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Dr. Faust admits to a 'very steep' learning curve in 2008, when Harvard's endowment fell 27%.
Fifty years ago, the annual cost to attend Harvard University was less than $2,500, or about $18,000 in current dollars. Today a year at Harvard costs almost $60,000, including tuition, room and fees. But as the debate rages over the spiraling cost of college in the U.S.— higher tuition has led to an estimated $1.2 trillion in student debt—Drew Gilpin Faust, the university's president, is ready to stand her ground. It's still worth it, she says—and not just for the lucky few who make it to the elite confines of Harvard Yard.
Leaning back on a long cream-colored couch in her spacious office in Massachusetts Hall in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Faust talks about the high return in both lifetime earnings and intellectual development. A university education, she says, teaches students about the rest of the world and opens their eyes to other cultures. "How do you imagine a new world if you don't know a world that was ever different than the one you're in?" As for Harvard itself, she stresses the ways the school has expanded and enriched its offerings.
"There are many more opportunities for students in a number of realms, such as more intensive research experiences, smaller classes…and a number of administrative units that are helping students," including counseling on alcohol and health concerns, she says.
But while "the sticker price of higher education has gone up," she says, "the actual net cost of attendance has gone down." To offset the high price, the school allows students whose families make $65,000 or less a year to pay no tuition, and 60% of the student body is on financial aid. Taking such assistance into account, she says, students on financial aid pay an average of $12,000 a year.
Dr. Faust, a historian of the Civil War and the American South, is determined to keep the humanities relevant in our high-tech age. But as undergraduates flock to science and technology, she is also adding new online courses and initiatives in those areas. The change has been especially dramatic among Harvard women. Over the past decade, the university has seen a 70% increase in female students majoring in the sciences. There are 45 female concentrators in statistics this year, for example, up from just two in 2007-08.
She is also overseeing the launch of the long-awaited Allston development, a new Harvard campus with more than 1.4 million square feet of construction, to be built over the next 10 years. The campus will include a new science site with a school of engineering and applied sciences. These developments come after the creation of Harvard's I-Lab, a center for entrepreneurship and innovation. Decorated in minimal white with bright, rolling furniture and beanbags, it looks like it could just as easily be a startup office in Palo Alto.
Harvard's new online edX platform—created with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—is one technological effort that expands the school's offerings to people beyond campus. Classes consist of free video lectures, annotation assignments and online discussions. More than 28,000 people in 183 countries, for instance, have signed up for Harvard Divinity School's first edX course, "Early Christianity: The Letters of Paul," which went online in early January.
Can such classes extend higher education to entirely new groups? Ms. Faust says there is a "wide range of use" on the edX courses, with a considerable number of students who aren't college educated, but so far, "the average user is in fact a fairly educated person."
Making the transition from professor to president has been a challenge for Dr. Faust, 66. She had previous experience with university administration and served on committees that decided a range of issues, but nothing could have prepared her for how the financial crisis affected Harvard. "That was a time when I found there to be a very steep and rapid learning curve," she says. In 2008, the endowment dropped 27%. Because the endowment supplies more than a third of the school's operating budget, she had to reduce expenditures, alter capital planning and explain to alumni what happened to their donations.
Yet Dr. Faust says that being a professor prepared her well for other presidential responsibilities. Just as in teaching, she says, being president requires a lot of "communicating and trying to explain things to people."
She adds, "People will often say, 'What does being a historian have to do with being president?' And they look at me quizzically, and I say, 'Just about everything, because history is about change and understanding how change happens, what leads people to embrace change, what leads people to resist change."
Dr. Faust became interested in Southern history at a young age. Growing up in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia in the 1950s and 1960s, she saw the effects of landmark court cases such as Brown vs. Board of Education. At age 9, without telling anyone, she wrote a letter to President Dwight Eisenhower saying that she thought segregation was terrible. To her parents' surprise, she got a letter back from the White House. Having told the story many times, she decided years ago to confirm it and went to the National Archives, where she found her original letter on a piece of notebook paper.
