How Harvard Works It Out

Harvard continues to be a calm spot in the sea of East Coast campuses that have been torn apart by the recession-inspired issue of the year, student fee hikes.

The Corporation routinely approved in February a $580 increase in student fees for next year--an increase that was, as usual, the product of about four months of negotiations among administration and Faculty officials, with very little student input.

The process starts early in the school year, around October, when financial officers of the Faculty arrive at an estimate of the increase in fees they would like to aim for. This year, the estimate was about $600, broken up into $300 for tuition, $200 for room and $100 for board.

At that point the total increase breaks up into its component parts, not to be reunited until January.

Room and board raises are determined according to a fairly straightforward system and hence are worked out first; the raises are designed simply to run the undergraduate rooms and dining halls on a break-even basis.

It is in the Faculty's interest to keep tuition's share of the total increase as high as possible, since tuition money goes directly into the Faculty's unrestricted funds. Money from room and board goes instead to Buildings and Grounds and Food Services, respectively, so it doesn't give the Faculty much breathing room.

The point of the fall negotiations, then, is to keep room and board as low as possible so that tuition can fill up the greatest possible space in the total package.

In the long process of adjustments and estimates, there were a couple of major victories for the Faculty. The number of students on board for next year turned out to be slightly higher than expected, so the per-student raise in board fees could be reduced from $100 to $90. Room fees were similarly whittled down from a raise of $200 to one of $150.

That left considerable expansion room for tuition, so in January the Faculty brought it up from a projected $300 raise to an actual $340 one--and in addition, ever watchful of its competition, it lowered the total projected increase from $600 to $580.