How much federal aid Harvard gets per student?

$90,000. Wait the f-ck a minute? Per student.

Ok, take a deep breath. Let's not over react here. Sure it's a lot of money but these spoiled little ultra woke dilletantes are the future leaders of this "country". Speaking of that, no amount of money is a waste for this ultra platinum "country" club...Jews need not apply. It's restricted.

Why are the federales sending $9 billion per year to a private tax exempt educational insitution? Because they do valuable research!

Of course as a private donor I can contribute money to the rocket scientist of my choice, but as a taxpayer the university charges a whopping addition 85% to cover administrative costs. Not kidding...this is actually true.

Should the US gov fund good research? You bet. Is this an efficient way to do it. Sure!

Harvard and the View From Hillsdale

The small college doesn’t take federal money. Its president, Larry Arnn, argues higher education would be far better if no one did.

By Tunku Varadarajan, WSJ

April 18, 2025 2:01 pm ET

As Donald Trump trains his guns on Harvard, the president of a small nondenominational Christian college in southern Michigan is licking his lips in anticipation of a battle royale that could redefine American higher education. Larry Arnn, 72, has been president of Hillsdale College since May 2000. The way his own little college is run is now “hot news.”

Mr. Trump’s war on Harvard is largely about federal money, and Mr. Arnn’s Hillsdale “doesn’t take a single cent of it,” he says. “Nobody gives us any money unless they want to.” This means Hillsdale, founded by Free Will Baptists in 1844, isn’t bound by government mandates tied to funding, such as Title IX. Harvard, he says, was “exclusively funded by the private sector for—what is it?—it’s got to be 250 years.” (Harvard was founded in 1636.) “And now, in this progressive era, if my calculations are right, they get $90,000 per student a year from the federal government.” He recommends that Harvard, which receives about $9 billion a year from Washington, emulate Hillsdale and get off the government dole.

“They should give it all up,” Mr. Arnn says. “They should make an honest living.”

Mr. Trump has acted to withhold federal funds from a raft of elite universities: Harvard ($2.26 billion), Cornell ($1 billion), Northwestern ($790 million), Brown ($510 million), Columbia ($400 million), Princeton ($210 million) and the University of Pennsylvania ($175 million). The gravamen of Mr. Trump’s complaint is the abject failure of these institutions to deal with antisemitism on campus, but the president has also demanded a broader crackdown on DEI compulsions and an expansion of viewpoint diversity among predominantly progressive faculty.

As the targeted universities consider their response—Harvard said this week that it intends to fight—a rumbling has arisen in conservative circles for the “Hillsdale model.” Hillsdale itself hasn’t been shy in this regard. Harvard tweeted these words by its president, Alan Garber, on Monday: “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” Hillsdale responded with a taunt. “There is another way: Refuse taxpayer money.”

The college took a kick at Barack Obama after the former president lauded Harvard for “rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom.” Hillsdale’s response: “President Obama, we have thoughts on the next step Harvard could take in order to strengthen this position. (It has to do with federal funding.)”

Mr. Arnn laughs when I ask him about Hillsdale’s trolling of Harvard. “It’s long past time,” he says, for American universities to rethink their approach to money. “To have a liberal society, you have to have important things going on outside the government’s grip.” The federal government has “an outsized influence in the education system now, and they didn’t have that until about the 1960s.”

America would be a “better place if the sources of support for education were decentralized,” Mr. Arnn says. Schools like Harvard “get a lot of money from the taxpayer, and they don’t like what Trump is doing to them. Harvard is claiming to have a constitutional right both to the money and to do whatever they want.” But there are “rules that go along with taking that federal money.”

These rules are labyrinthine—and demanding. Some of them are set out in the Higher Education Act of 1965. Title IV, which governs student loans and other financial aid, “comprises several hundred pages of nearly unreadable rules.” Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act bans racial discrimination by institutions that take federal funds. Hillsdale doesn’t discriminate and might lose its tax exemption if it did. But refusing federal money frees it from bureaucratic burdens such as counting its students by race and reporting the results to Washington.

Not taking money from government is “liberating,” Mr. Arnn says. “You know, Harvard is a very great thing. It’s the oldest American university and it’s very distinguished—even today. But it’s not its own thing anymore.” Harvard is “funded in a system that funds every college in America, except a few—and that’s not good, right?” (Mr. Arnn has a gently interrogatory way of speaking that comes from having daily lunchtime conversations with students in the college cafeteria.)

There are “3,000 or so colleges in America, but there’s only a few that are rich and famous,” Mr. Arnn says. “It’s amazing how similar they are to one another in their outlook and their opinions.” It’s fashionable to complain nowadays, he says, that the “gazillionaires have too much influence in politics. Well, at least the good news is that they disagree with each other, and then you can have an argument.”

Borrowing a line of reasoning from the financial crisis of 2008-09—when certain banks were said to be “too big to fail”—I ask if places like Harvard are too big to forgo federal money. Is it realistic to expect a sprawling university with more than 21,000 students to be like Hillsdale (enrollment 1,400)?

“I doubt that,” he says. “I don’t understand the Harvard finances. Sometimes I wonder if they do. But they have a lot of money”—an endowment of $53.2 billion—“and they have fame, and they can have support. One reads that their budget is tight, and they act like it’s tight. So they spend a lot of money too. So shouldn’t it be done economically, and as economically as possible?”

