During the holiday season, I had a conversation with a cousin about the reason why top universities choose to accept outstanding students that are unable to pay. We were able to highlight the main reasoning as diversity. Our reasoning follows the following logic.
Since the population of students who are academically outstanding, but financial insufficient is small, it reasons that the universities accept those students over outstanding, but financial sufficient students is to create a diverse group of students on campus. There were other additional reasons we listed such as good PR, etc, but diversity seems to triumph over the other explanations.
However, this topic of conversation had me pondering why top private universities charge tuition at all. For some universities, tuition is a significant portion of revenue used to provide for operations. But for top private universities like Harvard or Stanford that have millions if not billions in endowments, the tuition they charge is only a small portion of their total revenue. A recent article that I cannot source stated something along the lines that Harvard’s endowment is so large, it can afford to give free tuition to all its students for the next 10-15 years.
With such vast sums of money, it no longer seems to make sense to charge students tuition at all. Assuming that the mission of a university is to provide unparallel levels of education to as many individuals as possible, it should reason that a university should open its doors to as many students as possible.
Thus, the question is why do top universities charge tuition? It would seem that tuition’s only function in this case is to act as an inhibitor. Middle class families that might be able to afford a Stanford might choose not to send their brightest to Harvard when a great state school will be 10-50% cheaper.
If the above scenario that I wrote is true, then the previous logic of diversity would have to be not the main reason universities outstanding but poor students free tuition.
