Tuition is one of the many aspects, if not the first and most foreboding aspect, that prospective students take into consideration when deciding what college they want to attend for the next four years. Many colleges award financial aid and other forms of scholarship money to their students. Harvard, for example, boasts an astronomical $1.4 billion given to its students. The shocking sticker price of a school can send students and their families running in the other direction.
Harvard University’s most recent sticker price comes in at about $45,000 per year, another incredibly pricey number that matches its financial aid donations, but one that is not all that uncommon in comparison to many other private universities.
One last remarkably high value to add to the mix is $37.6 billion. That is the endowment that Harvard currently has to its name. And a slate of candidates running for the Board of Overseers at Harvard is proposing a new plan to put that money towards. That plan is simple: make Harvard tuition-free.
This extravagant proposal will combat two issues -- race-based admissions and the inability for the most highly qualified students to attend a university, which go hand-in-hand.
Ron Unz, a conservative from California, is attempting to expose Harvard’s flaws in the admissions process, where he believes that “better-qualified Asian-American students are bypassed in favor of whites, blacks and Hispanics, and the children of the wealthy and the powerful.”
Unz is not the only person looking into these disparities. The United States Supreme Court is currently reviewing if race should even be a factor that is considered in the admissions process. While affirmative action ensures that colleges will have an equal representation of different races and ethnicities, it can sometimes forego better-qualified candidates in order to meet these numbers.
Under-represented minority groups are the individuals that prosper from this movement. But what is being seen more often is that other groups, like Asian Americans, lose out from this legislation.
As far-fetched as it sounds, Unz, says that by tapping into the large endowment and offering free tuition, the number of applicants will increase dramatically across the board because the college will, “no longer have trouble balancing its class for racial or ethnic diversity.” Unz expects that once Harvard declares a tuition-free education, many other colleges would follow in a domino-like effect in order to keep its competitive edge in the incredibly cutthroat college admission world.
Unz’s proposal seems like a college student’s dream come true. However, it received much critical backlash from Harvard, saying that this seemingly easily implemented plan is strictly implausible.
Jeff Neal, a Harvard spokesperson, tore down Unz’s plan to use the endowment for tuition due to the fact that this money “[can’t] be accessed like bank accounts, used for anything at anytime.” Instead, Neal makes a point to explain that the endowment is extremely limited in its availability and “must be maintained in perpetuity.”
Although this plan voiced by Unz seems to be the fix-all for many of the most prominent problems that occur in the college admissions process, it would be very hard to accomplish if the funds just simply aren’t there, which Neal refers to.
As college tuition prices continue to rise, more people like Unz will perhaps look into the idea of utilizing college endowment for more purposes, such as lowering, if not covering, the cost of college for students. Until then, make sure you save every last penny if you are planning on spending four years at a pricey school like Harvard.
