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.
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.