As of July 1, graduate students at Harvard and other universities nationwide at Harvard and other universities nationwide can no longer borrow new loans up to their school-defined cost of attendance through the federal Grad PLUS program. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), new federal loans are now capped at $50,000 per year for professional degrees and $20,500 for all other graduate degrees, with lifetime caps of $200,000 and $100,000, respectively.
The argument for Congress limiting Grad PLUS: because Grad PLUS borrowing allowed students to borrow up to a university’s full cost of attendance, schools had less of an incentive to keep prices down. Graduate students were 16.8% of federal borrowers but received 46.6% of federal loan disbursements in 2024-25, and a 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that graduate-program sticker prices rose “approximately dollar for dollar with increases in federal loans.”
But limiting federal credit doesn’t lower prices on its own. Unless schools reduce their prices or increase grant aid, students must fill the resulting gap elsewhere — often through private loans whose availability depends on credit history or family financial backing. As we noted in January, that poses a pipeline risk for Harvard and similarly selective institutions unless they start offering competitive alternatives.
Harvard has tried to reduce that risk.
How is Harvard responding to the end of Grad PLUS loans?
Harvard’s response focuses on the immediate access question, not the underlying affordability question. Congress is trying to get universities to lower graduate school prices by limiting how much students can borrow. Harvard has focused on preventing those limits from determining which admitted students can actually enroll. That doesn’t make Harvard more affordable, but it does reflect a clear priority: access to private loans shouldn't become a second admissions hurdle.
Harvard solicited proposed loan terms from private lenders through a request for information (RFI) in November 2025 — roughly four months after Congress passed OBBBA. Out of 22 lender submissions, it selected the Harvard Federal Credit Union (HFCU) and College Ave as preferred lenders in March 2026:
Harvard is keeping rates below the old federal rates: HFCU’s preferred rates are 7.60%-7.85% fixed, and College Ave’s is 7.25% fixed, compared with the 8.94% final Grad PLUS rate available to new borrowers before the program’s elimination.
Harvard is reducing private loan credit barriers: Both its offerings provide domestic students with access to loans with no credit-score checks or cosigners — terms Harvard explicitly sought from its preferred lenders.
Harvard is assuming some financial risk itself to broaden access beyond what Grad PLUS had covered: Harvard’s RFI told lenders it “would consider risk-sharing agreements” to achieve its preferred terms. Harvard hasn’t disclosed whether it used risk sharing for domestic loans but says it entered “into a risk-share arrangement with Harvard FCU” to “ensure international students access to loan capital,” although lender availability and annual borrowing limits vary by school and enrollment status. Still, Harvard’s approach suggests its strategy wasn’t simply to replace Grad PLUS, given international students were never eligible for it.
Harvard’s choices focused on the problem Grad PLUS had previously solved: keeping admitted students from being filtered out by private credit markets. Grad PLUS required a credit check, but no minimum credit score or cosigner. Private lenders typically assess creditworthiness more broadly, so Harvard’s no-check on credit score or creditworthiness and no-cosigner terms target the post-admission financing barrier created by the new caps.
How do peers’ responses compare?
Peer responses vary widely, but Harvard stands apart for its combination of university-wide competitive rates and no credit checks.
Other universities may have good reasons to avoid formal preferred-lender programs. In 2007, state and federal investigations found potentially conflicted relationships between some university financial aid offices and private lenders, including payments and gifts tied to placement on preferred-lender lists. Columbia paid $1.125 million and Penn paid $1.6 million as part of those settlements.
Congress responded with the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA), which imposed disclosure rules, annual reporting obligations, and codes of conduct for preferred lender lists. Schools may now prefer historical vendor lists or “no endorsement” disclaimers, which avoid some of those obligations.
While Harvard hasn’t exactly made graduate education less expensive, it moved early, negotiated uniquely favorable loan terms for students, and accepted at least some institutional risk in the process. If preserving — even improving — access was Harvard's objective, it’s done more for students than it’s gotten credit for (no pun intended).
