Free Harvard

"Why should Harvard take such a costly, unprecedented step? Partly because the percentage of low-income students enrolling at the nation's top colleges has been falling for the last decade. According to a 2004 report by the Century Foundation, only 3% of students at the nation's 146 most selective colleges come from the nation's lowest socioeconomic quarter; 74% come from the richest quarter. In other words, as Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation put it recently, if you wander around one of the nation's selective campuses, you are 25 times as likely to run into a rich student as a poor one."

In the Los Angeles Times, Peter Hong proposes eliminating tuition at Harvard University.

Three week later in the Los Angeles Times, Catherine Hill of Vassar College and Gordon Winston of Williams College are not so sure.