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.

My kids each got the 5's in all their AP exams and their corresponding coursework. I know this stuff. But I suspect you're not explaining it to me, who knows already, but as a contribution to the general conversation.

Michigan gives preference to top applicants from public high schools from Michigan itself as compared to out of state applicants, targeting the top 5%, so the comment on U Mich admitting more students 'as a consequence' of applicants submitting standardised tests is a bit perplexing, partly because U Michigan is still test optional:
https://admissions.umich.edu/apply/first-year-applicants/requirements-deadlines/application-changes

Map showing other states with ACT or SAT required for high school graduation:
https://www.piqosity.com/act-sat-graduation-requirements-by-state/

The state I live in required the SAT until this year. From this year forth, juniors will take the ACT.

Even in states that do not require the SAT or ACT for school graduation, individual school districts within the state can require it.

Students receiving free or reduced price school meals are entitled to a waiver of the test fee for the SAT and ACT and also all AP exam fees. They are also entitled to a waiver of college application fees for a huge number of colleges.

Since a majority of states (including some states with a large number of universities, like CA and NY) do not require the ACT or SAT test, it would be difficult for students in those states to take these tests, and that is another reason why 'test optional' is the case in the majority of universities.

I was pointing out that your comment reflected a focus on what UK universities are interested in, and highlighting that the different systems use different rubrics in assigning grades at third level. Your GPA matters in American universities all through your studies and across all subjects. British universities tend to focus on end of year exams.

I was also challenging the idea that the AP exams have weight that sometimes is more significant than just the GPA which I agree, has less and less value. The A you receive in school as a result of the hard work you put into your AP coursework will contribute to your weighted GPA of over 4.0, and will likely be mirrored in a high score in the AP exam. AP courses are not separate from your high school transcript. Some students even do the coursework but for one reason or another don't take the AP exam.

Not so - quite the exaggeration in fact.

https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/plan-for-college/find-your-fit/what-colleges-require-SAT

Note the many third level institutions in Florida on the list. This is because state mandates in Florida are in shambles thanks to the right wing political agenda of state pols. The only universities worth applying to on the list of public universities are U Georgia, Georgia Tech, UTA, and the military academies.

Likewise, on the private list, only the top nine are worth applying to. The reason the bottom schools require test scores is poor school districts in-state - the ACT or SAT serve as quality control to gauge whether individual high school coursework and grades are worth the paper they're written on.

Meanwhile, the rest of the hundreds of universities across the country remain test optional.

Yes, I know this as well. Thanks.
Actually one of the universities said "you can take your place with us so long as you maintain a minimum 3.2 GPA by the time you graduate" That was Bristol and the offer was to my DC who has a 3.8 GPA (unweighted). So I guess, it matters a little bit in some places, still...

Thanks, @mathanxiety I have a couple of good friends who teach at UM including someone involved with diversity and I am familiar with the recruiting challenges in Michigan.

The purpose of requiring a standardised test is to identify talent. It is to encourage YP who are conditioned to believe that places like UM are out of the question to realise that they have as much right to attend as anyone else. In the absence of compelling test scores, there would be no equivalent way to grab the attention of these YP.

Michigan outreach is contaminated by politics, with urban poor largely PoC and Democratic, and rural poor (over a vast area) largely white and Republican. For efficiency and perhaps political reasons, outreach has been concentrated in the cities. Given limited budgets and the state’s daunting geography, that’s probably sensible, but it causes divides. Could poor white YP (who mainly live far away) have been reached with online initiatives? Probably. Realistically, the yield would be very low, but the lack of such outreach has not gone unnoticed. It is a complex situation.

Every single kid whose eyes are opened by SAT scores to the possibility of life outside the ghetto or the harsh poverty of the Upper Peninsula is important.

