@DeepBlue86 - alternately the federal government could prescribe taxation on the endowment and decide the amount and how the funds will be utilized.
Probably better for Harvard and the like to come clean, step up and utilize their endowments charitably. As well as agreeing not to engage in pay for play admission policies.
They do use their endowments toward greater good, in their communities and for the larger world. As do many great public schools. The operation of a large U is more complex and sometimes you have to dig in to see all they do, beyond getting kids to classes and graduating them.
@Hunt, you made me smile:
Truthfully, I think it comes from the same emotional place - an unshakeable belief that high-stats “deserving” kids are being shoved aside in favor of “undeserving” protected classes of people.
@ClarinetDad16 sure they could. The government can expropriate anyone they want if they have the votes in Congress and it isn’t found unconstitutional. If they succeeded in taxing and redistributing Harvard’s endowment, though, I have no confidence they’d allocate it as well as Harvard does.
I’m not aware that Harvard needs to “come clean” about anything, because I think they’re making the choices that they consider to be in the best interests of the institution. As for how they utilize their endowment, they’re a private nonprofit university, so unless you think it can be shown that they’re spending their money on something other than being a private nonprofit university, by definition they are using their endowment charitably, absent a change in the tax code.
As noted, it’s in Harvard’s interest to accept the best students, who will make their mark on society and burnish the name of Harvard. Harvard can build its classes any way it wants, though, and, looking around, they seem to have done a pretty good job over the last four centuries. The students they admit come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and guess what - some of them have money. If Harvard recruits a quarterback over someone with higher stats, what do you conclude from that? Or if they admit a URM, or an artist? Did you see their applications? Do you have any idea why Harvard would choose one over the other, or a reason to second-guess Harvard’s decision? There’s no magic ranking of all 38,000 applicants - just almost infinite permutations of classes comprising different sets of 1,600 kids with varying attributes. Harvard’s looking for leaders, and assembling classes is as much art as science, with different people being selected for different reasons. Regarding “pay to play” admissions practices, I think every university already strenuously denies engaging in them, so I’m not sure what agreeing to avoid them would achieve.
As I said way upthread, if Harvard decided to sell all its seats to the highest bidder, it would become a finishing school and it wouldn’t be Harvard, one of the top academic institutions in the world and perhaps the most influential, with the greatest reach in society. Harvard isn’t going to let that happen, because it’s not in Harvard’s interest to replace a class of future leaders of society with a class of useless rich children. Similarly, if Harvard just force-ranked everyone on stats, it would be something more like Caltech and fewer people who had an aspiration to leadership outside of a science lab would want to attend. This would also not be in Harvard’s interest and won’t be allowed to happen.
What I’m - clearly unsuccessfully - trying to convey here is that because there are a finite number of slots and a finite pool of resources, this issue is self-correcting and frankly not worth worrying about. Every dollar spent in one area can’t be spent in any other, and every kid admitted leaves one less slot for every other constituency (whether it be different departments or programs, athletic teams, performing arts groups, URMs, legacies or what have you), so it can’t move too much in any one direction. Some kids who are likely to be future leaders in society come from money, and Harvard admits a few of them every year, not unreasonably expecting that some of that money will come their way, maybe soon, or maybe in the future when the kid is a successful adult prominent in society. That’s how Harvard maintains and perpetuates its position as a leading academic institution and force in the world. Long may it continue.
@ClarinetDad16 The concept of “if the money was right” isn’t just a one way street in terms of how much parents donate. Potential detriment to the university must also be considered. Not likely the donations would fully offset the detriment to the university in the situations you note.
Harvard and its endowment doesn’t have as a goal doing good for everyone else.
Do you think the pay for play situations do not happen at Harvard (or other colleges/universities)?
@DeepBlue86 What would Harvard do when returns on the endowment were negative in any given year if they eliminated tuition? They would do the same thing they do with other spending. Do they stop capital projects or cut scholarships when the endowment has a negative return? Presumably no as you manage the endowment funds on a long term and conservative basis.
I wasn’t suggesting that they expand their enrollment at all.
Harvard’s, or the admissions policies of other Ivies/peer elite private colleges hasn’t been monolithic for 4 centuries.
For instance, before the mid-late '60s, Ivy/peer elite private college admissions was based much more on one’s SES background, family connections, and legacy considerations than one’s academic merit.
