Practicalmadness

Harvard, the one university in the U.S. that can afford to do whatever the hell it wants, has just announced that they are eliminating tuition charges for undergrads whose families make less than $40,000/year

Note that potential graduate students, such as those of us who are finishing our undergraduate degrees in two months, still get to take Even More Crippling Debt 101.

Grousing about our own situation aside, this is a tremendously welcome move. While I wouldn't start expecting a poor but brilliant African-American kid from the South Side of Chicago to come from nowhere, get into Harvard and end up on the fast track to run a major corporation or become President (although that would kick some ass), it makes a statement against the disenfranchisement of, well, everyone who isn't connected to the East Coast intelligentsia.

Harvard is saying, essentially, that you are not your parents' income bracket. This is in many ways a pleasant fiction, but it also gives lower-income kids more power to affect their own future. This is a good thing.

There will still be, and always will be, an argument to be made that the Ivy League is elitist in the sense that you have a 100% better chance to get in if your dad is named George Bush than if he's called Jorge Nunez or Usama al-Halawi¹, and no admissions or aid reforms is going to create a totally equitable system.

But this is the kind of progressiveness we can ask for in America, and we should smile and nod and go back to looking for work in the fast food industry.²