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.

Back to Scholarships

Disclaimer

Return to Youth Bureau Home Page