DetroitFlyer
December 20th, 2006, 07:35 AM
Holy cow, Harvard has enough money from their current endowment fund to allow EVERY student to attend for free! According to this article, if your family earns less than $50K/yr you can go for free! Yeah, the Ivys may not have football scholarships, but it does not appear as though that matters much at Harvard. Let's hear what the Harvard folks have to say about this article. Is it at all possible that the cost per student is $158K? Man, I need to find a job as an accountant at one of these colleges....
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/061219&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab2pos1
Harvard Course: Fuzzy Math 101: As higher education grows ever-more expensive and essential to success, the price of a bachelor's degree is becoming a barrier to social equality. Recently Harvard, which charges an actual-cost average of $36,115 per year to undergraduates, said it would charge nothing at all to children from households earning less than $50,000 a year. Other elite schools are making similar pledges, while Princeton recently converted all financial-aid loans into grants (discounts), making college more affordable for average families. These are good developments. My question: Why does anyone pay to attend Harvard? At the end of fiscal 2006, Harvard's endowment, richest in education, hit $29 billion, which exceeds the gross domestic product of Costa Rica. Federal law requires that endowments and philanthropies give away at minimum 5 percent per year, so the Harvard endowment must release to Harvard at least $1.5 billion through the current fiscal cycle. That's $79,000 per student, combining undergrads and graduates. Swarthmore College recently told the New York Times its full annual spending (payments for attendance, plus endowment and foundation income) is $73,000 per student. Harvard has higher expenses than Swarthmore because it operates research-center facilities and a medical school, but Harvard also receives many millions of dollars annually in federal research and medical funding that Swarthmore and similar liberal-arts colleges don't receive. So if the Harvard endowment will throw off more per student this year than Swarthmore spends in total per student, why is Harvard charging anything to attend? Harvard asserts its expenses this academic year will be $3 billion, which works out to $158,000 per student. That's the expense Harvard claims per student per year, not per four-year degree. One wonders where all this money is actually going.
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/061219&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab2pos1
Harvard Course: Fuzzy Math 101: As higher education grows ever-more expensive and essential to success, the price of a bachelor's degree is becoming a barrier to social equality. Recently Harvard, which charges an actual-cost average of $36,115 per year to undergraduates, said it would charge nothing at all to children from households earning less than $50,000 a year. Other elite schools are making similar pledges, while Princeton recently converted all financial-aid loans into grants (discounts), making college more affordable for average families. These are good developments. My question: Why does anyone pay to attend Harvard? At the end of fiscal 2006, Harvard's endowment, richest in education, hit $29 billion, which exceeds the gross domestic product of Costa Rica. Federal law requires that endowments and philanthropies give away at minimum 5 percent per year, so the Harvard endowment must release to Harvard at least $1.5 billion through the current fiscal cycle. That's $79,000 per student, combining undergrads and graduates. Swarthmore College recently told the New York Times its full annual spending (payments for attendance, plus endowment and foundation income) is $73,000 per student. Harvard has higher expenses than Swarthmore because it operates research-center facilities and a medical school, but Harvard also receives many millions of dollars annually in federal research and medical funding that Swarthmore and similar liberal-arts colleges don't receive. So if the Harvard endowment will throw off more per student this year than Swarthmore spends in total per student, why is Harvard charging anything to attend? Harvard asserts its expenses this academic year will be $3 billion, which works out to $158,000 per student. That's the expense Harvard claims per student per year, not per four-year degree. One wonders where all this money is actually going.