The Concurrent Master’s Has To Go

The concurrent master’s program occupies a special place in my heart. Specifically, where I keep the many things I found while furiously scouring Harvard’s website for Common App essay material and subsequently forgot about — that is, until about a week ago when I remembered and thought, ‘Huh. Why does this exist, again?’

Now, with two years of a Harvard education under my belt, I am older and wiser than my high school self, with a lot more puritanical opinions about what constitutes a liberal arts education — which is why I can definitively pronounce that the concurrent master’s shouldn’t exist.

The concurrent master’s program, in its current form, was created in 2019. It serves as a replacement for the Advanced Standing program, which used to grant 32 credits, akin to a full academic year, to students who scored a five on at least four Advanced Placement exams. Participants could either graduate a year early or use that time to pursue a master’s degree.

To be fair, the Advanced Standing program certainly had its flaws. Students who chose to graduate early, sometimes due to the financial burden of a fourth year, got three-fourths the experience of their peers. However, students who chose to pursue a master’s degree could do so at their own leisure, with their entire senior year to work on their post-secondary education.

In contrast, the current system only double-counts 16 credits for both degrees, requiring students to take twice as many credits as they would have under the Advanced Standing program. For some candidates, this means taking five classes for multiple semesters. Picking up a few extra classes here and there isn’t unheard of, but expecting students to do so for the better part of their undergraduate careers seems particularly ill-advised.

Do we honestly believe that someone can balance a healthy sleep schedule, social life, and extracurricular commitments with such an intense workload? I’d argue the possibility of such a feat is a major cause for concern. Harvard classes are meant to be intellectually rigorous and demanding. Taking five of them should be immensely difficult for one semester, let alone several.

The concurrent master’s program is also quite limited as it stands: only 13 departments even offer it as an option.

And while Harvard doesn’t offer any public information on the number of students graduating with a concurrent master’s, the program was glaringly unpopular even under the Advanced Standing system, whose participants in later years made up as little as 2.5 percent of the graduating class. Compare that to Stanford’s analogous coterminal degree program, pursued by 30 percent of incoming undergrads, and our program’s inability to entice college students becomes clear.

One might argue that even if the program is untenable for most students, it should still exist for those cancer-curing geniuses amongst us.

But do we really wish to say that these virtuosos have any less of a right to an enjoyable college experience than the rest of us? For the sake of our geniuses’ sanity, and thus their cancer cures, Harvard students’ sparse free time, left over after every other commitment has taken its share, should be spent savoring time with friends or exploring life outside of the Harvard bubble. God knows we don’t get out enough as it is.

Does taking away a student’s ability to choose extra school over a social life seem a little infantilizing? Perhaps. But Harvard promises us a transformative experience, which is simply not possible to achieve if you see the Lamont stacks more than your blockmates.

Among the many injustices I believe Harvard has committed against its liberal arts philosophy — egregious cuts to Ph.D. programs, the tacit sanctioning of rampant careerism, the General Education curriculum, to name a few — offering a concurrent master’s is particularly egregious. A liberal arts education should educate students over a number of different disciplines, not encourage specialization and the deprivation of a social life.

The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has already begun phasing out concurrent master’s degrees for undergraduates. It’s time the rest of the College follows suit.

Correction: September 20, 2026

A previous version of this article incorrectly identified undergraduate programs at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences as outside of the College. In fact, SEAS undergraduate programs are College programs.

Khadija T. Khan ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Philosophy concentrator in Currier House.