An uncle who was part of one of the first classes admitted to Yale in the mid-late '60s more on academic merit than those other considerations compared with previous entering classes got to observe the great social/background gap between his incoming freshman class which had many more middle/working-class or first-generation immigrant students from public schools than was the case in prior classes which overlapped with his like W’s*.
Also, before the mid-60’s, many older neighbors and Profs who came of age and applied to colleges back then were excluded from the Ivies/peer elite private colleges due to discrimination on race/ethnicity/religion**/SES.
The colleges which were regarded as having “merit-based admissions” were those like the pre-1969 CUNY colleges which took the best students who met/exceeded a minimum GPA/standardized test scores or the Federal Service Academies because their curriculum was much more STEM based*** for all students compared to the last few decades.
Another thing to keep in mind is that much of the academic renown Harvard and its peer elite private universities have become known for currently…especially internationally were a product of the research, publications, and innovations from their research Profs and graduate schools/students.
And they were relative latecomers to that compared with institutions like UChicago or JHU which started embracing the research university model from Imperial Germany in the late 19th century.
*They overlapped for a year or few.
** Reasons why colleges like BC were founded in 1863 or Brandeis in 1948.
*** FSA cadets had higher STEM core requirements than was the case after the late '60s/early '70s.
In response to your question, @saillakeerie - yes, when endowment returns fall significantly (as they did in 2008), the brakes get slammed on. I agree that $225 mn (assuming that’s the right number) may not sound like a lot of money in the context of Harvard’s endowment, but it would be over 13% of what the endowment distributed to Harvard last year, which itself was a third of the university’s operating budget. When endowment distributions fell 8% in 2009 and a further 8% the following year because of investment losses during the financial crisis, the university instituted a pay freeze, cut 275 jobs and put construction of the Allston campus on ice, so a permanent reduction of a similar amount would undoubtedly be very painful. For more detail, see here: http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/03/endowment-distribution-be-reduced-8-percent-budget-cuts-loom
I’d suggest that if endowment returns fell and spending had to be reduced further, the hardest thing politically to do would be to charge people tuition that they previously hadn’t had to pay. All of a sudden, many students would find themselves unable to pay to continue their education. I can’t believe Harvard would go down that road, so they’d have to figure out how to cut other spending to the bone.
I didn’t meant to imply that you were suggesting that Harvard increase its enrollment, but what you wrote made me think of it. In fact, if Harvard isn’t seen to be doing enough for society, or is considered to be building a gilded palace for a small number of elites, the logical response would be to expand enrollment and allow more to benefit from a Harvard education. In that case, you’d probably admit a lot of full payers to cover some of the expense (which would be vast).
And a link from a 2011 NYT article about how admissions policies to Ivy and peer private elite colleges were dramatically different in the mid-late 19th century:
http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/remembering-when-college-was-a-buyers-bazaar/?_r=0
Not only were there entrance exams*, but the colleges seemed to have such a limited pool of highly qualified students that they advertised themselves in ways they wouldn’t be caught doing just decades later.
If endowments were managed to make distributions at levels that can only be supported during periods like the great recession or worse the great depression, spending at universities would pretty much dry up (though over time endowments themselves would increase substantially).
And as a point of reference:
"Over the long term, HMC has produced excellent investment returns for the Harvard University portfolio. The annualized return on the endowment over the last 20 years has been more than 10.0% per year and the endowment was valued at $35.7 billion at June 30, 2016. In fiscal year 2016, distributions from the endowment contributed over a third of the University’s operating budget. "
http://www.hmc.harvard.edu/investment-management/performance-history.html
So even including the significant losses during the great recession, Harvard has managed more than 10 times the return I assumed in my example. Again, they could afford to eliminate tuition. For the reasons I noted, they do not want to and do not need to.
