Math Is HARD

Especially when you're a parent of a high school senior looking down the barrel of a six-figure college tuition. Is it any wonder the new favorite phrase in higher ed is Return on Investment?

- BY IAN FRISCH

One evening in late 2022, Adam Latif, a high school student in Tampa, sat down at his computer to see if he had been accepted by Harvard University. He had toured the school’s grounds with his parents earlier that year as part of a larger college jaunt around New England, and he immediately fell in love. The prestige, the history...Boston! Harvard became his first choice. And yet he was expecting to get rejected. The school’s acceptance rate was the lowest it had ever been—dropping from 6.2 percent for the class of 2015 to 3.5 percent for the class of 2027—and the tuition had risen by 40 percent over the same period, making financial affordability as remote as the odds of being accepted.

Latif applied early decision, leaving him ample time to submit regular applications to other Ivies (Princeton, Brown, Yale, Columbia) in case he got turned down. But when he opened the link in his email, “the confetti thing came up on my screen,” he says. He had been accepted. He let his future come into focus over the next hour before telling his parents. They were ecstatic. Latif immediately thought of all the preprofessional clubs he hoped to join; he knew he would need to make sure his professional accomplishments offset the cost of Harvard’s tuition. “There is an implicit understanding that I have to make the most of my time at Harvard,” he says. “My parents are paying a lot for me to go there.”

THE RISE OF ROI