Word: loan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Under the act, the School of Education will ask for aid to support its counselor program, and the Office of Financial Aid expects to request the full quarter of a million dollar limit offered to institutions for the loan and fellowship progams...
Actually what Harris suggests is a counterpart of a house mortgage loan. In this case, the 'mortgage' is on the anticipated earning power of the college graduate. By his own calculations, Harris sees the lifetime income of a man graduating now as about three quarters of a million dollars. This means that the the costs of repayment would be less than one per cent of lifetime income, assuming that the student borrows for three years (that is, the four college years sans summers), and the interest rate is kept low. Payment would be spread out from twenty to forty years...
What would the effects of such a program be on the recipients and on the universities themselves? The universities certainly would profit. "A rise of $500 in tutition made possible substantially by an adequate loan program," Harris says, "would double salaries and re-establish the economic status of faculty at a level commensurate with the attraction of talent." There is one local drawback, however. If private business is not interested in taking on the program (which seems likely, since inflation would probably deplete much of the profit), the alternative suggested is the federal government. These two words are anathema...
Perhaps if Harvard combined its scholarship funds with the interest from its investments and had an outside company administer this fund as a loan program, the government could be avoided. But there are other problems. The bookkeeping alone for such a program, keeping track of thousands of thirty and forty year loans, would be of epic size. A great quasi-Social Securities office would have to be set up, and with an inevitable upward rise of secretary salaries and of business equipment, the plan could cost more than it's worth...
...other and more important hand, the student may not like it. Even though he will know a loan is for the university's good and his own, there would have to be a considerable repression of human nature on the part of most students. To step out into the world after graduation with a four thousand dollar loan on one's shoulders is not a happy prospect, even if one has a life-time to pay it back. The loan, ever present, being reduced by a piddling sum each year, could turn into a hateful obligation fairly soon. Knowledge that...