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Events
Virtual — July 28 from 11:00-12:00 pm ET: Harvard Business Impact is hosting Harvard College Dean David Deming (PhD ‘10) for a conversation on the growing value of human skills in an AI-driven economy, and how higher ed can better prepare students for the future of work. Register here.
FYIs
FAS To Begin Layoff Notifications Next Week
Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) is expected to begin notifying staff of layoffs during the week of July 20, according to The Crimson. FAS hasn’t disclosed how many employees will be affected, though previous reports indicated that reductions could reach up to 25% of the school’s staff. The layoffs are part of a restructuring intended to address FAS’s longstanding $350 million structural deficit, as well as its decentralized administrative structure that has become increasingly inefficient.
Under the new model, some administrative roles assigned to individual departments will be replaced by positions serving clusters of academic units. FAS has also appointed three new managing directors of department and center administration, one each for its Science, Social Science, and Arts and Humanities divisions.
Harvard’s layoff policy generally provides 60 days’ notice, meaning employees notified next week could remain in their roles into September.
Harvard Files Appellate Brief in Federal Funding Lawsuit
This week, Harvard filed its appellate brief in its lawsuit challenging the federal government’s freeze and termination of more than $2.2 billion in federal research funding last April.
In September 2025, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs had ruled in Harvard’s favor, finding that the government’s actions violated the First Amendment and had failed to follow procedures required under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The government appealed in December 2025.
In its appellate brief, Harvard defends the central arguments on which it prevailed in district court. Harvard describes the government’s funding freeze as part of an “all-of-government campaign to punish Harvard” for rejecting unconstitutional demands affecting the University’s faculty, admissions, governance, and viewpoints. It also says the government failed to follow the procedures required under Title VI before terminating funding over alleged discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students.
On jurisdiction, Harvard notes that the government is no longer challenging the district court’s authority to vacate the broader funding freeze, though the government still argues that disputes over individual grant terminations belong in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Harvard says the freeze and terminations were “inextricably intertwined.”
The government argues that agencies lawfully terminated grants that no longer advanced federal priorities, including combating antisemitism, and that Title VI is not the exclusive mechanism for ending funding over discrimination concerns. Its reply brief is due in early August.
Former Radcliffe Fellow and Tenured Tufts Professor No Longer Employed by Tufts Following External Review Finding Factual and Citation Errors
Kerri Greenidge, a tenured associate professor at Tufts University and 2024-25 Radcliffe Institute fellow, is no longer employed by Tufts after an external peer review panel of American history scholars identified “multiple errors of fact and citation” in her 2022 book, The Grimkes.
In prior scholarly reviews of the book, concerns included Greenidge’s citation of letters between Sarah and Angelina Grimke as being held in the University of Michigan’s archives, though the university does not possess them. A reviewer also challenged Greenidge’s account of the 1838 burning of Pennsylvania Hall, writing that “numerous sources have documented” that no one was inside the building when it was set on fire, contrary to Greenidge’s description of the sisters helping women escape.
Greenidge denied plagiarism or fabrication but told The New York Times, “Are there citations that were misattributed? Probably.” She argued the scrutiny was racially motivated, adding, “The attack on Black women academics is real.”
Tufts didn’t disclose the details of Greenidge’s departure but emphasized the “independent review by outside experts in the field was fair, fact-based, thorough, and objective.”
The case follows Harvard’s May 2025 decision to revoke the tenure of former Harvard Business School (HBS) professor Francesca Gino — the first tenure revocation in Harvard’s history — and terminate her employment after an HBS investigation found research misconduct involving four papers. Gino denies committing academic fraud and continues to challenge Harvard’s investigation and disciplinary process in district court.
