Harvard offers free tuition to families earning less than $200,000

[RE]

What does this tell you?  How can Harvard afford to do this?  Reason?  The number of applicants who are accepted to Harvard whose families make under $200K/yr is vanishingly small.

SAT scores correlate most closely with the socioeconomic status of the family.  Nowadays, with affirmative action and DEI pretty much history and with grades having become meaningless in the public schools, about the only metric you have left are test scores to rank applicants.  I wouldn't be surprised if Harvard has their own test either, since the SAT itself has been dumbed down.

It's very easy also for Harvard to figure the family income during the application process     before they file their financial aid forms.  They know everyone from the main Prep schools like Phillips Exeter, Andover, Choate et al are 1%ers.  Those places cost as much as Harvard.  Even 2nd level private schools cost $40K/yr now.  Their Zip code and address also reveal the neighborhood their house is located in.  Then there are all the Legacy kids whose mom or dad went to Harvard.

So, basically this is a full ride scholarship for poor kids, which Harvard has pretty much always offered up.  Just back in the 70s when Ivy League tuition was $3K/yr not $60K, family income had to be <$20K to get need based scholarship money.

You'll note in the article that they say 86% of US families qualify for this, not 86% of the kids who get into Harvard.  They take about 2000 students each year, and I'd be surprised if more than about 100 come from below the 1%.  So around 5% of the class maybe gets the free ride.  Maybe 10% in a good year.

The Ivy League schools have always been for rich kids.  Always a sprinkling of scholarship kids to give the illusion of Equal Opportunity.  Within the school it's further stratified, the REALLY rich kids don't stay in the dorms, they have their own off campus apartments.  Medium rich have a few stratified Fraternities with townhouses or brownstones.  At Columbia you also have the lowest caste, Commuter students.  I was one of those the first half of my Freshman year.  They didn't have enough dorm rooms so I had to take the subway. It didn't even feel like college until I finally got a room on campus 2nd semester.

Cliques also form, and its rare for scholarship kids to hang with rich kids or vica versa.  You don't get invited to the parties in the Hamptons and you can't afford to go club hopping on the weekends.  So you don't have as much opportunity to make connections.  Later in life though, just having the right school on you CV gets you interviews at the top Banks and Law Firms.  In this way, it makes it hard to crack the ceiling to the top tier unless you have at least an upper middle class background.  There are always a few exceptions of course, but I don't know of any Billionaires who really started from nothing Horatio Alger style.

Harvard offers free tuition to families earning less than $200,000

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2d5jllx60o

RE