Surprising? Well, it shouldn’t be. Given that all the other top universities have been raising the bar on their financial aid policies, it shouldn’t be a surprise at all that the No. 1 university in the world would follow suit.

Anyway, according to the press release, Harvard has increased the threshold of what it considers to be poor students to US$60,000 from the original US$40,000 - a whopping 50% increase. At US$60,000, I’d say that a very large proportion of middle-class or lower middle-class families will qualify.

Should this move be followed by the rest of the “trailing pack”, e.g. Duke, Cornell, etc.? Well, I’d answer “not really” if I were to merely consider that it should help dispel the “elitist” shroud falling on the very best universities in America in recent years. But if I were to consider the fact that Harvard costs only around US$42,000 per year per student, then I’d have to say yes. After all, most, of the top 30 universities in the US have exceeded the US$40,000 threshold. If Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford can do it, I’d say the rest should follow suit.

[News via The Universities Weblog]