Will There Finally Be More Black Students At Harvard?

Yahoo

20-03-2025

Earlythisweek, Harvard University announced that its elite education will soon be accessible to more families of humble financial backgrounds. As a mom who is increasingly worried about my son's access to the college education of his choosing post-affirmative action, I'm approaching this announcement with a lot of hope and a little disbelief of how we got here to begin with.
Starting this fall, the private Ivy League institution, which totes a hefty price tag of around $57,000 a year (not including room and board), will waive tuition for families earning less than $200,000 a year. To go a step further for families with a household income of $100,000 or less annually, Harvard will cover nearly the entire college experience: housing, health insurance, transportation, event fees and a $2,000 startup grant. The wildest and most unexpected perk is the new winter gear, provided by the university, to keep them toasty during Cambridge, Massachusetts' brutal winters.
In 2006, Harvard began covering the tuition for students of families making less than $60,000 yearly — and that number swelled to $85,000 in 2023, according to the Harvard Gazette. Making attendance more of a possibility for all accepted students is part of a movement by institutions to protect diversity on university campuses in light of the striking down of affirmative action and Trump's push to erase DEI efforts at institutions across the country.
Just last fall, Harvard saw a decrease in enrollment of Black first-year students from 18% to 14%, which is believed to be linked to the 2023 Supreme Court decision to end affirmative action. Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, told The New York Times that more financial aid makes sense if colleges want to attract and retain a diverse body, 'since race and income are often intertwined.' This is an understatement that people in our current administration don't want to seem to acknowledge.
Data shows that historically, typical white households possess more wealth than Black and Hispanic homes. And while we're seeing Black wealth increasing — with a third of Black households earning $75,000 or more a year — the nation's racial wealth gap continues to widen because of persisting biases. Experts at Duke point to the 'perpetually inequitable opportunities for Black Americans to accrue wealth' or the cyclical lack of wealth transfers from one generation to the next. And this makes sense, especially when we consider how often white and other non-Black families afford college tuition thanks to trust funds, college savings plans and other forms of wealth transferred through inheritance.
Harvard is among a handful of prestigious universities that are attempting to make educational opportunities accessible to students with the grades and potential — and it'll be interesting to see how it plays out under the pressures of this presidential administration.
Harvard plans to use its $53.2 billion endowment to fund this financial aid initiative. This matters not just because many of the philanthropic donations made to the school's endowment during its inception came from 'men whose fortunes derived from slavery in some form,' but also because Vice President JD Vance wants to massively increase taxes on large endowments (from 1.4% to 35%). This poses a threat not just to Harvard's new financial aid plans but to existing funding that has historically helped students from diverse backgrounds afford Ivy League degrees, something Vance is a direct beneficiary of. 'Ironic' doesn't begin to describe it.
Harvard is not the only prestigious private institution offering free tuition to families earning less than $200,000. At the end of last year, the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology also announced they would start covering tuition for families in the same income bracket. These moves shadow New York University's 2018 announcementto waive tuition for all incoming medical school students, which resulted in a 142% increase in applications from Black and Afro-Caribbean students.
As the mother of a Black child, I continue to resist efforts that rob my child of opportunities he will rightfully deserve when he is of age. And watching institutions that we have historically been excluded from change the fabric of their admissions process makes me feel a little stronger in doing so.