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Comment by defen | Hacker News Reader

Harvard doesn't offer academic scholarships. If you can't afford Harvard tuition it's free - e.g. if your parents make less than 65,000 (20% of Harvard students) you don't pay anything. So yes, it's actually massively worth it if you can get in, because you graduate with no debt and have a name-brand diploma and access to an extremely well-connected group of people. It's the kids who go to second- and third-tier institutions and take on massive debt who should reconsider college, not the ones going to Harvard.

https://college.harvard.edu/guides/financial-aid-fact-sheet

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As someone who was accepted and got to see their financial aid package, I have to mention that it's extremely generous as well. They don't just cover room and board and tuition, there's an understanding that you're poorer than your peers at the university so there's general spending money, money to buy winter clothes, money to fly home 2x-3x a year.

This is a rounding error for Harvard, but I didn't realize how limiting not having that would be at the school I ended up going to (which only covered tuition and most of room and board).

So where was better than Harvard for you?

Hogwarts, obviously.

Johns Hopkins as per his profile. (He studied Biomedical Engineering)

I went to Hopkins to study bioengineering. This ended up being a tactical mistake - the media hype around the field gave me unrealistic expectations, the life of an underpaid academic no longer seemed appealing, coursework was incredibly difficult and graded on a harsh curve.

But it was incredibly useful because it took me off the default track. Had I gone to Harvard and enjoyed its attendant grade inflation and reputation advantages, I'd probably be floating around McKinsey and feeling self important right now.

Instead, I had to ask myself some difficult questions about what is important to me and how to make it happen in my life.

The big takeaway I have from reading this thread is how many people think of the top Ivies as rich kid schools where most students are paying exorbitant amounts of money to attend. Probably a stereotype perpetuated by movies and TV shows...

There are certainly a lot of upper middle class students at Harvard (55% are getting aid and it's vaguely implied the cutoff for aid is around 200k, so around half of families make more than that), but that's not because poorer families can't afford to go to Harvard, it's a more systemic issue with wealthier families having more time and money to invest in their kids' education - good schools and neighborhoods, time for clubs and competitions, money for tutors and pricier extracurriculars, etc.

> top Ivies as rich kid schools

They're definitely that as well. Everyone that gets into Harvard is very talented, but the general groups of differentiation on top of that I see is:

(1) Rich kids who's parents can buy them opportunity, bribe the school with donations, and legacies.

(2) White/Asians from modest backgrounds that are "holy shit" levels of exceptional.

(3) Other minorities that are exceptional but more on the level of being a really good student.

Harvard and the other ivies aren't exactly transparent so I don't really know how accurate my perception is but that's what it seems like to me.

Fair enough, that breakdown sounds about right to me. Though it's important to note that "rich kids" here means really super rich. I recall once hearing some admissions person half-jokingly say that they don't even notice donations under $10m. Which kind of raises the question, if the kid's family is contributing that much to the school, and part of the value for regular folks going to these schools is the opportunity to network with people with exceptional backgrounds, perhaps the occasional "my mom paid for this building" or "my dad is a world leader" student is OK?

Yes using those numbers, Harvard legacy admissions is basically a "Buy One Give One Hundred" concept similar to Tom's Shoes concept of "Buy One Give One"[1] but applied to experiential goods.

With a $10M donation and tuition at ~$100,000, the super donor is essentially buying 1 admission for their student and giving 100 students free admission.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/beyond-buy-one-g...

Maybe we should just go back to divine right kings and cut out Harvard as the middleman.

Seriously, though, it is a complicated problem. Elites are going to get a leg up in any system. It's just a bad look when you're giving one group advantages because they are supposedly disadvantaged while also giving a leg up to the super privileged.

It's worth noting that this is not a case of "elites" taking out an unfairly large share out of a communal resource, it's the case of the elites choosing how much of their private resource they want to share with the rest of the society. It (e.g. Harvard) does not belong to all citizens/taxpayers, it belongs to the elites, and they can get as much 'leg up' as they choose.

It would be perfectly cromulent for Harvard to choose to admit only legacy students, and it could be a reasonable choice for them to set the tuition fee to a million dollars per year, with no scholarships whatsoever, and admit only rich students. They're not part of a government-funded education system with a goal of educating the whole society, they are a private school who can educate whomever they want - they can go back to teaching only Puritan clergy as they once did, if they so wish.

In essence, all the (quite welcoming!) financial aid and scholarships they're offering for talented students is freely given charity, funded by the fees of the rich students and gifts of alumni - and here we are complaining that they're not doing enough charity and not doing it in the right direction, forgetting that they might as well stop doing it at all if they wish.

They are essentially controlled by their alumni, who elect the overseers, so if the alumni collectively decide that it's good to invite talented-but-not-rich students with scholarships, because they believe it's best for their school and the children of alumni who also will be joining the school as legacy admissions, then that's their right to choose so. It's "their club" and they get to choose which non-super-privileged (if any!) they want to invite to their club.

This is in deep contrast with most other countries, where the elite universities tend to be funded and run by the government, who then gets to set policy to achieve relevant social goals, but in USA the top universities are private and their policy is controlled by the super privileged, not anyone whom the general public can elect.

