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Comment by stormdennis | Hacker News Reader

$50,000 a year for a Harvard undergraduate course exclusive of accommodation and food. Sounds like there's a lot of fat that could be trimmed. Sounds immoral in fact.

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It's not immoral, it's business. Harvard has presented a product and you are free to take it or leave it. What is unfortuntate though is that we've been conditioned as a society to believe that a higher education is the most valuable thing you could ever earn.

In France the students are paid to go to the best schools.

So, still immoral. It's gatekeeping upwards mobility with absurd prices.

Its a private service, they don't sell "justice"

It's a private service. Lots of institutions used to be private until government realized that they were effectively States within States and nationalised them in the interests of the public good

You're missing the entire point of my comment - college is antiquated.

So says you. But the rest of the world, including the job market, thinks otherwise. Thus, gatekeeping etc and the moral impact.

For neurosurgeons ? Come now.

Of course there are going to be exceptions to any blanket internet hot take.

Harvard is not a business, it is a non-profit.

> $50,000 a year for a Harvard undergraduate course exclusive of accommodation and food

Please don’t throw this number out without understanding how it really works.

55% of Harvard undergrads get some sort of financial aid. Much of this aid is in the form of grants that cover tuition. One simple example — if a student’s family makes $65k or less a year, tuition is free. Above $65k, there is a sliding scale, and financial aid officers have quite a bit of latitude to work with people with unusual financial situations.

To be fair, I think families making $250k-$350k in high cost of living areas might get the short end of the stick in this system, but even they have some flexibility if they work with the financial aid department.

What's called in economics, elastic pricing then. The same model that means you can be on the same package holiday as someone else paying a vastly different price. A model that would be criminal if you used it to charge customers in a high street shop. It's charging based on what you think you can screw out of them but, for cosmetic reasons, dressing it up as subsiding poorer students

That's $50k/year to put Harvard on your resume, and the privileges that follow.

Love or hate the top Ivies, they open up doors (or at least fast-track you to the door) that remain closed for a lot of graduates.

If your only goal in life is to maximize your chances at some cookie-cutter prestigious professional job / career, then $200k isn't too bad. The ROI is going to blow most everything else out of the water, as far as education goes.

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