Originally posted by Dupek Chopra:
I hope these are all Ivy league schools you're going to. I'd hate to see all that hard earned bread your poor parents sweated go to waste on some jerkwater teachers college-with-a-good-football-team institute.
luckily, harvard is eliminating tuition for kids who's parents make less than $40,000 a year.
Harvard eliminates tuition for some
Wed Mar 10, 9:40 AM ET Add Top Stories - Chicago Tribune to My Yahoo!
By Ron DePasquale Special to the Tribune
Peter Brown did not come to Harvard University to move boxes.
Yet the 22-year-old sociology and Portuguese literature major from Oklahoma has been spending up to 18 hours a week moving boxes and doing other odd jobs to pay his $280 monthly tuition bill. Beginning next fall, however, Brown will be able to devote more time to his studies, because Harvard will not charge students whose parents, like Brown's mother, make less than $40,000 a year.
The new aid program, announced late last month by Harvard President Lawrence Summers, has sent shock waves through the Ivy League and the rest of the nation's colleges, where big tuition increases have become an annual event.
Summers cited new research that shows there are 25 times as many students from the top-income quarter as the bottom at the nation's 146 most selective public and private schools.
Along with eliminating the average $2,300 expected contribution from low-income students' families, Harvard also announced that students whose parents earn from $40,000 to $60,000 will receive a substantial increase in aid.
Tuition, room, board and fees at Harvard cost $37,928 this year.
Brown, a junior, said he and other students have been paying their parents' share of tuition because they didn't want to ask them for money.
Harvard also plans to more aggressively recruit low-income students, making sure they know they can afford to attend college. Low-income families often overestimate the cost of attending a university, new federal research shows.
"Too often, outstanding students from families of modest means do not believe that college is an option for them, much less an Ivy League university," Summers said at the recent meeting of the American Council on Education in Miami, according to a transcript published by Harvard. "Our doors have long been open to talented students regardless of financial need, but many students simply do not know or believe this. We are determined to change both the perception and the reality."
After decades of efforts to make campuses racially diverse, a push is on to include more low-income students as well, said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive policy institute in Washington. Kahlenberg edited "America's Untapped Resource: Low-Income Students in Higher Education," the book that contained much of the research cited by Summers.
"What Summers is doing is really inspiring," said Kahlenberg. "Someone needed to take the leadership role on this question of economic inequality."
Just 7 percent of Harvard undergraduates represent the lowest quarter of American household incomes, and 16 percent are from the bottom half. Almost three-quarters have parents whose earnings are in the top quarter. Those numbers are even worse on average at the top 146 colleges: only 3 percent of students are from the bottom quarter, and 10 percent are from the bottom half, according to "America's Untapped Resource."
The gap between rich and poor students has grown because as college costs have increased dramatically, government and philanthropic aid programs have shifted from helping students in need to students of merit, said Brian Fitzgerald, staff director of the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, which advises Congress.
Not many schools can afford to give low-income students a full ride like Harvard can, so the Advisory Committee is calling on Congress to shift student aid back to low-income students, Fitzgerald said. Federal Pell Grants, which helped low-income students pay for about 40 percent of the cost of attending a private college in the mid-1970s but now cover about 15 percent, should be increased "as much as possible," he said.
The Harvard decision will likely influence negotiations in Congress as the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act is debated, Fitzgerald said. The maximum Pell Grant is $4,050.
In his recent speech, Summers tried to dispel the notion that low-income students are less qualified than others. Affluent students attend schools that offer extra-curricular activities that burnish resumes and can afford SAT prep courses that help boost their scores--opportunities often unavailable to low-income students, he said.
As for Brown, the Harvard student says his experience of just scraping by at college led him to change career goals.
"I wanted to be a millionaire, and I didn't care how I did it," Brown said. "It sounds maudlin, but this has changed me. Now I'd be happy directing a financial-aid program."
