Summers' Financial Aid Initiatives Must Be Extended

To the editors:



It will be years before the controversies regarding Lawrence Summers’ presidency of Harvard are sorted out—and people will always disagree over many aspects of the past five years. But one feature of his presidency stands out as so important and so valuable that it should be insulated from debate. That is the issue of making higher education in general and Harvard University in particular accessible and affordable for low-income students.

Low-income students’ near absence from the nation’s more selective colleges and universities is now and will continue to be the most important form of inequity in higher education. Barely 10 percent of students at the top 31 private colleges and universities in the United States come from the bottom two-fifths of the income distribution. That leaves students from such families far more underrepresented than are women, African Americans, or Latinos. Poor people may be the only group without a chance of descriptive representation in the faculty and administrative ranks; by definition (despite our occasional complaints about salaries), professors and deans are not poor, whereas they may be black, female, immigrant, Muslim, musical, or mathematically inclined. In all of the discussion over the past several years about the Summers presidency, almost no faculty member has spoken publicly about his low-income student initiative; this group lacks spokespersons on campus.

President Summers, in conjunction with the president of Amherst and a few others, took major steps to rectify this deeply troubling situation. Since 2004, students from poor and working-class families pay little or nothing to attend Harvard; Harvard admissions officers also visit more high schools in poor communities; Harvard began a small summer program for promising low-income students; and students and graduates engage in broader and more systematic outreach. The percentage of low-income students at Harvard is inching up, without any sacrifice in quality of those admitted, and other wealthy colleges and universities are slowly following in Harvard’s footsteps.

That, of course, is as it should be. Now that President Summers is leaving, we will need to create a constituency of students, faculty, administrators, and alumni to maintain and extend this program. A university community that thinks of itself as committed to equal opportunity should be ashamed to do less.



JENNIFER L. HOCHSCHILD

CHRISTOPHER S. JENCKS ’58

JANE J. MANSBRIDGE

NANCY L. ROSENBLUM ’69

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON

Cambridge, Mass.

March 2, 2006



Jennifer L. Hochschild is Jayne professor of government and professor of African and African American Studies. Christopher S. Jencks is Wiener professor of social policy. Jane J. Mansbridge is Adams professor of political leadership and democratic values. Nancy L. Rosenblum is clark professor of ethics in politics and government and chair of the Government Department, and William Julius Wilson is Geyser University professor.