The Freebie League

Interesting times for rarefied, elite education in America: in a move that paralleled and extended Harvard’s, Stanford announced a couple of weeks ago that students whose families earn < $100,000 a year won’t be charged tuition and those whose families earn < $60,000 will also be exempted from paying room & board — in other words, they’ll pay nada.

Harvard and Stanford, btw, have multi-billion dollar endowments that are respectively the 1st and 3rd largest in the world (Yale, with the 2nd largest endowment, has announced similar moves). With other big pocketed institutions forced to follow suit and with endowments’ double-digit increase rates it isn’t farfetched at all to imagine that soon enough most top-tier universities will simply dismiss nickel & diming altogether.

Which will be a fascinating and unprecedented landmark for the service industry.