Is It Worth It?

This Wednesday, in its four-part investigation of Harvard University's split identity as both an institution of higher learning and a money-sucking behemoth, The Boston Globe will attempt to answer the question: "Is it worth it?" I hope the Globe, if only to spare our collective sanity, won't be so cruel as to tell the members of my class, just 24 hours before our graduation, that no, indeed, it is not worth it.

Humor aside, a cost-benefit analysis of a Harvard education is not far from many seniors' minds. After all, for most of us, money is not simply a theoretical problem but a pressing concern. Last Tuesday I sat in a room in Byerly Hall packed with seniors and students about to take leaves of absence. We were each handed a (free) glossy red folder containing promissory notes, incomprehensible financial booklets and everyone's favorite--the cumulative statement of our individual debts to Uncle Sam and Mother Harvard. To my delight, I discovered that even if I were to start making payments this fall--which I can't do, because I'm going to graduate school--I would be sending a monthly check to the Federal government until 2013. Under the "Extended Plan" (read: Low-Income Plan), by 2013 my interest payments will have matched the principal of my debt.

Since I'll have so many years to contemplate the value of a Harvard education, it might seem best to postpone thinking about the issue. After all, as I write this piece I am only hours away from enjoying the "Infamous Moonlight Cruise," an evening of Boston Harbor revelry. Yet at the risk of sounding like a Marxist apparatchik, the issue of how value is created and exchanged at Harvard has been at the top of my mind.

Henry Rosovsky, the former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is famous for saying that Harvard College students are here for only four years, the Faculty for a lifetime and the University forever. But Harvard's key asset in maintaining its unparalleled reputation and its overflowing prestige seems to me to lie not so much in the permanence of the institution--because, like everything, the institution will change and evolve over time--but rather in how effectively the institution persuades us of its own rightness and legitimacy.

This is an obvious and yet not-so-obvious insight. Certainly, all old institutions are concerned about keeping up a certain image and, more meaningfully, perpetuating their values and traditions. And the student activist movements of the '60s left us with a legacy of questioning University policies, ranging from Harvard's investments in apartheid-era South Africa to the dearth of tenured women and people of color in the ranks of the Faculty.

Yet this questioning is not quite the same as doubting the value of the University itself. For example, in calling for more racial and ethnic studies courses in the curriculum, we are not so much challenging the validity of the curriculum itself but rather asking Harvard to live up to our expectations of a well-rounded, liberal arts education that pays adequate attention to emerging fields of scholarship. Even the teaching of such controversial tenets of scholarship as post-modernism and deconstructionism has done little to take apart universities themselves; to the contrary, these theories have supplied American schools with excited Ph.D.'s eager to continue refining these theories. Taking curricular risks does nothing to undermine the University's legitimacy and strength.

But rather than answering our calls for a more diverse curriculum, Harvard has, perhaps predictably, occupied itself with creating feelings of self-worth and validation. The very physical landscape of the school simultaneously oozes timelessness and creation. The last four years have seen a spurt of building and renovation. From Annenberg to the Barker Center, Loker Commons to the spanking-new interior of Harvard Law School's Langdell Library, the people who build and maintain Harvard put on quite a show. But Harvard's sheer physical attractiveness is not by itself sufficient in creating value. The value of a Harvard education is not found merely in a stroll through the Yard but in the total experience, and it is in assigning a normative value to this total experience that Harvard has been especially effective.

The senior survey--ingeniously required of all seniors, because they must turn in their copy in order to receive Commencement tickets--disaggregates this experience to a certain extent. I found myself rating very highly such features of the undergraduate experience as House life, the resources of the Office of Career Services, the panoply of extracurricular offerings and, most importantly, the quality of friendships formed and kept. Yet when it came to the one category in which Harvard as an institution is judged alone--namely, the administration's responsiveness to student concerns and its attentiveness to student input--I found myself giving the University very low marks. My fear is that in the pre-Commencement haze of celebrations with friends, conversations with faculty mentors and well-deserved self congratulation for four years of Harvard work, we might too generously evaluate those aspects of the undergraduate experience that are most disagreeable.

But regardless of the very real need to evaluate the University critically in our final opportunity to do so, it is my firm belief that most, if not all, of the value of a Harvard education is self-created by the student. Out of a strange convergence of resources and circumstances, learning is attained and relationships forged.

Is the sum package different because the school is Harvard, as opposed to any other college? Probably. But I doubt strongly that the value that has been added can be chalked up to the administration's strength, as opposed to the diversity and vitality of the students within Harvard's gates. The answer to the question "Is it worth it?", then, lies not in the financial tabulations of tuition payments and endowment earnings but in the uniqueness and intimacy of our private lives.

Sewell Chan '98, a social studies concentrator in Quincy House, was executive editor of The Crimson in 1997.