Summary
Harvard announced that, starting in the 2025-2026 academic year, it will not charge tuition for students from families earning under $200,000.
Students from households making less than $100,000 will attend for free. Previously, free tuition applied only to families earning under $85,000.
The expansion aims to make Harvard more accessible to middle-income families.
This follows similar moves by other wealthy universities, including MIT, which expanded its financial aid last November.
There has to be some objective method of categorising whether someone lives off their parents income or not: it’s a relevant question to ask.
Someone can live in the same house as their parents while paying full rent and being responsible for their own food, effectively being economically independent. They can also live on the other side of the country while being 100% sponsored by their parents. It’s not trivial to categorise whether someone qualifies for something like this.
Yes, and the federal government already has a way to make that determination. I forget what it is because it’s been years, but they have one.
I still think it’s a fair question to ask, because as far as I understand, there’s nothing forcing Harvard to use the same method as the federal government. Have you seen anything on how they plan to do that?
It’s a relevant question to ask if we want to continue with the system of paying for higher education. Which maybe we don’t. You don’t pay for high school.
It’s a relevant question either way: Regardless whether you think all education should be free (which I agree, it should), this is about how they plan on resolving this specific case of making education more accessible right now.
Whether education should be free altogether is a whole different question. In that case, it would make sense to also discuss whether it should be free for everyone, or whether there should be some income limit.
In Norway we’ve landed on a solution where the education itself is free, but in order to qualify for a government stipend and government-backed loan (with very good interest rates) in order to support yourself studying you need to have a fortune below a certain (high) threshold. Personally, I think that’s a nice trade off between accessibility and preventing rich people from making money off of a welfare program.
The student doesn’t pay for highschool, but there are still fees. My income was low enough that they waived the (roughly) $500-700 a year though. They based it off the paperwork to qualify for free/reduced lunches.