The UCLA Center for Research, Education, and Strategic Communication on Minority Health Disparities

Harvard Tuition Announcements for Financially Disadvantaged Students

Harvard is offering free tuition for students that have a family income below $40,000. If you are a mentor or have nieces and nephews who might be interested, please give them this information. If you know anyone/family earning less than $40K with a brilliant child near ready for college, please pass this along.

Harvard's Tuition Announcement Highlights Failure of Prestigious Universities to Enroll Low-Income Students March 1, 2004, Harvard University announced over the weekend that from now on undergraduate students from low-income families will pay no tuition. In making the announcement, Harvard's president Lawrence H. Summers said, "When only 10 percent of the students in elite higher education come from families in lower half the income distribution, we are not doing enough. We are not doing enough in bringing elite higher education to the lower half of the income distribution." This initiative puts severe pressure on other well-endowed colleges and universities to adopt similar measures. Some commentators believe that Harvard's announcement was made in response to Princeton University's decision six years ago to eliminate all tuition charges for families earning less than $40,000 (adjusted annually to take inflation into account) and its subsequent decision three years later to substitute all student loans with outright grants.

The Harvard announcement indicates that the Princeton plan has had some success in drawing to Princeton some of the high-achieving, low-income students who typically went to Harvard. Each year The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education gathers figures from the U.S. Department of Education relating to the percentage of students at the nation's leading colleges and universities who receive federal financial assistance under the Pell Grant program for low-income students. These figures provide a good measure of the institution's relative success in enrolling students from the bottom economic sector of the nation's families.

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