Before I go on further, I am not one of those complaining that Kushner or GW Bush or whoever got admitted because their family had money, if in fact their families help support those institutions to allow others to go there, then that is fine by me (although a couple of years ago, I remember a discussion on CC about legacy admits and apparently the universities themselves were thinking of chucking legacy preferences because it didn’t do what people are saying,that people basically gave to the schools in spite of legacy admits…
I also would be careful about labeling Kushner or anyone coming out of Harvard as successful, be careful about that, I leave to history whether GW Bush was a great leader or not, in terms of Kushner keep in mind he went into Daddy’s business, and Trump had the advantage of his father’s business contacts and experience when he set out for himself, he worked for his dad for a while, and when someone starts life on third base it is very hard to say whether let’s say Harvard or Yale or school X was responsible for ‘their success’ or not. The Ivy league have turned out some brilliant people (or any elite school), have turned out leaders and movers and shakers, and they also turn out a number of people who are successful but quite ordinary, and some who end up not ‘doing much’ according to conventional wisdom, which is true of any school. The Ivy league as an institution (or institutions) are kind of interesting, in the 19th century, through almost the end of it, it was a kind of ‘gentleman’s’ finishing school that for the most part was the bastion of WASP culture, where ‘classical education’ was emphasized over ‘practical knowledge’ (one of the reasons MIT came into existence was those crass nouveau riche industrialists needed people learning about science and technology…something the ivy league didn’t do much if at all)…and it took a long time for the culture to change, as it has, when my cousin went to Dartmouth in the early 70’s, they still had a lot of really well off kids who frankly were the stereotype of the idle rich (my cousin made a fortune writing term papers and such for them).
Anyway, I more than understand why schools have a wide range of admissions, if full pay students (or better, rich families give a lot) and that helps kids with more humble backgrounds, go for it, from everything i know about the Ivies they are a lot more generous with aid than a lot of other schools (holding my nose like NYU, which decided it wanted to be elitist but also do so without making it easy for kids to attend), as I have no problems with athletes and musicians and artists and dancers getting a break (though I speak from experience, the musical kids the ivies give ‘preference’ to are very much stars in the stats end of things, too, the kids I saw go from Juilliard pre college to the elite schools had stellar academic records, too).
A lot of people are griping and moaning that kids with stellar stats don’t get into the ivies, especially HYP, claiming it isn’t fair, basically arguing that all that matters are GPA and SAT’s and ACT’s and EC’s and whatnot and based on that, only those kids should get in there, but one of the things that made the Ivies the schools they are is they didn’t always go by that.
My objection is people blowing off the Donald Trumps, GW Bush’es, Jared Kushner and the like, then complaining about the URM’s, about admitting athletes with “only” an A- (least that is what it was at Columbia when my brother went there long time ago), artists, dance students, kids from rural areas with crappy schools, first generation students, etc, that bothers me a lot more than legacy admits or rich dumb kids getting in (these days, apparently, instead of old WASp bluebloods, it is the offspring of tech princes that are getting the advantage today). Like I quoted about Colin Powell, who pointed out people complaining about the relatively few who have benefitted from programs like affirmative action yet think preferences and earmarks for families or allowances for rich kids are fine, and I agree with him about that, you cannot argue for a meritocracy then argue that set asides for the well off and well connected is fair, while it isn’t for a URM or whatnot shrug.
And like it or not for many students the chance to mingle with the wealthy elite and future power brokers of the country is part of the attraction of Harvard. It’s not just about academics. Harvard is not particularly famous for all the great academics it’s produced - though I’m sure it’s produced it’s share - it’s far more famous for the presidents, supreme court justices and other power brokers.
As a Harvard alum, I can tell you I never met these people, but I do know people who benefited from this. I’m okay with this.
And FWIW the only legacies I know who were admitted recently (last five years or so - not way back in the 1990s - nearly a generation ago - all had 4.0s and nearly perfect test scores.
I disagree with your assumption Donald Trump and the Bushes clearly wouldn’t have been admitted under a meritocracy because I disagree with your assumption about what merit is. As @DeepBlue86 pointed out, if HYP wanted to be like Caltech and just crank out as many future STEM Phds as possible, then SAT scores and grades are an excellent way to predict that. If HYP wants to recruit future senators, congressmen, governors, and presidents, then merit has to be defined more broadly than just SAT score + grades.
It would take only a fraction of the $225 million to make Harvard free to every household earning under, let’s say $250k/year.
What happened in the 19th and early 20th century is irrelevant to the current discussion of development admits. And as @mathmom said, even what happened back in the 1990’s is irrelevant. There will always be development admits and admits of people with well known last names. If the family has demonstrated an ability to be hugely successful, one can hope the offspring have been swimming in that gene pool.
