Word: hfai
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2005-2005
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...forum took place a little over a year after University President Lawrence H. Summers introduced the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative (HFAI), which sharply cut the parental contribution for families with less than $60,000 in annual income, and the gastronomic gaffe demonstrated the difficulties facing the College as it works to promote the highly publicized program...
...those listening to Summers’ words, less than 20 percent came from families in the bottom half of the national income distribution. The “problem of equal opportunity” that Summers spoke of was right in front of him. How the College has subsequently marketed HFAI epitomizes its struggle to maintain Harvard’s dual identity. Byerly Hall, home base for Harvard’s undergraduate admissions operation, must walk a fine line between accessibility and exclusivity in its efforts to recruit middle- and low-income applicants for the initiative...
Those growing numbers have made it inside the gates thanks in large part to the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative (HFAI), which justly waived the parental contribution from families living on less than $40,000—an income equivalent, incredibly, to one year’s full tuition at the College—and sent recruiters in aggressive pursuit of lower-income applicants...
...What HFAI is now doing is affording more disadvantaged applicants an opportunity to slip through the cracks in a class wall erected over hundreds of years. Much of that wall remains intact, at least on the inside, and even if it doesn’t keep them all out anymore, the divisions it fosters certainly don’t help them fit in once they’re here...
Harvard could easily take HFAI to the next level—improving not just admissions stats, but the quality of life for those lower-income students admitted—by reducing and ultimately eliminating the “self-help” requirement, raising campus wages for students who want to work, and increasing grants as Princeton has to allow students to graduate debt-free...