Tuition for Harvard College is to be raised $400 next year. Yet, if the college were completely to subsidize student fees for the next ten years, and if the investments grown at a rate similar to that of the last twenty years (taking into account the fact that much less would be reinvested each year than before) the present billion dollars would become $2.2 billion by 1977. This would hardly leave Harvard financially "busted."
Perhaps ten years is not long enough to tell for sure what the ultimate effects would be on the University's finances. What about the "needs of the 'longer long term?" In fact, with real expenses rising linearly and the investments rising exponentially, Harvard cannot lose over time by allowing the endowment to shoulder more of the burden which student fees now carry.
In the first years during which fees were subsidized, the growth rate of the general investments might be cut back to 6.5 per cent, but this rate would gradually grow back toward the original 8.4 per cent. (The full version of the financial research is available.)
But against such a policy is an argument not yet touched on which is expounded by the University at great length in the booklet on its resources. In itself, the argument comprises the keystone motto of Harvard's institutional ideology: "Every tub on its own bottom." What this means financially is that each department of the University must be self-supporting. Harvard put it this way:
Every tub on its own bottom. The university . . . will given all the help it can. Yet the choice that faces all Deans or Department Heads is clear: in respect to any new programs, either find new resources, or go without. In respect to the increasing trend of operating expenses, either find new rseources or curtail program.
If the University does provide help, it is not in the form of a gift but of an interest-bearing loan.
There are a number of problems with this policy. For one thing, it forces the University to judge academic departments by financial criteria, that is, how much money they can draw in for their own support.
Further, although each dean is supposed to dig up his own resources of support, he cannot completely control his own expenditures. Rather, the Corporation decides each year what portion of the income from his faculty's endowment he is to be allowed to spend. And as has already been shown, this apportionment is somewhat less than generous.
The last justification of Harvard's stinginess with its endowment funds is that most of these funds are restricted by the terms of the original bequest to specific faculties and within the faculties to specific projects.
In fact, however, there are substantial unrestricted funds around. In 1967, for example, nearly one-third of the $38-million given to the University was totally without qualification. And the best estimate from University figures indicates that over one-fifth of the total endowment or about $200 million is unrestricted funds. So the University has a pretty big tub in its own right, which could, it would appear, be used to fund faculties in financial trouble (without charging interest).
Summary
In the first installment I showed that Harvard's student body is remarkably undiverse. It is decidedly weighted toward upper incomes and upper classes. The two reasons for this were shown to be: (1) the high cost of coming to Harvard and the increasingly inadequate scholarship program, which de facto discriminates against lower and middle income groups; and (2) conscious admissions policies. The first of these arguments is entirely, and the second partially, based on the assertion that Harvard is caught in a financial squeeze which means it must accept largely people who can pay for their education now and can support the University in the future. But the long discussion of finances which followed--showed that Harvard is not poor at all. It does not need to admit people who it feels will support it in the future, i.e., preppies. It does not need to raise its fees $400 next year. In fact, in his full article Labaree argues that Harvard's endowment, far from forcing constant fee increases, could withstand complete and permanent elimination of student fees for undergraduates.
Besides, whether students believe free tuition is possible or not, there is another point that remains. Students should no longer accept the platitude that they must pay more because of increased costs. We have indicated how the budget figures showing increased costs have been skewed by including increased government research costs in them. Such research was government contracted and funded and so was really virtually free to Harvard.
Second, the University does not know what it "costs to educate" the average student. Their tuition figure is not based on any such figure. In fact, they admit they have no way of even determining such a figure as the cost to educate the average student. Harvard has many sources of income of which tuition is one small one. Students may already pay more than "it costs to educate them." That is, already one should visualize the tuition as going into a general fund used to support what the Corporation calls the "University." That complex may then exist and thus give one the opportunity to benefit from the use of a few of its myriad functions and facilities. What share a student should pay to perpetuate the entire community is a somewhat arbitrary decision. Right now I feel it is based on a hierarchy of priorities that drastically needs reassessment. And for those costs that are increasing it should be shown why students should bear those increased costs!
Meanwhile, the student fees are already so high that they are pereptuating the pattern of an education of an elite. They do so by discouraging all but elite from even applying. This saves Harvard the trouble of having to more blatantly put into practice the biases in admissions that favor those with the advantages of "nature and inheritance," i.e., preppies, and sons of those "ruling." Yet even after the screening done by high fees the college still applies economic arguments to those applications that are received in order to justify favoritism to preppies (40 per cent of each class). They say they need the tuition and the potential later financial support.
Without these financial arguments the high fees and admissions process would be seen as glaring bias and pressure might build to turn Harvard into a merit-based institution. That would be the sort of place, as Dean Bender pointed out, which the two Roosevelts would hardly have been "admitted to or would have wanted to enter. . . . " This last, of course, is crucial. Bender makes it quite clear that -- financial arguments aside -- Harvard perceives as its purpose the education of the real leaders of tomorrow. And with firm sociological insight, it recognizes that potential leaders are most likely to be, by the process of "inheritance and nurture," the children of those presently ruling (or leading, depending on your politics).
The passage we kept by two sturdy porters named Riches and Poverty, and the latter obstinately refused to give Entrance to any who had first gain'd the Favour of the former ..." --Benjamin Franklin, 1772, Dogwood Paper No. 4