Harvard Announces Free Tuition for Students Whose Families Make Under $200,000

The costs of higher education can be daunting. The mere prospect of being saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt by the time you graduate and are kicked out into the real world sounds like too insurmountable an obstacle to realistically clamber over.

You’ll be paying that off for the rest of your life unless you are one of the very few lucky ones who can land a high-paying job before the debt collector starts calling. Harvard University is hoping to change that.

The college that famously gave us comedic geniuses like Conan O’Brien and infamously gave us sociopathic freaks like Mark Zuckerberg has announced that starting in the 2025-26 academic year, it will offer free tuition to students from families with annual incomes of $200,000 or less.

Harvard Is Now Free for Students Whose Families Make Under $200,000

Under this new initiative, around 86 percent of families in the United States would qualify for financial aid. This instantly turns the notoriously inaccessible University into one of the most financially accessible universities in the country. Now all you’ve got to do is get accepted. Good luck with that!

For students from families making between 100,000 and $200,000 annually, only tuition will be free. Students from families earning $100,000 or less will have not only their tuition paid for, but also their housing, food, health services, and other miscellaneous costs.

To get an idea of how much money a student will be saving, according to Harvard’s own website, tuition for an undergraduate student is around $56,000. Factor in housing, food, and health services and you’re looking at an average annual tuition of over $82,000.

All of this is part of Harvard’s larger effort to make higher education more accessible to students of a wider set of economic backgrounds. In a released statement, Harvard’s Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, William R Fitzsimmons, said, “We know the most talented students come from different socioeconomic backgrounds and experiences, from every state and around the globe.”