I truly hope the Harvard endowment will be able to return to its glory days under new leadership after years of turmoil and relative underperformance, but its five-year average annual return has been 5.9% (all post the crisis), and the ten year average annual return has been 5.7% (including the crisis and the rebound) - see here: http://www.hmc.harvard.edu/docs/Final_Annual_Report_2016.pdf .
According to its website, Harvard targets a payout of 5-5.5% of endowment market value, which, as can be seen, is close to the endowment’s investment performance over the last five and ten years. This implies that allocating close to 1% of market value to paying everyone’s tuition would reduce by close to dollar for dollar the amount of endowment payout going into the operating budget for other purposes if performance continues at this rate. I don’t think it would be trivial to replace more than $200m in the university’s operating budget, particularly given restrictions on how most of the endowment can be used.
Accordingly, I think this reason alone will be enough to deter Harvard from eliminating tuition (at least until endowment performance improves). As @saillakeerie says, there’s also no reason to abandon the subsidy provided by full payers; the most logical development would be for scholarship thresholds to continue to rise (as suggested by @roethlisburger). I think this is driven by competitive pressures - if Y, P or S do it, H will likely follow.
Actually, there’s is at least one American higher-ed institution which prove that one can be admitted much more on academic merits*…even to the point of almost rank and stack which have produces many power brokers…including a few Presidents. West Point and Annapolis.
3 Presidents and many notable movers and shakers in US society. Especially considering for the first half of the 19th century, most of the professional engineers were graduates of West Point as it was one of the few engineering schools available back then.
Also, citing Caltech’s lack of movers and shakers is a bit of an apples and durians comparison considering it was founded in 1891 and has been a very tiny institution in terms of student population than the Ivies and peer elite colleges founded around the same period from 1636-1700s.
I’ll agree that the service academies are in their own way, just as competitive and selective as the Ivies. I’ll also agree that many of their graduates have ended up in influential positions, inside and outside the military. While the service academies don’t need to give away spots to development cases the way private universities do, they still require a Congressional nomination. I’m not sure the process is quite the mechanical rack and stack on academic merits that you’re portraying.
I was talking about how admissions were done in the past when one got the nomination, but still had to arrive at West Point and pass the academic entrance exam before being admitted as a bona-fide cadet. This was the case with one of the Presidents when he applied and possibly with the second.
Also, even with the current nomination system, some nominators determine who to nominate by having FSA applicants seeing a nomination take the Federal Civil Service exam and choosing from the highest scorers. This was how a couple of former colleagues who attended FSAs in the '80s and late '90s managed to get their nominations from their congresspersons/senators.
Actually, like the Ivies/peer elite colleges, the degree of competitiveness for admissions varied in history due to a lot of historical factors over the decades.
For instance, FSA admissions were exceedingly competitive right after WWII till the mid-60s due to the positive high esteem of a critical mass of the American populace.
However, due to the increasing unpopularity of the Vietnam War and increasingly negative perceptions of the military as a career/institution…including from parents who were WWII/Korean War vets, that influenced FSA admissions to the point it became far less competitive for admission in the early '70s.
This continued into the late '70s/early '80s according to older HS alums who knew classmates/siblings who applied and attended the FSAs during that period. From reports of those older HS alums, the FSAs in the late '70s/early '80s weren’t anywhere near as competitive as the Ivies/peer elites when they were applying to colleges.
This was one of the major reasons several classmates of an older neighbor from my old NYC neighborhood who graduated from my HS in the mid '80s along with his parents/HS teachers were shocked at how he turned down a full FA package to MIT for Annapolis*.
Especially considering most applicants from our HS who accepted admissions to FSAs back then on average were students with GPAs/scores which placed them more in the middle of their respective graduating classes…certainly not the top 25%-33% who tended to secure admission to Ivy/peer elite colleges.
However, this relative unpopularity of FSAs started to fade by the late '80s so by the early '90s, the FSAs were so popular even among top 25-33% of our respective HS graduating classes that they were perceived as on par with the Ivies/peer elite colleges in terms of admission difficulty. And there were far more applicants to FSAs each year in the early-mid-'90s than they were when the older alums who graduated in the late '70s/early '80s graduated.
Another thread gone far off topic. You guys are keeping us busy.