“PBHA programs are already cash-strapped, and we get pretty worried when we have to ask our volunteers to pay for their own subway fare, plus their mentee’s subway fare,” said Kimberely S. Mak ’05, who runs the PBHA tutoring program Best Buddies.

“The fares start to add up—and any discount would help us out tremendously.”

Harvard employees receive a 40 percent discount on transportation fares. Subsidies by Harvard’s Accounts Payable Office makes this high discount possible.

GSAS, which joined the Semester Pass program last year after receiving a multitude of student requests, has discussed the possibility of raising the 11 percent discount through subsidies of its own.

“We want to be good citizens and make transportation more accessible and cheaper for our students,” said Garth O. McCavana, associate dean for student affairs at GSAS.

But if a graduate school within Harvard wants to initiate a subsidy, the other graduate schools must follow suit and agree to the same subsidy—a task that might prove difficult because of Harvard’s decentralized administration.

“We want to subsidize the discount, but it would be absolutely impossible to get all the schools to agree on a number, especially because there is no central student affairs office,” McCavana said.

About 130 students at GSAS are using the semester pass program this fall, according to Rivera.