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.

Absolutely, I am extremely familiar with them.

Are you familiar with Oxford and Cambridge? What’s the best comparison would you suggest between, say, a Master’s in Engineering or Part III Management or Maths at Cambridge; and the equivalent in the French HE system?

This thread has been about undergraduate recruitment so I'm not entirely sure why we are now discussing Masters. Grandes Ecoles don't work on the Bologna system: they are entered after two extra years of secondary school (classes préparatoires) taught by secondary school teachers according to a state mandated curriculum. Students in classes préparatoires take a competitive examination (concours) after two years to enter a Grande Ecole which is not designed to be intellectually challenging - the concours are a form of standardised testing (according to idiosyncratic traditions rather than to robust scientifically validated assessment criteria). Students then spend 3 or 4 years at a Grande Ecole of which only a very few hold up to international standards. Polytechnique or Ecole Normale Supérieure (Ulm) might be Oxbridge Masters equivalents in the GE system. None of the Management Grandes Ecoles are better than the top five or six BSc Economics degrees in the UK - the academic standards just aren't rigorous. I compare Grandes Ecoles de Commerce to Economics because graduates enter the same sorts of companies (Investment Banks, Consulting Firms) upon graduation.

The grandes ecoles are definitely now within the Bologna framework (speaking as someone who used to work on it as a public policy analyst!)

We’re talking about Masters’ degrees because quite a few U.K. university degrees — especially in Oxbridge — are effectively Masters’ degrees, particularly in Engineering, some management and business courses and sciences (such as the MEng degree). Students require a very high level of maths and science subject knowledge even to begin the degree.

Traditionally Oxford and Cambridge are also slightly different from the rest of the U.K. university system (and indeed, students who go there are traditionally able to style their degrees as MA (Cantab)/MA (Oxon)). But UK universities typically offer both professional/elite technical and academic degrees, so whereas most students studying subjects like Engineering or Economics/Management at Oxbridge are doing something equivalent to the old Diploma/new Masters at one of the grands ecoles (and here I am thinking of the best ones!), students doing philosophy or literature are studying at a level comparable to an elite research university in France like the Sorbonne.

The point is that both they and some of the top Russell Group universities like Imperial College are globally competitive institutions with high entry standards (and this thread was originally about US Ivy League, so we’ve been discussing entry qualifications to what are all elite / competitive institutions). They ask for subject specific marks in the IB because that’s the level they require. It’s worth noting that in admissions at Oxford and Cambridge the vast majority of our IB candidates come from U.K. schools which also offer A-levels, and the few who aren’t tend to be at international schools like the World Colleges which are specifically geared towards the “global elite” universities.

The GE may have been shoved into the Bologna framework for bureaucratic purposes and to allow the GE to participate in Erasmus but they don't function along the lines of 3 year undergraduate degree / two year Masters degree. If you want a qualification that is not just the GE diploma, you have to enrol separately in a university and take 3rd year exams in that university to get a licence, in your first year of GE (which is usually a party year) after your two years of prépa. Let us not be under any illusion that two extra years of secondary schooling and one year of very light coursework is in any shape or form equivalent to a rigorous UK undergraduate degree.

No, I mean that the GE diploma is equivalent to the U.K. four year undergraduate+ degree (eg LLM, MEng).

"It’s worth noting that in admissions at Oxford and Cambridge the vast majority of our IB candidates come from U.K. schools which also offer A-levels, and the few who aren’t tend to be at international schools like the World Colleges which are specifically geared towards the “global elite” universities."

I'm not surprised that this is so but am rather surprised that you write openly of such élitist admissions policies! Many very clever children are educated at non-selective IB schools because that is what is available to them and their parents. Surely they deserve a fair shot at admission to an élite university?

Perhaps but they don't generally allow students to proceed directly to a PhD so further evidence that this is a bureaucratic move rather than evidence of academic equivalence.

Eh? The point of Oxbridge/Russell Group institutions is that they admit the best students, academically? We take into account their background, but they still have to get excellent results in A-levels, IB, or whatever system they are in.

And you think that top students at UWC are better than top students at non-selective IB schools worldwide? Given the eye-watering fees at UWC and the fact that children have to board in a country far from home, there's a selection bias that is very strong indeed and students also benefit from an extraordinary academic environment at UWC to prepare them for global élite universities. I would have thought that a top student at a non-selective IB school might have more merit, personally.

Okay; I think you’re getting a bit confused in terms of what I’ve written.

I didn’t say we admit those international students. I said that’s where we tend to see the majority of the non-U.K. IB applicants coming from. But, as I posted upthread, we don’t actually admit many overseas students at all, and almost none in many subjects. Our quotas / targets are precisely geared at the less privileged UK hone students.

Now, as I also said upthread, the trend for the IB in U.K. schools started in the private/grammar schools, but it became very popular in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and then many state schools also started offering the IB (usually alongside A-levels). At one point up to 40-50% of our U.K. applicants were doing the IB. But after the Gove reforms to the A-level curriculum, plus austerity-related retrenchment in schools funding, most U.K. schools stopped offering the IB (and other things like the pre-U), and reverted to A-levels only. There are very very few IB-only state schools left in the U.K. now, and in general they tend to be themselves in more privileged areas/more selective.

The vast majority of our candidates with the IB now (much diminished in numbers), are from pretty decent UK schools, because those are the ones which tend to be able to afford to run the IB. (Many of them are schools that offer both IB and A-level parallel systems, so they aren’t in practice taught that much differently in ethos.) In any case, we apply the same applications process and standards to both routes. The standard offer ought to be at a comparable standard for both.

We take context into account when making offers, especially for disadvantaged candidates; but unlike some U.K. universities, we don’t make contextual offers. All candidates have to meet our standard offer.

@cityofgirls Thank you for expanding on your previous posts - they did, indeed, require clarification.

I’ve just reposted the same things I wrote upthread.

If you say so