Harvard free tuition update today

[poetryandwine]

Harvard University announced today that from the next academic year all undergraduates from families with incomes below $200,000 will receive full tuition fee waivers. MIT announced the same limit in Nov 2024.

Further generous aid is available at both institutions. Students may be expected to work for a few hours per week and to make a small contribution from summer earnings. Part time employment is typical of American students so there is no stigma.

Other (rich) universities are also raising their financial aid limits. However financial aid is often geared to American students, or in-state students at public universities (unless it is in the form of a talent scholarship of some type)

Obviously the universities I’ve mentioned are highly competitive, but they, others, and the superb (also highly competitive) four year colleges giving generous aid to international students can make it more economical to attend university in the US than in the UK.

The Fulbright Foundation website is generally an excellent source of information on American universities for British applicants, and vice versa, but it may take a little while to update.

Interesting

Harvard is hopping aboard the bandwagon here, not unexpectedly.

Tuition is only a portion of the cost of attendance, albeit the biggest chunk. Students live on campus at most American universities, and room and board are factored into the COA. Also included is cost of books and materials.

Work study jobs (campus jobs) are usually reserved for domestic students iirc. I could be behind on this, though.

Harvard has raised its income threshold for financial aid (basically a write off of entire COA up to 100% depending on family income, on a sliding scale) as well as the $200k/ tuition bit.

I expect all well endowed liberal arts colleges and universities to follow the lead here.

Harvard has always given parity to international students on financial aid. The pre-existing policy of a full ride when the family income is below $100,000 also applies to international students. (There is usually the work requirement but I don’t know whether international students are exempt)

Harvard used to cap aid around $200,000 of family income and now it appears that won’t always be the case. MIT seems broadly similar.

If you read the NYTimes article it is because diversity is down. More Hispanic students are attending but fewer African Americans, the numbers have dropped from 18% to 14%

So part of the rationale for this financial move is to scoop up the good students they may well have lost because they can no longer ask the "Race" question on the application forms.

Harvard has always offered free tuition for some time to families with incomes below a certain level ($US70.000 I think when I was a Visiting Fellow there a few years ago). This announcement is a significant uplift in the maximum salary to £US200,000, which is interesting.

In GBP terms, it's around £150,000 which is very high income here (more than any university professor I know!), so it's really interesting that they've chosen that pretty high family income as their ceiling for free tuition.

Yeah, they're absolutely not looking for basic white kids from England to apply because of this change.

And the benchmark was higher, not $70k it was $85K

Oh right @ChangeitUp2 - I knew it was under $USD 100,000 when I was working there 3 years ago. Interesting that they’ve increased it so substantially.

Applicants still have to meet the very high entry standards though.

I think they're matching MIT and a couple of others who raised the minimum income level last Autumn.

Are they still getting high numbers applying for STEM now they are having their hands tied through Trump though? I would be very wary of paying for a STEM degree in US right now considering everything that is being banned, research being stymied and cuts to funding.

I think this is very good news! We now need them to abolish legacy students. Pure meritocracy.

I agree with your previous post that this is to some extent an implicit diversity initiative.

I don’t think a ‘basic white kid from England’ is disadvantaged, except insofar as everyone has to be awfully good to get in. The large majority of applicants and admits are white, and questions on race and ethnicity are now forbidden. Admissions decisions are taken before applicants’ financials are submitted - ‘ ‘needs blind admissions’.

Oh, for a $50Bn endowment.

Sorry, my post just above is to @ChangeitUp2 with respect to this post.

Intal students can't work off campus in the US on a student visa. My DD was offered a full ride scholarship at 2 US unis. Both said she was unable to work off campus under the visa arrangements with UK.
She's actually going to Canada now, all tuition paid. And she can work up to 24 hours a week on or off campus.

I think the old $85k income limit was for full COA, which consists of room and board plus tuition plus sundry expenses. That figure has now risen. For the purposes of disadvantaged students/ students from larger families, this is the important figure.

Work study (campus job) is always optional iirc and is intended to help you buy stuff like laundry detergent, toiletries, clothing, and a modicum of meals out, entertainment, etc. You could also look for an off campus job but negotiating your PT hours around your classes and exams would be difficult.

Yes, the students on ‘work study’ work on campus.

I hope your DD is thriving in Canada

You’re right about this. Harvard raised that limit to $100,000 a little while back. Students with full expenses paid on this scheme may be required to do work study on campus a few hours per week, and I think this may include international students

Lots of American students do work off campus though

For the "graduating class of 2027"

37% of Harvard undergrads are Asian
34.5% are white
14% Hispanic / Latino
18% Black or AA
and some much smaller numbers for mixed race / Pacific Islanders / Native Americans.

etc

I would say the majority of applicants to Harvard, really serious applicants, are usually Asian. The highest achieving students at my kids US high schools have almost always been Asian. This is one of the reasons that the race section of the applications were removed, Harvard was accused of being bias against Asian students, who if you look at their achievements on paper, could fill the entire place (and rightly so, I think).