Most of the Ivies are pretty generous when it comes to financial aid

>Harvard doesn't offer academic scholarships.

OK, but there are other places that provide scholarships.

>if your parents make less than 65,000 (20% of Harvard students) you don't pay anything.

That's awesome for students from low-income families. I support it 100%! But let's be clear here, a family with a household income of $66k/year (up to, I don't know, $200k/year) cannot afford $85k/year tuition without the student going into massive debt. Those students shouldn't even look at Harvard. It's not worth it.

>It's the kids who go to second- and third-tier institutions and take on massive debt who should reconsider college, not the ones going to Harvard.

What are we arguing here? If a student ends up with massive debt from Harvard, that's not worth it either - right?

> But let's be clear here, a family with a household income of $66k/year (up to, I don't know, $200k/year) cannot afford $85k/year tuition without the student going into massive debt.

Click the link - "Families with incomes between $65,000 and $150,000 will contribute from 0-10% of their income, and those with incomes above $150,000 will be asked to pay proportionately more than 10%, based on their individual circumstances"

Essentially nobody graduates from Harvard with a significant amount of debt.

>Essentially nobody graduates from Harvard with a significant amount of debt.

That's great! No argument from me. If Harvard structures their tuition in such a way that students aren't graduating with a massive student loan debt, awesome!

You shouldn't have such strong opinions on things when you aren't willing to do even the most basic research.

I didn't make any strong arguments. Look back at see. All I argued was the following:

1) Harvard is not necessary for quality education (true)

2) Harvard is a great school and great a degree (true)

3) If you need to go into debt to pay for Harvard tuition, the Harvard degree isn't worth it, but if you can get it paid for (by whatever means) you should do it! (true)

Which part do you disagree with?

A big part of your argument relies on the cost of a Harvard education. This was completely dismantled at least 3 times that I see in this thread.

At some point you should have stepped back and said to yourself "maybe I don't know enough about Harvard to voice my opinion on it".

>A big part of your argument relies on the cost of a Harvard education.

Cite where I argued that please.

The argument was always framed as IF you have to pay $85k/y to go to Harvard and have to get loans to do it THEN it isn't worth it. Never wavered on that part. Never wavered on the part that Harvard is a great school. What I was informed about was a tangential point that Harvard has scaled tuition where nobody who can't afford tuition actually pays the full price. Good to know but that doesn't actually make a difference to my point.

Why exactly were you arguing so vociferously when all this information was available just one click away, at the link the other user provided?

This kind of comment (being unwilling to do even the most basic research before pontificating on something one doesn't know about) makes HN discussion poorer overall, imho.

>Why exactly were you arguing so vociferously when all this information was available just one click away, at the link the other user provided?

I wasn't arguing. The entire thread I repeated the exact same thing. Namely, that Harvard is a great school and a great degree but if you have to go into debt for it, it's not worth it as there are other quality institutions. I've never wavered from that argument.

Wow, they should have advertised this more heavily.

Not in a braggy way, but I recently (okay, it's been a little bit) looked into which colleges would be the best for me and I was looking into high-end signalling locations before eventually deciding to go with a more frugal option.

Though I wouldn't give up the experiences I have if I had to do it again, I had literally no idea they structured like this and didn't even consider them because of my perception of the astronomical price.

> Essentially nobody graduates from Harvard with a significant amount of debt.

Now I wonder:

1) how common it is to have such a tuition scaling?

2) can Harvard do this just because they have a shitload of money?

3) how easy/hard/expensive would it be for other colleges/universities to do something similar?

4) Is this possible only because a significant percentage of students are in the higher tiers and in practice their full tuition is what makes these discounts possible?

I don't have exact answers to your questions, but it basically comes down to the endowment. For example Princeton has an endowment of 29 billion dollars. There are 8,623 undergrads, and if you assume the full sticker price for tuition, room, board, and expenses ($75,210) reflects the actual cost, then it costs $648,535,830 per year to educate those students. That's 2.5% of the endowment if you assume nobody is paying anything and that it reflects the true cost; but the endowment grows by more than that annually just from investment returns!

At last check, Harvard has produced far more world class scumbags than my second/third tier state university alma mater. There's Larry Summers, who presided over their lame attempt to monopolize Russian ACH clearing after the Soviet party fell apart, which landed some professors in federal fraud charges. Then there's Tom Cotton who recently cheered on the idea of soldiers shooting at peaceful protestors at the behest of the NY Times, which fits with their hiring of noted NY Times managing plagiarist Jill Abramson, who had the nerve to say she wasn't paid enough to copy and paste other people's words. And considering Cotton Mather, Tom Cotton is only arguably the second worst Cotton to come from Harvard.

And we haven't even gotten to the MK Ultra participants, both willing in terms of the faculty and unwilling in the case of the Unabomber, have we?

The bad are so bad that they overshadow the everyday grifters, such as the William Empsons of the world who preached rugged individualism attained conveniently after suing their dead wife's family for a comfortable amount of money to live on while not needing anything from anyone else in a purely literary sense, I suppose.

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