<p>^ marite,
I have no doubt the kids at Harvard from $200K+ income households are individually and as a group highly qualified—that’s not my point. </p>
<p>I just find it either comical or nauseating, depending on my mood, when Harvard goes around boasting about how much it’s doing for kids from lower income brackets, when the facts generally suggest otherwise. That “nearly 20%” of its student body who come from households with incomes under $60K represent all of 330 students per class. Heck, at UC Berkeley alone there are more than 2,000 kids in each class from families with incomes below $45,000, and probably another 1,000 or so in the $45K to $60K range—roughly an order of magnitude larger than the numbers you’ll find at Harvard, and representing a much more substantial fraction of the student body. The fact is, an overwhelming percentage of kids from lower and middle-income households are educated by public colleges and universities—the primary channel for equalizing educational and career opportunities in this country. Yes, those 330 per year who get their tickets punched at Harvard will have extraordinary opportunities. But they’ll be barely a blip on the radar screen amidst the hundreds of thousands of lower- and middle-income kids getting their shot at upward mobility through public higher education.</p>
<p>The percentage of kids at schools with much less money to spend but who receive aid is often much higher. The real inequities in life are there, not in Harvard Yard, and what Harvard is doing has always reeked to me of ineffective social engineering that mostly satisfies the constituencies of the privileged who really matter to Harvard. </p>
<p>That said, please realize the Globe often acts as Harvard’s PR rep and that this story appears - surprise!! - after a deluge of articles criticizing Harvard’s investment failures. </p>
<p>The real stories are at the large number of schools that work hard to admit students who can barely afford to come, who work to combine loans and grants and work aid to make school possible. Many of these schools stretch their aid budgets to the limit - without the vast cushion that Harvard refuses to touch. You won’t see stories like that in the Globe though you can find them all over the Boston and NE area.</p>
<p>The Globe continues its tradition of reporting as a form of noblesse oblige combined with celebrity worship.</p>
<p>Harvard is a private college and not a public institution. It has a different mission from that of the UCs, so it is not fair to compare it with what the UCs or any other public university does. </p>
<p>So what if only 330 students out of 1600+ get “their tickets punched at Harvard” and will represent only a blip in the total student population? Harvard’s total undergraduate population is only a fraction of Berkeley’s. </p>
<p>That said, the tuition for an OOS student is the same as at Harvard. I have not tried to find out if those OOS students have as much chance to get finaid at Cal as they do at Harvard. I somehow doubt it, since admitting more OOS students (who’ll pay far more than in-state ones) seems to be one solution to the UCs’ financial woes.</p>
<p>Our S is a middle-class white kid from the rural midwest, who is at Harvard because of the school’s financial aid for middle-class families. Our kid is not getting a full-ride, but we also are not paying full fare – and our kid would not be at Harvard if we had to pay full fare.</p>
<p>Like most Harvard students, he was offered full-ride scholarships at other schools, and, as a middle-class family with other kids to educate and our retirement looming (we hope), those offers were very tempting. However, Harvard’s financial aid made sending our kid there as affordable for us as paying to send him to the state flagship university – and that was do-able for us. We would not have been able to afford to send this kid to Duke or Dartmouth or WUSL, given their less generous FA for families like ours. (Both parents working full-time, with household income less than $100,000.)</p>
<p>Our S has friends at Harvard whose families are a lot wealthier than ours, and friends whose families have a lot less, and he is happy and comfortable and loving all the opportunities Harvard is providing him.</p>
<p>So from my family, thank you, Fitz! We are very appreciative of your work and of the generousity of so many Harvard alumni. Hopefully our S and his peers will be as generous to the generations of Harvard students who follow.</p>
<p>It doesn’t make sense to compare Harvard’s 20% under $60K against the percentage of the general U.S. population making under $60K, if the majority of those kids are not “college ready.” It is possible that 20% under $60K is actually high compared to college-ready kids from households making under $60K.</p>
<p>I have no doubt that Fitzsimmons personally feels good about helping Harvard to become more egalitarian, but we all need to realize that the university is not his to alter as he wishes. If he wants to promote new ideas in recruiting students, he’s got to sell them to his supervisors, which means that he needs to build a compelling case that they’re in Harvard’s own self-interest. When I’ve heard him explain the change in admissions philosophy during his tenure, it’s not been cited as a motivation for social engineering - it’s been to keep Harvard competitive in a changing world. </p>
