with the military. Harvard's policies still reflect the anti-military sentiment of the Vietnam era, and most of America, and most of the University, has moved past that," Moulton said.

—Staff writer Peter F. Zhu can be reached at pzhu@fas.harvard.edu.