Harvard says tuition will be free for families making $200K or less
73 comments
·March 17, 2025Aurornis
rahimnathwani
A very confusing aspect of the US college system is that very few students pay the full sticker price.
About 55% of Harvard undergraduates receive some type of financial aid, according to the university.
but it allows universities to admit a much wider range of students than they normally would.
Do you like it when you visit a SaaS product's pricing page and it says 'call for pricing'?
Well, how about if it was totally normal that, before a SaaS provider was willing to quote you a price, you had to provide them with a list of your assets and a copy of your most recent tax return?
paulpauper
This is sorta why the hysterics by the punditry on Twitter and the media about student loan debt or about college degrees being worthless, are overblown or unfounded. The sticker price is seldom, if ever paid in full.
Not only huge discounts on the tuition-side, but also tons of forbearance and payment plans after graduating. There are many people with homes, 6-figure jobs paying off loans slowly and gradually, while enjoying career success and a high standard of living compared to those who do not have degrees.
It's not as daunting as the large figure of money would suggest when the returns from a degree are still largely positive compared to without a degree.
robertjpayne
This is oversimplifying. The path to a good career after graduation is still fraught with many traps and pitfalls.
Ask anyone who finished university in late 2008 to 2010 how their job prospects were compared to those that finished just two years earlier in 2006.
Compounded by the fact that there is no way to discharge the debt if you get exploited into signing up to $100,000+ of debt for a degree that provides no good stable income afterwards.
telchior
"There are many people" is a useless platitude to any number of people who fall through the cracks.
Personally I had to wait until I was 25 to get some loans I needed to finally finish a degree, because my family was paper rich, wasn't paying anything, but was still on speaking / visiting terms with me. The system doesn't accept that as an answer; you have to show an extreme degree of alienation / separation (I can't remember the specifics, but a loan counsellor basically told me to give up).
southernplaces7
>There are many people" is a useless platitude to any number of people who fall through the cracks.
And so too is "any number of people who fall through the cracks". For any given situation or context in which the vast majority fare okay at least, there will be a certain number who fall through the cracks (just as there will be some who do very well) and you can't design all the rules around a system to completely eliminate the possibility of falling through the cracks, or at least you cant without risking externalities that make some key part of it worse for many more people.
As a criticism of any complex system, pointing out unusual worst cases is usually little more than a sort of useless hand-wringing for the sake of doing so, unless one has a solution to propose.
lapcat
> the returns from a degree are still largely positive compared to without a degree.
Keep in mind that people who do not complete a degree also accumulate student loans.
m463
I also wonder if people who get loans might be different than the people who search for and get aid. It might be more frictionless to get into debt than get a scholarship, even if it would be possible.
latentcall
Cool, tuition should be taxpayer funded by the American people, namely the super wealthy.
mcmcmc
There are a lot of other things that money should go towards before college tuition. Maybe we start with our abysmal primary and secondary education.
lolinder
In a sense isn't that exactly what OP is saying is happening today? Only the super wealthy actually pay the sticker price on college, everyone else is subsidized by some combination of taxpayer-funded grants, scholarships (usually provided by the super wealthy), or just straight-up discounts (covered by the wealthy students paying full price).
rayiner
You can’t fund all this stuff only by taxing “the super wealthy.” The math just doesn’t math. That’s why every developed country that has free college also has heavy taxes on middle and upper middle class people.
zeroonetwothree
Fun fact: if we taxed all income over $500,000 at a 100% tax rate it wouldn’t even cover our current budget deficit, let alone allow for such a massive spending increase.
null
thumbsup-_-
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.
Aurornis
Tuition assistance isn't a binary all-or-nothing.
Every university like this uses a sliding scale.
In this case, their scale slides to the point that under $200K family income you pay nothing for tuition.
Under $100K they'll even cover food and housing.
elicksaur
Yes cost of living does matter.
But I’ve also never met or heard of a $200k household that I wouldn’t consider “well off”. Typically, stories about these “not well off” yet “over double the median income” households are budgeting issues.
People don’t like to admit that because most people blame external forces instead of evaluating their own choices.
hedgehog
It depends on location. In San Francisco a mortgage on a median house might be over $80k/year and child care for a young kid $20k-$30k/year. Then $50k in taxes, assume two kids, that's maybe $180k and we haven't even bought groceries yet. Or healthcare.
zeroonetwothree
It seems unlikely you are spending $30k on child at the same time as you are sending kids to college. Not many families have such an age gap.
Getting a mortgage that is 40% of your income is fairly irresponsible (I’m sure it does happen though). You also didn’t count property tax which is probably like $20k
FloorEgg
Multiple kids + unexpected chronic health issues can quickly change this equation. And before you go judging someone for having multiple kids, consider that a) demographic collapse is probably very bad and we don't want our society to make having kids exceptionally hard, rather than the default norm and b) people may decide to have kids without expecting significant and rapid changes to inflation and cost of living.
CaliforniaKarl
This is one of the reasons why—although university admissions and financial aid has lots of paperwork—there is still a major human element.
This is explicitly mentioned on the FAFSA's web site: https://studentaid.gov/help/reporting-special-financial-circ...
almosthere
The vast majority of people at 200k+ and "not doing well" are suffering from self inflicted budget issues.
jghn
Besides the obvious that there needs to be some sort of cutoff, it's more of a socioeconomic angle, not economic. By doing it this way it also encourages a larger geographic distribution and thus a wider range of background demographics.
koolba
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.
CaliforniaKarl
> At an industry standard 4% drawdown, they could provide $88,000 of “aid” to every student indefinitely.
Just to confirm: Are you saying that all endowment proceeds should go towards student aid? What would you suggest be done to restricted-purpose investments?
mmmBacon
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.
zeroonetwothree
Tuition is around 21% of their revenue and the endowment is 37%. That corresponds to around a 4.8% withdrawal rate currently which would go up to around 7% if they covered tuition. And 7% is probably too high to do in perpetuity.
ipv6ipv4
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 consistently grown to opportunistically consume all free cash of American income.
CaliforniaKarl
> 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.
No. Do not make assumptions like that.
The source material is easy to find. It's https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordabi...
From the source material:
> Financial aid will be available to many students from families with incomes above $200,000, depending on individual circumstances.
The cost of an American higher education is something worth discussing, but I think starting the discussion with inaccurate information is problematic.
lollollollollol
> 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.
CaliforniaKarl
> I read this as Harvard being more stringent on admitting more students whose families make enough to pay their children’s tuition.
From https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordabi...:
> Most importantly, your financial situation will not affect your chances of admission to Harvard College.
> If you think I’m wrong, understand that there will be limited funding available for this program.
First of all, be aware that this program is not new. Until now the cutoff was $150,000, not $200,000. See https://web.archive.org/web/20240229232535/https://college.h...
To the question "How does Harvard afford raising the threshold by $50,000?", I think the plan is to use endowment investment returns to cover the cost.
singhrac
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.
CaliforniaKarl
Thank you for this. Unfortunately (IMO) many people seem to have a very short memory, or lack research skills, and I think this leads people to a cynical response.
bsimpson
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.
null
bradleyjg
$200,000 family income and below, with typical assets
null
theodorewiles
why dont they increase class sizes
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.