Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

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I get it, it helps to have wealthy foreign donors and you don't have to give them aid.

I was more asking why is this acceptable? If its an American university, benefiting from American tax dollars, shouldn't it primarily benefit American students?

So many things we just accept at face value and don't question. I never really thought about it before, but it's weird now that I think about it. This is necessarily a scarce resource (by design). It doesn't have to be, they could vastly grow their class size without lowering standards. But they choose not to, to maintain elite status and make their donor class happy.

If they wanted to keep their class size the same, they could probably fund it entirely through their $53bn endowment, yet they still charge 50k+ a year.

And then they have the audacity to reject thousands of qualified American kids and give their seats to rich foreign kids? Come on

The taxpayer funding is for Harvard's research activities, not for its undergraduate teaching. The undergraduate teaching is funded by tuition (often paid in full by international students) and by returns on the endowment (including some earmarked for financial aid).

> they could vastly grow their class size without lowering standards

The issue isn't the quality of the students they are accepting, but the resources to educate and house them, including classroom space, dorms, and staff.

But you said it your self, 3/4 of the students are American students primarily benefitting. How high does that ratio need to be? Possibly non-American students might bring some value to the school and students also? Lots to consider, maybe people are not taking things at face value but rather seeing the whole picture.

> And then they have the audacity to reject thousands of qualified American kids and give their seats to rich foreign kids?

Most of the international students at Harvard are graduate students. You can't assume they are rich because a significant fraction of those are pursuing science PhDs. At Harvard science PhD programs are fully funded regardless of the nationality of the student.

Also, the mentioned fast tracking to a US citizen will bring/create highly educated, skilled people to the country and will be a future tax payers, innovators, employers that the country gained with the tiniest amount of temporal investment and with some pretty standard monetary investment that other schools get.

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