Because resources are severely limited, KSG Associate Dean Joseph J. McCarthy said, students have to take out too many loans to finance their education.

KSG has a need-based aid program, and tries to meet identified need, but, McCarthy said, “we don’t succeed.”

The average KSG student leaves with $42,000 in debt. When faced with a presidential management internship paying $38,000 a year or a six-figure salary for consulting, McCarthy said, “students’ choices are constrained.”

He said that the financial aid office calculated that limiting the debt burden to one the typical KSG-grad federal worker can handle would mean increasing the financial aid budget by 25-30 percent, or $2-3 million.

But fulfilling full need would cost far more than that.

Further proof that Summers faces a multitude of different barriers to increasing aid is the School of Public Health (SPH). James H. Ware, SPH dean for academic affairs, said that funding international students is the school’s biggest financial aid problem.

While the government provides one third of the school’s overall tuition in the form of training grants, international students are not eligible for that money.

“As a result, we are not able to achieve the type of diversity we’d like,” Ware said.

—Staff writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.