As measures of individual students’ academic readiness, ACT scores show weak relationships and even negative relationships at the higher achievement levels. The negative slope among students with the highest achievement could result if people are using ACT scores to make decisions about students’ readiness for very rigorous academic programs out of a belief that they are strong indicators of readiness when they are not. Future research might investigate this further. Regardless, there is little evidence that students will have more college success if they work to improve their ACT score because most of the signal from the ACT score seems to represent factors associated with the student’s school rather than the student. In contrast, students’ efforts to improve their HSGPAs would seem to have considerable potential leverage for improving college readiness. The fact that HSGPAs are based on so many different criteria—including effort over an entire semester in many different types of classes, demonstration of skills through multiple formats, and different teacher expectations—does not seem to be a weakness. Instead, it might help to make HSGPAs strong indicators of readiness because they measure a very wide variety of the skills and behaviors that are needed for success in college, where students will also encounter widely varying content and expectations.

Test scores provide more of a signal at the school level, with school-level average test scores providing additional information about students’ likelihood of graduating above and beyond students’ individual HSGPAs. For judging college readiness, school-average ACT scores would provide a stronger prediction than students’ individual scores.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0013189X20902110
@Ceramiq

@poetryandwine
A student who has enough hope in his or her future to apply for university from an impoverished, underprivileged high school will have that hope based on their GPA.

A Michigan student who takes the SAT as part of the Michigan Merit Exam will achieve a low score if he or she hasn't done very well in coursework of sufficiently high calibre to meet the requirements in the exam. The average student in a poor area will struggle to achieve excellent SAT results. There are honorable exceptions, but on average, if you want results good enough to get into the University of Michigan, you need to go to a good high school. In practice, this means living in an affluent area.

Your assertion puts the cart before the horse.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/education/2025/01/29/mich-students-scores-stagnate-on-newly-released-national-assessment/77969593007/

I wonder how they're funding this, surely it will result in an increase in applications and eventually it will become like the grammar schools in England which have a higher proportion of ethnic minorities than there are white.

@mathanxiety That research article is 5 years old. Times have changed.

@roses2
Harvard's endowment stands at $53.2 billion.

They could afford to write off the educational costs of every single student who is admitted for several centuries.

@Ceramiq
GPA has always been and always will be used by colleges in a contextualised admission decisions for US universities. It has not lost value, and the value of test scores has not increased, as evidenced by the 'test optional' admissions processes in the majority of American universities, and the no ACT or SAT test policies/ practices of several major states with excellent public and private universities.

It's not as useful as test scores for application to British universities, because ability to excel in exams has a higher value to British universities than the abilities that result in a high GPA.

Thanks, @ ceramiq.

@mathanxiety you do realise this links to an article about pupils age nine and age 12? What is the relevance?

Ah, I see where you are coming from @mathanxiety

Gently, it’s a middle class (or upper class bubble). You’re looking at trends. I’m looking at lives.

Of course YP who will be awakened by their SAT scores will have good grades. So will many of their peers, just as many of the peers of those from MC schools being admitted to elite institutions don’t understand why they are rejected. Sometimes it is truly random, sometimes it isn’t.

No, exceptional youth don’t need to be from good schools although this is undeniably helpful. Cream rises. Not easily and it’s not fair, but the best do. Don’t write them off prematurely.

@poetryandwine I respect everything you write on this board, you're measured, polite and very well informed. However, I'll politely ask that you not be using the term "the ghetto" under any circumstances. It is actually considered a very narrow and outdated, racist term in the US, pretty much everywhere.

Thanks, @ChangeitUp2 . Just rushed and trying to find a contrast with poor rural YP. But point taken, absolutely.

Absolutely. I suspect "urban poor" covers it well, without the looming shadow of assumed criminal activity. 😉

Agreed!

I'm not writing anyone off, but schools are assessed as part of the admission process too. A stellar GPA from a poor school is not going to be taken as seriously as a marginally less than stellar GPA from a school with a great reputation, a track record of sending solid students who go on to graduate, and that is known to have many teachers with PhDs.

You’ve just made a case for a use for the SAT, particularly the aptitude components of the Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Now that formal affirmative action has been banned, universities are encouraged to evaluate candidates holistically. A candidate with a great GPA from a bad school and SAT aptitude scores in the top 1% or 0.5% does generate enthusiasm from admissions officers and rightly so. It isn’t the candidate’s fault that their school may not offer AP courses and they may not be well taught.

