A propósito del posting de ayer, sobre la nueva política de ayudas económicas de la Universidad de Harvard, Bob Zemsky escribe en el Blog Brainstorm del Chronicle of Higher Education, lo siguiente:
Like Being Mugged in a Dark Alley
Talk to a private college president or, even better, a private college CFO and be prepared for an afternoon of anguish. I have had several such conversations and each starts out pretty much the same — quiet consternation followed by a kind of confused anger expressed in the message “Why is Harvard doing this to me? It makes no sense. We don’t compete with Harvard, we don’t charge what Harvard charges, and we sure don’t have a $35-billion endowment that will allow us to provide the kind of financial aid that Harvard has so freely promised its upper income families. And yes, in our applicant pool, families with annual incomes in excess of $125,000 are decidedly upper income.”
What is likely to follow is the testimony of an exasperated college official who faces nothing but bad choices in trying to match Harvard’s largess. Private institutions of moderate to low endowments — a category that includes most private colleges and universities — have only three options if they are forced to adopt Harvard’s policy on maximum family contribution. They can redirect institutionally funded financial aid from the very poor to the near rich. Or they can substantially reduce their costs by reducing faculty and staff plus freezing salaries for the indefinite future. Or they can try to make up in volume what they are loosing in price. All three options will likely lower the quality of the institution making even greater the gap between it and its better endowed and until now higher priced competitors
Why, you may ask as I did, should the college even worry about what Harvard does? The answer, I was told, was painfully obvious. What Harvard does matters. For more than a century it has set the standard for academic excellence. Now it will set the standard for maximum family contribution at 10% of annual family income. It is a standard that no one but Harvard and a handful of its well-endowed private competitors can meet. The rest of higher education will have to suck-it-up, reducing costs and shifting financial aid from the poor to the near rich all in the name of providing a more affordable college education. And what will Harvard and its immediate peers be doing? Increasing their spending per student in hopes of warding off a Congressional probe focusing on how, at tax-payers expense, they massed such large endowments in the first place.
Maybe we should all be chewing nails.
Posted at 06:34:59 PM on January 23, 2008 | All postings by Bob Zemsky
Más de Zemsky sobre la política de Harvard, ver más abajo.

A Financial Aid Scheme Only the Very Rich Can Afford
The reverberations from Harvard’s stunning announcement that it had redefined middle income status to include families making up to $180,000 a year are just now coming into focus. To understand what Harvard has done to the rest of higher education it helps to first consider two sets of numbers. The first is reported growth in the value of the Harvard endowment from $14.3-billion in 1999 to 34.9-billion in 2007 — more than a doubling during a period of historically low inflation. In terms of funds available to be spent on education and research, that increase of more than $20-billion yields, at Harvard’s current 4.6% spending rate, $920-million per year.
The second set of numbers to consider are those associated with the cost to Harvard of its new financial aid scheme. According to the Chronicle’s writeup of the new Harvard plan, the university’s student aid budget will increase to $120-million from its current $98-million — in sum, a $22-million increase or 2.4% of the extra funds the increase in endowment annually supplies the Harvard budget. That $22-million dollars is also less than one half of one percent of the increase in the value of the Harvard endowment between 2006 and 2007.
For a mere $22-million Harvard has thumbed its nose at its public competitors, made certain that it has less than a half dozen competitors among private colleges and universities, and created truly nightmare conditions for the rest of private higher education. That’s what a $35-billion dollar endowment buys these days.
Next up — looking at the Harvard scheme from the perspective of a moderately endowed college or university.
Posted at 09:29:10 AM on January 21, 2008 | All postings by Bob Zemsky.