Harvard's Aid to Middle Class Pressures Rivals

I think it's great that Harvard's move to expand financial aid is pressuring other universities to do the same:

William G. Durden, president of Dickinson College, said it did not have the money to match aid from Harvard, which has announced it will discount costs for all but the wealthiest students.

“He even said, ‘I know this costs a lot of money, but you should do it anyway,’ ” Dr. Durden said. The president replied that Dickinson, a small liberal arts college where the full annual cost of tuition, fees, room and board nears $45,000, did not have the money to match Harvard’s largess.

Because of Harvard, Dr. Durden said ruefully in recalling the exchange, “a lot of us are going to be under huge pressure to do these things that we just can’t do.”

By substantially discounting costs for all but the very wealthiest students, Harvard shook up the landscape of college pricing. Like Dr. Durden, officials of other colleges say its move will create intense pressure on them to give more aid to upper-middle-class students and will open the door to more parental price haggling.

Some colleges had already been moving to eliminate loans from all their financial aid packages and replace them with grants. In the weeks since Harvard’s announcement, a stampede of additional institutions — the University of Pennsylvania, Pomona, Swarthmore, Haverford — have taken the same step, which will help middle- and upper-middle-income families.

I don't think this argument is correct, but it's worth watching closely:

Some administrators say there will now be pressure to provide more merit aid to relatively wealthy high achievers, reducing the amount available to poorer students.

“It could lead to schools’ doing this sort of thing because they want to be part of the top group,” David W. Oxtoby, president of Pomona College in California, said of Harvard’s move. If that meant those colleges had to reduce the number of their low-income students, Dr. Oxtoby said, “that would be terrible, exactly the wrong outcome.”

This all misses the big issue, however.  As I've written before (http://edreform.blogspot.com/2007/12/harvard-to-aid-students-high-in-middle.html):

I applaud Harvard for doing this, but, even if all of the other top colleges do this, I think it will do very little to change the fact that today, at the 146 most selective colleges in the country, 74% of students come from top 25% income households, 17% come from 2nd quartile households, 6% from 3rd quartile households and a miniscule 3% from bottom quartile households...

 

Here's why: the main reason for the under-representation noted above is NOT that poor kids can't afford Harvard and therefore end up at a community college (though I'm sure there are a few exceptions).  Rather, it's that so few poor kids are academically prepared for Harvard and like schools.  Why?  Because in addition to all of the other obstacles associated with being poor, the key factor is that most poor kids are forced to attend mediocre to catastrophically bad schools and are taught by way too many mediocre-to-catastrophically bad teachers.  That's the main problem we face as a nation.
 
My most fervent hope is that some day Harvard and other rich, powerful, influential schools, will wake up to this fact and start using their clout to call for genuine education reform.  To date, they have been totally absent in this struggle.  Shame, shame!

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Harvard’s Aid to Middle Class Pressures Rivals

By JONATHAN D. GLATER

Published: December 29, 2007

www.nytimes.com/2007/12/29/us/29tuition.html

Just days after Harvard University announced this month that it would significantly expand financial aid to students from families earning as much as $180,000 a year, William G. Durden, president of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., got a query from a student’s father, asking whether the college would follow Harvard’s lead.