Taking its chances in the market, Mr. Arnn believes, would make an “honest institution” of Harvard. A third of Harvard’s operating budget comes from “this one donor, and it’s the plurality of your support. And the donor is your government. It has the power of law, and it controls you.” In Mr. Arnn’s ideal world, the government is “actually supposed to be controlled by the society.” He laments that the government, “Republican and Democrat, tends to look at students like they’re factors of production.” Officials and the colleges they control “think they’re managing the future by managing what young people learn.”

In Mr. Arnn’s view, colleges are where a student “learns to be a good human being.” He regards as “very much the villains” that generation of educators who shaped the Progressive Era of American society in the early 20th century—foremost among them John Dewey (1859-1952), Frank Goodnow (1859-1939) and Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924)—“who began the transformation of American education into an exercise in power and a way to engineer the society.” That “undercut the idea of human freedom, and the old idea of what university was for, which was to understand the society and understand what would make a good society.”

Mr. Arnn lives as much in the real world as he does in the bosom of an old-fashioned Christian campus—which he traverses daily in his gleaming Tesla truck, purchased in December. “Admiration for the DOGE”—Department of Government Efficiency—“which I have in great measure, had something to do with my buying the truck. But I like the truck for its own sake.”

What is the president trying to accomplish in his attack on Harvard? “What’s happening right now is classic Trump,” Mr. Arnn says. “He’s negotiating, and I don’t know any better than anybody else what he intends, except he does appear to intend that Harvard is going to reform itself in some big ways.” It is his way “to ask for more than he is likely to get in the beginning. He seems to do that all the time.”

In his Monday response to the Trump administration, Harvard’s president objected to “direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.” Mr. Arnn agrees: “I don’t think Trump ought to run Harvard. I doubt if he thinks that. But I do think that we’re spending a lot of money at Harvard. It’s a very unbalanced institution. And goodness’ sakes, some of the kids are not safe there, because of their race, or religion, or both. And so, should the taxpayer be funding that?”

He offers an anecdote that sheds light on the failings of elite colleges. He recently had in his office a prospective transfer student and her father. “Darned if he didn’t cry in my office when I told them what a college is for,” Mr. Arnn says. The student had told him she was a conservative. “I said, ‘Define the term for me, would you?’ And of course, she couldn’t. She’s 18. And I said, ‘See, it’s actually not about your opinions, right? You should try to find out what that is before you become one of them.’

“And that’s what we do at college. You come here to figure it out. And her dad, who’s a college professor, I swear he cried. And I told her, ‘See, there we see something abidingly true. He loves you. He was nervous about coming in this office, not because he’s afraid of me, but because he wants to protect you.’ We go to college to look for that.”

By which Mr. Arnn means colleges should strip the young of their illusions of omniscience and protect them from their innocence and ignorance—while teaching them. “That, I think, is what they don’t do” at Ivy League schools.

“I noticed the anti-Israel demonstrations were virulent and ugly,” he says. “I watched several interviews with the students who were demonstrating, and they didn’t seem to know very much about the history of the Middle East. And shouldn’t they be there learning that instead of trying to change policy about that? That means they’re off the rails.” They were like the young woman in his office, except that there was nobody there saying, “Let me teach you.” They were merely expressing themselves. “We all have a right to our opinion when we enter a college,” Mr. Arnn says. “But that is the place where it’s getting ready to be questioned. Every opinion.”

Mr. Arnn believes the real problem—a moral crisis, even—was that “Harvard and Columbia couldn’t define a reason to stop these protests last spring.” There wasn’t enough “integrity of purpose, of community,” for someone in authority to step in and say, “ ‘Enough, stop, get back to class.’ And I think that’s because they don’t have an agreement about what they’re there to do. It was astonishing to me. They couldn’t reach an agreement to go back to their work.”

He sees the beginning of a counterrevolution in American higher education: “Harvard has asserted a constitutional right against the government. That’s a fundamental dispute. Their letter to Trump contains some procedural accusations that look like the basis of a court case.” Mr. Trump seems to be spoiling for the fight. “I do think that this is the best prospect for ending up somewhere better than I have seen.”

Hillsdale is “a happy place” (and the week I spent on campus teaching a one-credit journalism course confirms this). Every student who attends the college “knows that there’s an honor code and a purpose to the college. You may not agree with it, but at least the taxpayer isn’t paying for it.” It’s understood that “you can say anything you want to, if you can say it in a civil and academic manner. And that means you don’t shout ‘dirty Jew’ at anybody.” Hillsdale will soon introduce a minor, and eventually a major, in Jewish studies, partially in solidarity with beleaguered Jews on other campuses.

Students here are free to make the argument that Israel is illegitimate. “Make it if you can. But if you want to say, ‘Run those people into the sea, and everybody like them, and everybody like them is evil,’ you can’t do that, because it breaks up the happy community.”

Harvard needs to reform, “or to change fundamentally the way they work,” Mr. Arnn says. “I think that would be a good idea. Harvard should be happy. It’s a great place. It’s very elite. Why is there so much strife there? There shouldn’t be.”

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.

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Appeared in the April 19, 2025, print edition as 'Harvard and the View From Hillsdale'.