Harvard Announces Major Boost To Undergraduate Financial Aid

Initiatives will cut college costs and expand college and career opportunities

Harvard will increase by 20 percent its annual scholarship program for undergraduates, University officials announced Wednesday. The new financial aid plan means that students with financial need will face less debt upon graduation, and will have more time to concentrate on educational opportunities.

Harvard is increasing its undergraduate financial aid budget to provide scholarship recipients with significantly higher grant help: at least $2,000 a year per individual scholarship recipient in 1998-99. Harvard will also now allow undergraduates to use the full amount of any outside scholarship award to reduce the self-help portions of their financial aid packages. These initiatives will substantially reduce students' work and loan obligations, so they have more freedom to pursue academic and extracurricular opportunities, and so they graduate from Harvard with less debt.

These changes will take place immediately, not only for students entering Harvard this fall, but for all current and future undergraduate classes.

"Our main concern in making these changes is to keep the doors of Harvard College open to students from different backgrounds, whatever their financial means," said President Neil L. Rudenstine. "We will continue to consider students for admission without regard to their economic circumstances, and we will continue to make sure that students who need financial help receive the aid that they need. These changes will help keep Harvard College accessible and affordable to students from across the entire economic spectrum. And they will help avoid situations in which debt becomes a significant factor in students' decisions about the careers they pursue after graduation."

Nearly 50 percent of Harvard undergraduates receive scholarship grants, which currently average almost $15,000 a year. Approximately 70 percent receive some form of financial aid.

The new program has two principal features:

¥ An annual increase of $2,000 in the amount of additional Harvard grant assistance available to individual scholarship recipients, thereby reducing the amount that students are expected to provide by borrowing and by working during the academic year and the summer. Students will thus have greater flexibility to reduce their indebtedness, to lower their term-time work expectations, or to use their summers for study, travel, public service, or exploring possible future careers. Approximately half of all Harvard undergraduates will benefit from this change.

¥ Students who are awarded outside scholarships may now use the full amount of those awards to replace the annual job and loan expectations of Harvard. HarvardÕs previous policy permitted students to use only a portion of their outside scholarships to replace loan and job commitments. Nearly 2,000 students will benefit significantly from this new policy, in some cases by up to $6,000 per year.

In the future the cumulative benefit of these changes in policy over a student's undergraduate years could be as high as $20,000-$25,000 in additional scholarship assistance.

"Harvard's policies of scrupulous need-blind admissions and need-based aid have, for many years, been pivotal in our ability to attract talented undergraduates with special academic and personal strengths," said Jeremy Knowles, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "I am delighted that the continuing generosity of our alumni and our friends makes it possible for us to lighten the expectation of summer and term-time earnings, and to reduce the loan burden on graduation."

Students are admitted to Harvard under a policy that is "need-blind": applicants are offered admission without any regard to their financial background. All enrolled students are then provided with financial assistance based on need. All students from low-income families and many from middle-income families receive financial assistance: the average family income for a student with grant assistance is about $65,000. Harvard's total financial aid budget for the coming year will be over $90 million, $53 million of which will be in the form of scholarship grants.

Harvard's "yield" (the percentage of applicants admitted who decide to come to Harvard) for candidates admitted to this year's freshman class was nearly 80 percent, a figure unmatched by any comparable institution, and the highest at Harvard in over 25 years. The yield for financial aid candidates was identical to that for those who pay full tuition. HarvardÕs supportive financial aid policy also helps to produce a graduation rate of 97 percent.

In addition to increasing its commitment to students on financial aid, Harvard is continuing to contain costs and to lower the rate of increase in tuition and fees. This year's increase was the lowest in nearly 30 years.

Graduate student financial aid has also been the subject of discussion and analysis within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences over the past year. A committee chaired by Professor Peter Ellison recommended last spring a number of changes in the structure and level of graduate student support, including cohort-based funding and four-year offers. The committeeÕs report received the warm endorsement of the full Faculty. The FAS has a firm commitment to incremental funding for graduate student financial aid, and has already begun to phase in additional resources for graduate student support.