Link Banana

In an interesting Op-Ed, Roger Lehecka and Andrew Delbanco contend that Harvard and Yale’s recent announcements of greater financial aid are really bad news. It’s an interesting idea if nothing else.

The problem is that most colleges will feel compelled to follow Harvard and Yale’s lead in price-discounting. Yet few have enough money to give more aid to relatively wealthy students without taking it away from relatively poor ones.

Most colleges already tend to favor the affluent because their budgets require it. More than 90 percent of America’s private colleges have endowments less than 1 percent the size of Harvard’s. Giving an upper-middle-class applicant even a generous partial scholarship puts less strain on their budgets than giving a full scholarship to a student whose family can afford to pay nothing.