<p>Fitzsimmons has suggested that genius does not emerge primarily from the upper class, but is randomly distributed throughout all socioeconomic levels and geographic settings. He’s said that Harvard should claim its share of that random distribution of genius to which it’s entitled, but for a long time had forfeited it to other institutions by focusing to a greater extent on applicants from elite backgrounds. Under his leadership, Harvard admissions is now determined to get their full stake in the future leaders of the world.</p>
<p>Powerful institutions and powerful people often cite altruistic values, but rarely pursue noble goals that don’t also serve their own self-interests.</p>
<p>JHS - As Marite so correctly points out - you have to look at the payout ratio on the endowment - not the gross size. Most true endowments are limited at the high end on how much of a % can be withdrawn each year.</p>
<p>Before Harvard’s questionable investment tactics went against them, they had grown the endowment to $36.9 billion, the world’s largest. That was supposed to be good for $1.4 billion in annual earnings.</p>
<p>Harvard has been counting on the endowment to fund more than a third of its $3.5 billion operating budget. On top of that, they had started a huge expansion that was to eventually almost double the size of the university which they envisioned being funded in large part by this endowment.</p>
<p>With a cut to the $25 billion range (or roughly 1/3) that $1.4 billion draw becomes $900 million. Furthermore, a big part of their endowment is illiguid (in private equity and other alternative investments) - and I would not be surprised to find they are overvaluing their private equity investments - so the $25 billion is really less.</p>
<p>You may think their FA policy is sustainable - but with figures like those, that is doubtful - unless of course they slash spending significantly elsewhere</p>
<p>Possible, but not likely. Not when UC Berkeley, for example, is drawing around 40% of its much larger student body from that group. But if you mean not “college-ready” but “Harvard-ready,” i.e., with all the fancy AP courses and ECs that the typical Harvard admit comes adorned with, then you may be right. Kids from high-end high schools and high-end families in many cases spend four years in HS grooming themselves for Ivy admissions, compiling exactly the kind of resume they think Harvard will be looking for. Kids from low- and middle-income families are far more likely to be clueless about these things, and it may never even occur to them to apply to HYPS-level schools because no one in their family and no one in their HS has ever done it or even suggested it’s a possibility. Even if they’re smart enough and sufficiently grounded in the basics to succeed at that level, i.e., easily “college-ready.”</p>
<p>Indeed. “College ready” and “Harvard ready” are not synonymous. Nor are “college-ready” and “Berkeley-ready,” actually. Even, to use your own words, " if they’re smart enough and sufficiently grounded in the basics to succeed at that level, i.e., easily “college-ready.”"</p>
<p>^^^It is also possible that a fair number of Harvard’s 20%-under-$60K crowd is not really “disadvantaged,” as we tend to think of students from that income level. For example, I am familiar with 2 Harvard students in our area who lost their (high-income) fathers a couple of years before they graduated from high school. One mother remained unemployed, the other took a low-paying job. While these students’ family income profiles certainly fell under $60K, one had attended one of the finest prep schools in the state, and the other attended public schools in one of the highest-income areas of the state. But Harvard gets to claim them as “low-income” trophy students. This can’t be all that uncommon (like kids who have a lawyer- or professor-father who works at a $58K government job and SAHM mom with an MBA).</p>
<p>I second your sentiment. My daughter is at Harvard on partial scholarship because of the middle-class initiative; we just couldn’t afford it otherwise. So, yes – thank you Fitz!</p>
<p>Taking loads of APs at a high-end HS is certainly one way to pursue Harvard admissions. But these days, in the Fitzsimmonsian admissions culture, I’m not sure that the higher-percentage path to Harvard isn’t going to a resource-limited public HS in a low-income area and building impressive stats by being creative in your approach to academic rigor - joint enrollment at a local college, online coursework, voracious reading and self-study, etc. Though as bclintonk suggests, knowing how to start down that road may require the advocacy of adults to raise a student’s awareness.</p>
<p>I could not have gone to Harvard without the need-based scholarship that I got. Many of my friends also got need-based scholarships including some who were first generation college. I forever will be grateful for having that opportunity.</p>