As you say, University of Michigan like many elite flagship state schools targets roughly the top 5% of in state high school seniors. Whilst good teaching, AP courses, coaching, etc can help with SAT, aptitude scores like the ones I’ve just mentioned are more randomly distributed. Those who earn them can hold their own against the better prepared until they catch up.

Just for interest (as it’s really tangential to this discussion), I do admissions in Oxbridge (won’t say which for anonymity). When assessing US applicants our current minimum threshold is 5 APs at 5 (up from 3 APs at 5 a couple of decades ago). We do look in detail at both SAT scores and GPA / transcript as well. To be honest, though, all the US applicants we see are from families/schools with privileged backgrounds, so often we are looking at their SATs to see if the SAT scores are significantly lower than the APs would suggest (i.e. we’re specifically looking to see if the applicant is naturally clever or just very well schooled/well taught).

Our academic threshold for taking US applicants is extremely high, because if we make an offer and they don’t take up the place, we’ve ‘lost’ an offer that could have gone to a deserving UK candidate. (Our priority tends to be taking underprivileged candidates from the U.K. where we can, so we’re almost looking for reasons to turn US candidates down.)

We never see applications from underprivileged cohorts in the US because the U.K. overseas university fee is now very high, and the “full ride” scholarship just doesn’t exist here for undergraduate study — so they simply don’t apply.

(NB we see vey few undergrad applicants from the US at all, actually. This isn’t surprising given the fee issues, travel and mismatch between the education systems at 18. It’s true that U.K. universities value greater specialisation, but that doesn’t mean that U.K. candidates are expected to have dropped “major areas of human thought” at 16. Rather they are expected to have developed these in tandem with their A-levels and proposed university subject through wider reading/thinking.

Even at graduate admissions level, where it evens out, there are key differences between US and U.K./EU applicants. I could go on about this more but it’s getting a bit too off topic now. But by that point good students from both systems are pretty quick to learn and adjust up to the same level — and certainly by doctoral level if not before.)

@cityofgirls This doesn't fully make sense to me:

Our academic threshold for taking US applicants is extremely high, because if we make an offer and they don’t take up the place, we’ve ‘lost’ an offer that could have gone to a deserving UK candidate.

Because you'll have a quota for each category - home / overseas - and also a matrix that establishes how many offers go out to each, in order to cover the places that will need filling - given that some people ultimately will not get the grades, or go elsewhere.

What you're describing sounds like a contextualised admission process for US applicants, much the same as the process in the US.

The free ride to underprivileged students that highly selective institutions offer in the US is definitely a huge draw for those students. For students who will be the first of their families going to university, the complexity of an application to a foreign university would be very off-putting too, and finances are paramount of course. Even study abroad opportunities can be a daunting prospect. For some families, their student will be the first in their family to ever apply for a passport.

A couple of points -
Even in the days of affirmative action, holistic evaluation of all applications was done, and it continues now. The idea that applications by certain minorities were subjected to significantly less scrutiny than those from other ethnic groups is one that is debatable despite the contentions of groups who feel they were edged out. It's quite a pernicious contention in the hands of the White Right. Contextual (or holistic) scrutiny continues to be the practice in university admissions.

Coaching for the SAT and ACT is at this point a cottage industry generating millions of dollars annually for providers. It is possible to be coached even in the aptitude section of the SAT, and to see significant improvement in results. Coaching tends to focus on strategies in attacking questions/ identification of the core of a question/ minimising time spent trying to decode questions, exam stamina, and dealing with nerves. Coaching makes sure the playing field is skewed. Normally - in public schools anyway - teachers do not coach students in preparation for the SAT or ACT. (They do coach in preparation for AP exams, but that is an entirely different format.). Students who can't afford the hefty cost of SAT or ACT prep classes outside of school can be disadvantaged (truly outstanding intellects excepted of course).