Harvard says tuition will be free for families making $200K or less

Under $100K they're covering housing, food, and more:

> Undergraduate students from families with annual incomes of $100,000 or less will not only have tuition covered but also housing, food, health services and other student services, the university said.

A very confusing aspect of the US college system is that very few students pay the full sticker price. Most universities have sliding scales for tuition through various grants and scholarships.

Strangely, even talking to college students reveals that most of them don't understand this situation. You'll frequently hear college students explain that they got "lucky" to get a lot of grants, discounts, and/or scholarships to attend, but in reality all but the most wealthy families get a lot of "tuition assistance".

The situation confuses foreigners and even US people to no end, but it allows universities to admit a much wider range of students than they normally would. It's not uncommon to look at their statistics and find a significant portion of their student body pays nearly nothing in tuition. Harvard is taking this to an extreme, but there are similar programs at all of the other big universities.

One critical exception: There are sleazy for-profit universities who take advantage of the fact that some people don't understand this game and use it to charge exorbitant rates to people who can't afford it. Avoid those, obviously, and do your part to discourage others from looking at them.

This sliding scale tuition structure explains the massive discrepancy between the $200K+ per year sticker price for a 4-year degree at private universities and the fact that most students graduate with nowhere near that much debt.

It's a good move but blanket 200k may mean that a kid from a well-off family in Iowa with a 150k income is able to get free tution while a kid with not so well off family in California with a 210k income is unable to get free tution.

Income as a number doesn't have much meaning until Cost of living is taken into account.

People are going out of their way to extol Harvard's supposed largesse, and how hardly anyone pays sticker. First, 45% do pay sticker according to the article.

Second, another way to look at this is that Harvard is putting a cap on a family earnings that it doesn't feel entitled to. ~$83K/year (post tax) is a massive amount of money for one child of a family making even $300K/year or $500K/year (pre tax).

The sticker price does matter, and this exemption is lipstick on the pig.

The problem with American higher education (and American healthcare, for the matter) is that they have persistently grown to opportunistically consume all the discretionary income of Americans.

Sigh, there is a lot of misinformation about this and higher education tuition.

* It’s not a new policy, when I went to school the same threshold was ~$150k

* It’s not a step function, it’s a sliding scale (with <0 tuition, i.e. cost-of-living assistance below that number, and some (but not full) tuition above $200k)

* It’s not just for athletes or minorities - I was neither (by Harvard standards, Indians were fairly common and not considered a minority in admissions processes). Lots of smart kids whose parents did not make a lot of money fell into this bucket.

* It’s not a small subset of the student body (as tzs said); despite what you might perceive, a large fraction of students came from modest backgrounds. It was balanced by a sizable fraction that came from incredibly well-off backgrounds. But the total number that had donated a building to get in were pretty small (there are only so many buildings).

Higher education has many, many flaws, but please examine the facts before you respond with knee-jerk cynicism.

On France the elite schools are very expensive (by our standards). Universities are basically free.

They are expensive for wealthy people. Depending on how much you earn, you get a progressive cost that covers the tuition of the less fortunate. There is no threshold (200k would be insane).

I pay a lot but I also keep in mind my father who came from an extremely poor family and graduated from our most prestigious engineering school. This what we call the social elevator and it works.

With the size of Harvard’s endowment, 11% of its operating income coming from federal sources, and its tax exempt status, it’s hard to understand why anyone has to pay tuition regardless of need.

Harvard has an endowment of about $55 billion dollars. Student population is about 22,000. At an industry standard 4% drawdown, they could provide $88,000 of “aid” to every student indefinitely.

If you exclude foreign students and make them pay a full ride, or change that cap to a family net worth of <$5M, you could easily cover everybody else.

> Harvard says tuition will be free for families making $200K or less

I read this as Harvard being more stringent on admitting more students whose families make enough to pay their children’s tuition.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Harvard has to make money.

If you think I’m wrong, understand that there will be limited funding available for this program.

It's amusing that people keep wanting to portray Harvard admits as Horatio Alger stories when even the "middle class" ones that get free tuition are the least sympathetic, most elite (by virtue of getting in) people on the planet.

This feels ripe for gaming.

Building a system that's resilient to a bunch of smart people going "what if I retire a few years early if I realize my kid might go to Harvard?" seems nontrivial.