Dr. Faust graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1968, having no aspirations to be president of anything, let alone the first female president of Harvard. "I would've had to be quite crazy to have such a notion in my head at that age," she says. Women weren't even allowed in Harvard's undergraduate library when she was in college, she notes. After a stint at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, she went on to get her Ph.D. and to teach at the University of Pennsylvania, where she spent the next 25 years.
"I enjoyed teaching and scholarship hugely and never wanted to take an administrative job," she says. Then in 1999, Harvard President Neil Rudenstine called to ask her whom he should hire as dean of Radcliffe. He eventually got to his real point: whether she herself was interested in the job.
"The way he framed it I'll never forget, and I've used it on other people," she explains. As she recalls, he said, "If you have 5% interest in this job, will you just keep talking to me?" She thought 5% was easy to agree to and has since used the line in hiring, including with her current provost Alan Garber, who left Stanford to take the job.
The dean offer came as her daughter was preparing to go off to college, so she thought it would be a good time to make a move. "I also felt I'd spent so much time on committees, so I thought maybe it was time to make these institutional activities my day job," she says. She became dean of Radcliffe in 2001. Then, after economist Larry Summers resigned as Harvard's president in 2006, Ms. Faust received a second call asking if she was interested in something more. She became Harvard's president in 2007.
Looking back, she says she never could have expected where she would end up. "Almost every part of my career life has exceeded my expectations," she says. "I worry about young people now who might have such high expectations…their life will be sometimes a narrative of not reaching their expectations," she adds. "Certainly they should have aspirations that are very high, but it's nice to be surprised."
Write to Alexandra Wolfe at alexandra.wolfe@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared January 31, 2014, on page C11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: wEEKEND cONFIDENTIAL: aLEXANDRA wOLFE.
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Fifty years ago, the annual cost to attend Harvard University was less than $2,500, or about $18,000 in current dollars. Today a year at Harvard costs almost $60,000, including tuition, room and fees. But as the debate rages over the spiraling cost of college in the U.S.— higher tuition has led to an estimated $1.2 trillion in student debt—Drew Gilpin Faust, the university's president, is ready to stand her ground. It's still worth it, she says—and not just for the lucky few who make it to the elite confines of Harvard Yard.
Leaning back on a long cream-colored couch in her spacious office in Massachusetts Hall in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Faust talks about the high return in both lifetime earnings and intellectual development. A university education, she says, teaches students about the rest of the world and opens their eyes to other cultures. "How do you imagine a new world if you don't know a world that was ever different than the one you're in?" As for Harvard itself, she stresses the ways the school has expanded and enriched its offerings.
"There are many more opportunities for students in a number of realms, such as more intensive research experiences, smaller classes…and a number of administrative units that are helping students," including counseling on alcohol and health concerns, she says.
But while "the sticker price of higher education has gone up," she says, "the actual net cost of attendance has gone down." To offset the high price, the school allows students whose families make $65,000 or less a year to pay no tuition, and 60% of the student body is on financial aid. Taking such assistance into account, she says, students on financial aid pay an average of $12,000 a year.
Dr. Faust, a historian of the Civil War and the American South, is determined to keep the humanities relevant in our high-tech age. But as undergraduates flock to science and technology, she is also adding new online courses and initiatives in those areas. The change has been especially dramatic among Harvard women. Over the past decade, the university has seen a 70% increase in female students majoring in the sciences. There are 45 female concentrators in statistics this year, for example, up from just two in 2007-08.
She is also overseeing the launch of the long-awaited Allston development, a new Harvard campus with more than 1.4 million square feet of construction, to be built over the next 10 years. The campus will include a new science site with a school of engineering and applied sciences. These developments come after the creation of Harvard's I-Lab, a center for entrepreneurship and innovation. Decorated in minimal white with bright, rolling furniture and beanbags, it looks like it could just as easily be a startup office in Palo Alto.
