HARVARD University’s announcement earlier this month that it will offer significant financial assistance to students from families with household incomes between $120,000 and $180,000 presented an unlikely image: the upper-middle-class scholarship student.
Harvard hopes its plan to charge those students 10 percent of their household income will attract students of middle- and upper-middle-class parents who have been scared off by its $45,000-plus price tag. It seems a safe bet. Since 2004, when Harvard began offering free tuition to families with incomes of $40,000 or less (it has since raised the cutoff to $60,000), the number of low-income students has increased by 33 percent.
But Harvard officials also expressed hope that its new policy would erode the “upstairs-downstairs syndrome” that still pervades there. They spoke of a divide in which only wealthy students are able to pursue highly valuable but unpaid research opportunities, take unpaid summer internships or study abroad. more
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