Two of our DC met a lot of Asian students on their courses at UK universities. The Asian students had impressive records in public examinations (better on average than the rest of the cohort) but did not outperform the rest of the cohort in their degrees. Universities find it very difficult to predict who, based on their high school record, will perform best in their degree and it is no secret that some students will have "peaked" in the system at 18 when others are going to carry on making very rapid relative academic progress in their early 20s. Students to a large extent respond to the critical points in any system in which they are engaged and Asian families (both in Asia and in the US) are highly focused on HS examination results as the critical point when families from other cultural backgrounds may think that the critical point lies elsewhere and invest resources/time on other pursuits. Hence Harvard and other universities taking Asian HS performance in context.

This is an interesting question. MIT has no shortage of applicants!

STEM research grants affect PG students and postdocs much more than UG students. Cutbacks will have the largest impact there, although if they persist there will also be fewer permanent academic staff. That affrcts UGs.

Sadly it still looks awfully good compared to UK HE. The US has a large number of very good land grant universities - eg Penn State, Michigan State, Purdue (I think) etc that may be the first to feel pain. Trump’s vendetta is with some more glam institutions, for the most part, but they are filthy rich. Many of the Ivies have 11 figure endowments.

Thank you for the correction here. My implicit bias is to lump Asian YP, particularly those of Chinese, Malaysian, Singaporean and Japanese ethnicities, who have grown up in the West with white YP for academic purposes only in my own mind.

In particular I am sympathetic to Asian Americans fighting the perception that they are taking places from MC and UC white YP, and that they may tend towards personality characteristics less valued by elite American universities (who are all pursuing Tomorrow’s Leaders, if not future presidents - of the USA that is) and be penalised for this.

My post just above referenced @ChangeitUp2 ’s table of ethnicities at Harvard

Is the purpose of a top ranking university to select brutally for academics or is the purpose of a university to create tomorrow's élite?

An excellent question.

I would say that greatness comes in many forms. Many of the traits associated to leadership at a young age are closely related to good (and perhaps self-orientated) presentational skills and those in turn link to individual vs collectivist cultural expectations, etc. It is really too soon to tell who will be ‘great’.

Susan Cain’s book Quiet from perhaps 10 years ago is excellent, I think. It isn’t specifically about cultural divides but does speak to the fact that the preference of elite US universities for extroverts is very hard on Asian Americans.

There is a brilliant anecdote about some students doing the Harvard MBA, which is largely about teamwork and values inclusiveness. There was a group assignment to solve a problem. Group discussions were videotaped. A star student led a group and discussed with Cain why their group failed the assignment.

Well, they didn’t do a very good job. Naturally the group leader tried to use all the inclusive principles. So they thought they would get a mediocre mark - pretty bad outcome but good working methods. However the video revealed that a quiet (white) guy whom everyone knew to have specific expertise repeatedly tried to speak and could never get a word in. This is why the group failed.

The whole group was shocked as they had been genuinely unaware the guy was trying to speak. I cannot tell you how horrifying I found this. I think students (and to a lesser extent academics) do this all the time. It is why I am wary of group work.

Cain also identifies a number of leaders who are introverts. I think ambiverts are generally held to be the most successful.

Also being great at academics is the starting point for intellectual leadership.

I think the British system where applications are evaluated, and students are interviewed, by academics, is better than having these jobs done by staff.

colleges giving generous aid to international students can make it more economical to attend university in the US than in the UK

That may be so on the bare facts of tuition and living, but there are a lot of other factors that are still far more expensive. I went to university in the States with my parents in the UK and quickly realised that the cost of flights added up quickly -to say nothing of my parents flying over! So anything I did extracurricular on campus, whether that was a concert, an opera, rowing in a race, etc they wouldn't ever be there to see it unless the money was there for flights x2, a hotel room, etc.

Another massively underestimated thing is the network you build is not much use early on in your career if you're not staying in the USA. The vast majority of my (American) peers remained in the USA after graduation so not much use in terms of early professional connections (this has changed 20 years on as we are all more senior). I had the choice of whether to stay or go home, but many other international students had to go back to their home countries and found that they were far behind their peers who had gone to uni at home in terms of jobs, internships, network. One of my school friends who also went to the US on a full ride got a degree in engineering - had she stayed in the UK she would have done a sandwich year in industry, probably had a job offer waiting on graduation and been on track for a UK engineering qualification. She had the option to remain in the States but didn't want to build her career in another country from her family. Returning from the States she was well behind her peers and had to do a masters to catch up to where she would have been had she done a UK degree - she was not at all behind academically, it was just to get back into the system.

I know another young man who is considered going to the USA for college with a full ride rowing scholarship, but he is very interested in politics - unless he can afford the plane tickets he wasn't going to be getting the internships and political work at home if he was in the USA doing rowing camps all summer, and as he's not a US citizen it would have been difficult for him to stay in the USA after graduation unless he was going to be sponsored by an employer for an H1-B. I think he's now decided to stick to the UK for uni for that reason.

@poetryandwine I think, as someone who looks at lots of university applications and labour market entry systems, that over selecting for academics is a thing. Humans like the idea of a perfect system, of utopia etc but the law of diminishing returns always kicks in at some point and the well rounded personality has IMO been horribly undermined by the relenting focus on STEM. Science cannot provide all the answers - indeed, science and technology allow man to play at God and interfere with the world in terribly destructive ways.