For many high school seniors, the next few months are going to be trying ones. College application essays must be polished to perfection. The last shot at the SAT feels like a matter of life and death. And this is on top of the schoolwork, clubs, teams, jobs, and social life seniors already have crammed into their days.
But some kids—especially those who aspire to the most prestigious and most expensive universities in the world—have to worry about something else: If they do manage to get into an Ivy League school, how the heck are they going to pay for it?
Consider Harvard, where tuition and fees alone will add up to $43,938 this year.
Harvard will pay for your education if you find yourself on the lower rungs of the income ladder, but aid gets more and more conservative the higher you go.
While millionaires and billionaires can easily afford to send their children to a $60,000 dollar per year university, for those families at the higher reaches of the middle class, giving their kids the education of their dreams is a lot more difficult. Though these kids have more financial leeway, Harvard tuition is still a large chunk of their family’s income. If your parents make $200,000, they can expect to use 30% of that every year paying your tuition. The financial pinch is still significant.
Meanwhile, students and their families (even those on financial aid) must allocate large portions of their income to pay for college. Placing such a large burden on students for a relatively small piece of the university’s income didn’t seem fair.
But Harvard isn’t alone. Stanford, MIT, Yale, Princeton, and many others could certainly afford to educate the world’s best and brightest at no cost to the students or their families.
Harvard’s price tag became even harder to stomach after its endowment grew to a whopping $36 billion this year. That’s so large that if Harvard were a country, it would be richer than 104 other nations. Of its annual $4 billion in expenditures, only 3% is spent on grants to students; it spends twice as much on bond interests and 16 times more on employee salaries than it does on financial aid.
Meanwhile, the students’ families who are still expected to pay full tuition must come up with the estimated $62,250-$68,050 it costs to go to Harvard per year.
While Harvard has certainly made leaps and bounds in improving affordability, the situation is still far from ideal.
Harvard’s gigantic endowment makes it the richest university in the country. If it truly wants to attract the world’s best students, regardless of financial need, why doesn’t it just make school free?
Harvard does not depend on tuition to survive. While the university collected $814 million in student fees in 2013, in the same year it received $880 million in gifts, and its endowment grew by $2 billion dollars from returns on investments. So, if all things remained the same, Harvard’s endowment would continue to grow by more than $1 billion per year. Each year, the university only increases its assets by 2.54% from student income. It recently announced a new goal to raise $6.5 billion in donations. Simply put, tuition revenues are a drop in Harvard’s solid-gold bucket.
The university even stands to gain from an end to tuition. Harvard should not underestimate the revenue it could make once its wildly successful graduates have enough income to start giving back to the school. Among its alumni, Harvard can count 52 billionaires with a combined net worth of $205 billion dollars, more than any other university. In 2014, alumnus Kenneth Griffin donated $150 million to Harvard, its largest gift ever. His goal? To make a Harvard education – something he believes teaches students to “challenge themselves, learn to solve complex problems, and ultimately better our world” – more affordable for all students. Wealthy alumni like Griffin want everyone to be able to get the education that was so instrumental in their success.
It would be making a much more convincing argument to donors about their commitment to affordability if education were free. Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, grew up in Brooklyn housing projects but attended Harvard College and Law School on a scholarship. His regular contributions in excess of $1 million stem from a desire to “reciprocate for the great opportunities [he] was given.” In a world where every graduate has been given a free Harvard education, many more will, like Blankfein, find it much easier to give generously.
But there are more than just financial reasons to eliminate tuition.
To get into Harvard these days, you have to find the cure for cancer, be a concert pianist, or maintain a perfect GPA despite being homeless. This is no exaggeration—students like these all go to Harvard right now! Every student that is admitted has demonstrated near superhuman intelligence, creativity, and focus. Most of them have done more in their short 18 years than many will do in their entire lifetime. For this reason, the Ivy League doesn’t offer merit-based scholarships.
In this action there is an admission that an Ivy League education should be free for every student gifted enough to earn one. If these schools started asking themselves “who deserves?” rather than “who needs?” financial assistance, they would find it easier to make their schools much more accessible.
Maybe tuition is so ingrained in the higher education system that we haven’t stopped to consider whether or not it makes sense for these elite schools to continue collecting it at all. The consistent trend toward larger and larger financial aid packages may foreshadow the beginning of an era when truly everyone can afford a world class education. It will take more donations, a little bit of financial wizardry, and a great deal of initiative on the part of these universities, but it is possible.
Whatever the case, it’s time that Harvard and its elite peers put their money where their mouths are and make tuition a thing of the past.
Ian Miller is a senior at Charlotte Catholic High School. He is currently applying to colleges, including four Ivy League universities.
