Harvard puts up signs in the Yard apparently welcoming anyone who can pay $73,600/year:
[“Wherever you are from… You are home.” — lifted from Burning Man?]
Actually the offer is more generous than initially apparent because Harvard promises free tuition, room, and board for children from any family earning less than $65,000 year (source).
Is there a clear path for almost anyone to get a free ride through Harvard? Harvard doesn’t ask for a birth certificate, right? There is no public record of who has a U.S. passport, right? So anyone who is admitted to Harvard can say “I am an undocumented immigrant.” At that point Harvard cannot ask for any authoritative financial forms. The applicant can simply say “I don’t know what my parents’ immigration status is and I would feel uncomfortable asking for their IRS 1040 returns.”
https://college.harvard.edu/i-am-undocumented-am-i-still-eligible-financial-aid says
If you are undocumented you are eligible for financial aid from Harvard. Harvard makes no distinction based on citizenship in the financial aid process or in the amount of aid for which students are eligible. Undocumented students do not need to file a FAFSA since they are not eligible to apply for federal aid.
Readers: What do you think? There are procedures for proving that one is documented, e.g., producing a passport. But there is no procedure for proving that someone is undocumented. Is there then a clear path to free tuition, room, and board?
Related:
- “Stanford’s elite business school caught cheating — by one of its own MBA students” (Mercury News blog): “Stanford had routinely granted fellowship money to students without regard to their financial needs, often favoring admits who were female…” (i.e., it should be straightforward to get a discount on business school by identifying as female or as someone in a sought-after racial or ethnic category; “The school has offered additional fellowship awards to candidates whose biographies make them particularly compelling and competitive in trying to attract a diverse class,” said the dean)
- Should college students from upper-middle income families fly to Las Vegas this weekend and get married?
It’s weird that this is a policy, but I think claiming to be undocumented in order to avoid paying tuition might be fraud
superMike: How is it fraud? Do you have a clear memory of your birth? Are you 100 percent sure from your personal knowledge that you were born in the U.S.? If not, how do you know that you are fully and properly “documented”? Same question regarding your parents… were you present during their respective births and do you have a clear memory of those events as having occurred in the U.S.? If not, how can you be sure that your parents are “documented”?
IANAL, but a quick definition lookup of “fraud” includes possibilities of “misrepresentation or omission” and “reasonable standard”. Making an affirmative statement like “I am undocumented” merely because it’s a theoretical possibility when you have no reason to actually believe that is the most likely situation seems to fly awfully close to danger. If you’ve actually seen your birth certificate, SSN card, or passport by the time you apply to Harvard then it seems to be open-and-shut. Parents, don’t take your kids on international vacations, I guess?
“Is there then a clear path to free tuition, room, and board?”
There is a “clear” path to avoiding filing a FAFSA for non US Citizens without green cards, valid student visas etc. The paragraph is silent on what alternate forms of financial disclosure are required, but I assume there would be are some. For US citizens or individuals holding other documentation it would indeed be fraud and it would not be difficult for Harvard to prove it. However, they don’t actually need to “prove” it. They could simply toss the application and as a practical matter there is little the applicant can do about it. Why on earth would someone who was accepted to Harvard risk losing that seat just to avoid filing a FAFSA?
Is fraud even the relevant standard? Harvard charges a different price, of their own choice, to each customer. Same deal with Stanford Business School (see the link, above). So what would it mean for a customer to defraud Harvard? How would it be possible to calculate the damages? The process by which a price is quoted is secret, right?
I believe Harvard can simply follow the airlines practices here – they calculate damages due to someone breaking their contract of carriage (for example, hidden city ticketing) and try to charge fare difference based on their secret formula price, which is different for each customer. And Harvard has much better chance of catching such customers than airlines.
The marriage option (near end of the post) seems far more robust.
re: marriage option — an angle an attorney mentioned to a friend, when she & her husband spent $250 to ask about eligibility for in-state tuition at UVA (or William & Mary, Virginia Tech, etc.), which is less than half out-of-state tuition. Attorney mentioned marriage, if the spouse’s income is modest, and joining the military/ROTC as the surest options. (Online sources confirm this). Parents moving to VA are subject to a 12 mo waiting period, plus the real estate transaction costs alone give most people pause.
re: fraud — Harvard will sue to recover financial aid obtained via fraud, as evidenced by the Harvard faker case circa 2008 (he forged his transcripts, SATs, etc.). Since faker was the son of a school teacher from Delaware, unclear what assets were available.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/11/09/harvard-faker-jailed-for-citing-school-on-resume.html
Something tells me this is not a good plan… It falls under the same category as misstating ethnicity to gain unfair advantage.
Although in some cases one can work one’s way all the way to a lucrative teaching position at Harvard and to the senate floor without anyone noticing.
To me the more critical question is How can I declare myself a refugee? Can I show up in
Sweden and claim asylum from the trumpenreich?
Can I burn my birth certificate here in America and claim I’m from “war-torn” somalia and have Catholic Charities lend me a hand?
I’m not too fond of my job and am a bit burned out and it’d be nice to chill for eight months on the public dime rather than burn savings. I am a refugee from corporate America.
Your mistake is taking that slogan literally. Just because you are “home” doesn’t mean Harvard will allow you to matriculate.
@bobbybobbob: Aren’t you limiting yourself to traditional (so maybe now conservative) ways of being undocumented? Why not be an undocumented homeowner (wherein one doesn’t need to have documents to prove ownership)? Won’t Cambridge support rights of such people? There must be acceptable houses or apartments there. And can also be undocumented car-owner. A recent post on this blog had photo of a nice Italian car nearby!
Instead of all of this trouble, can’t one just be an undocumented Harvard graduate? Isn’t it a deplorable practice to ask a person to show a document (diploma, transcripts etc) to prove that?
The path is to be a smart international student to get in to Harvard (Yale , Princeton and the like) with full scholarship. These schools have need-blind admission. If a student from a low/middle income country is accepted, s/he is granted full scholarship considering average income, say in Eastern Europe (not even mentioning developing countries in Asia, Africa) falls way below the income requirements for US citizens. A number of friends of mine successfully graduated from aforementioned schools without paying a dime.