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Comment by defen | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

> 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!

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