• Harvard gets 20% of its income from students, and the other 80% comes from investments and other sources (matches what link previously posted implies).
• There are two cohorts of students (A) wealthy but undeserving students, and (B) poor but deserving meritorious students.
• The argument made was that we are better off if wealthy undeserving students subsidise the poor but deserving students (paraphrasing).
• I'm going to pick a number that every student costs the university $100k per annum (incorrect, and assuming zero variability between students . . . I'm just picking this number so I can make my point clearly. Edit: actually $100k matches a back-of-the-envelope calculation from other figures).
Then:
Any wealthy undeserving student paying between $20k[1] to $100k actually reduces the number of deserving students. Said another way: wealthy undeserving students need to be paying more than 5[1] times what their fair prorated fees would be before it helps the poor deserving students.
Also the article is talking about excessive overhead costs - maybe Harvard could trim 20% of administrative costs, and then concentrate 100% on teaching those that merit it the most, regardless of their background.
Edit: Let us assume it is okay to buy your way into Harvard if you also pay for one other deserving student (that can't afford it), then with my hypothetical University costs of $100k for a student for a year, the fees for the rich student would need to be $1 million to meet that 1:1 ratio, and that ratio implies (in the limit) that 50% of students are undeserving rich students!!!
Also note that 98% of Harvard students graduate: https://college.harvard.edu/resources/faq/what-harvards-grad...
[1] Edit 2: low value of $20k here is incorrect. Although 20% of income comes from students, a large percentage of expenses are for research and other non-teaching expenses. See my other comment, with an analysis from a different direction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33838700