Harvard's new online edX platform—created with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—is one technological effort that expands the school's offerings to people beyond campus. Classes consist of free video lectures, annotation assignments and online discussions. More than 28,000 people in 183 countries, for instance, have signed up for Harvard Divinity School's first edX course, "Early Christianity: The Letters of Paul," which went online in early January.
Can such classes extend higher education to entirely new groups? Ms. Faust says there is a "wide range of use" on the edX courses, with a considerable number of students who aren't college educated, but so far, "the average user is in fact a fairly educated person."
Making the transition from professor to president has been a challenge for Dr. Faust, 66. She had previous experience with university administration and served on committees that decided a range of issues, but nothing could have prepared her for how the financial crisis affected Harvard. "That was a time when I found there to be a very steep and rapid learning curve," she says. In 2008, the endowment dropped 27%. Because the endowment supplies more than a third of the school's operating budget, she had to reduce expenditures, alter capital planning and explain to alumni what happened to their donations.
Yet Dr. Faust says that being a professor prepared her well for other presidential responsibilities. Just as in teaching, she says, being president requires a lot of "communicating and trying to explain things to people."
She adds, "People will often say, 'What does being a historian have to do with being president?' And they look at me quizzically, and I say, 'Just about everything, because history is about change and understanding how change happens, what leads people to embrace change, what leads people to resist change."
Dr. Faust became interested in Southern history at a young age. Growing up in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia in the 1950s and 1960s, she saw the effects of landmark court cases such as Brown vs. Board of Education. At age 9, without telling anyone, she wrote a letter to President Dwight Eisenhower saying that she thought segregation was terrible. To her parents' surprise, she got a letter back from the White House. Having told the story many times, she decided years ago to confirm it and went to the National Archives, where she found her original letter on a piece of notebook paper.
Dr. Faust graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1968, having no aspirations to be president of anything, let alone the first female president of Harvard. "I would've had to be quite crazy to have such a notion in my head at that age," she says. Women weren't even allowed in Harvard's undergraduate library when she was in college, she notes. After a stint at the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, she went on to get her Ph.D. and to teach at the University of Pennsylvania, where she spent the next 25 years.
"I enjoyed teaching and scholarship hugely and never wanted to take an administrative job," she says. Then in 1999, Harvard President Neil Rudenstine called to ask her whom he should hire as dean of Radcliffe. He eventually got to his real point: whether she herself was interested in the job.
"The way he framed it I'll never forget, and I've used it on other people," she explains. As she recalls, he said, "If you have 5% interest in this job, will you just keep talking to me?" She thought 5% was easy to agree to and has since used the line in hiring, including with her current provost Alan Garber, who left Stanford to take the job.
The dean offer came as her daughter was preparing to go off to college, so she thought it would be a good time to make a move. "I also felt I'd spent so much time on committees, so I thought maybe it was time to make these institutional activities my day job," she says. She became dean of Radcliffe in 2001. Then, after economist Larry Summers resigned as Harvard's president in 2006, Ms. Faust received a second call asking if she was interested in something more. She became Harvard's president in 2007.
Looking back, she says she never could have expected where she would end up. "Almost every part of my career life has exceeded my expectations," she says. "I worry about young people now who might have such high expectations…their life will be sometimes a narrative of not reaching their expectations," she adds. "Certainly they should have aspirations that are very high, but it's nice to be surprised."
Write to Alexandra Wolfe at alexandra.wolfe@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared January 31, 2014, on page C11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: wEEKEND cONFIDENTIAL: aLEXANDRA wOLFE.
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
2 Comments, add yours
MORE IN
Life & Culture »
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Heard: Apple's New, Old Problem
Microsoft's Satya Nadella in Talks to Become CEO
Opinion: Lame President, Lame Address?
Jeb Bush Thinks About Running for President
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NY State police looking for stolen guns
wEEKEND cONFIDENTIAL: aLEXANDRA wOLFE
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Charles Krauthammer: ‘The President Now Is Toxic’ (Downtrend)
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