More News
More News at Harvard
Harvard Magazine: “Harvard’s Rising Scholars Program Doubles in Size”
The Crimson: “Russia Designates Three Harvard Institutions As ‘Undesirable’”
Hamilton College: “Hamilton Adds Harvard, Duke, and Vanderbilt Early Assurance Graduate Programs”
Harvard Business School: “Reflections From Five Years Leading the HBS Fund” — feat. Outgoing HBS Fund chairs Anna and Tom Nelson (both MBA ‘88)
The Context Window Podcast: “AI Will Beat You at Everything. You'll Still Have a Job.” — feat. David Deming (PhD ‘10), Dean of Harvard College and economics professor at FAS, Harvard Kennedy School, and Harvard Graduate School of Education
The Crimson: “Inside Avi Loeb's New UAP Council, Built From His Harvard Orbit” — feat. Astronomy professor Avi Loeb
Harvard Alumni for Free Speech (HAFFS): “Tarek Masoud on Harvard's Middle East Dialogues and Fostering Dialogue on Divisive Issues” — conversation between HAFFS advisory board chair John Evangelakos (AB ‘81) and HKS professor Tarek Masoud
Harvard Kennedy School: “A Record Year for the Alumni Board” — HKS Alumni Board FY2026 Annual Report and letter from board chair Kathy Hutson (MPP ‘04)
The Boston Globe: “Trump administration seeks to slash scientific funding for disfavored topics, researchers say” — feat. HSPH Professor Nancy Krieger (AB ‘80)
Harvard Gazette: “Award-winning biologist Connie Cepko set to retire” — feat. HMS professor Connie Cepko
Harvard Gazette: “More than an endowment pioneer, ‘a good man’” — feat.
Harvard Management Company founder and former leader Walter Cabot (AB ‘55, MBA ‘59)
FAS Current: “15 from FAS hailed as ‘Harvard Heroes’”
Washington Post: “I'm an Army general. My education shouldn't be unexpected.” — op-ed by Monty Montague (AB ‘95)
More News Beyond Harvard
Chronicle of Higher Education: “Is Anthropology Hopelessly Politicized?”
Los Angeles Times: “UC regents set firm, faster 2027 deadline on whether to bring back SAT admissions requirement”
The Boston Globe: “At Yale, pressure mounts to follow Harvard's lead against Trump”
Gallup: “Confidence in U.S. Higher Education Slips Back Slightly”
The Atlantic: “A Free-Speech Meltdown”
Yale Daily News: “Admissions, Protests, and DEI: How Other Schools Have Settled With Trump”
MIT Sloan: “MIT Sloan School of Management launches Evening MBA”
New York Times: “Nobel-Winning U.S. Chemist Will Move to China to Lead A.I. Institute”
Daily Princetonian: “New data and AI unit quietly absorbs five research units, costing survey research director his job”
Chronicle of Higher Education: “Is a New Report About the Humanities ‘Diabolically Evil’? We Questioned Its Authors.”
Ars Technica: “Influential study touting ChatGPT in education retracted over red flags”
Federation of American Scientists: “Scaling Team Science is the Important Experiment We Need”
PitchBook: “Universities’ Dwindling Financial Positions Place Pressure on Endowments”
The Hedgehog Review: “How America's Public Universities Stopped Being Public”
TED: “Matt Wu: Why AI will never replace a great teacher” — feat. Schoolhouse President Matt Wu
RealClearInvestigations: “Inside An Elite University's Campaign To Bring Conservatives to Campus”
Expression (FIRE Substack): “The shape of campus censorship on the left and on the right”
Inside Higher Ed: “Thrasher Sues Northwestern, McMahon, Walberg Over Tenure Denial”
The Free Press: “I'm a Brown University Professor. Half My Students Are Cheating.” — by Brown economics professor Roberto Serrano
New York Times: “I'm a College Professor Inflating Grades. I Need Help.” — op-ed by Duke professor Frank Bruni
Pirate Wires: “AI Is Breaking the College-to-Work Pipeline. National Service Can Fix It.” — by Anduril Industries chairperson Trae Stephens
Wall Street Journal: “Jewish Students Are Feeling at Home at MIT” — op-ed by MIT Vice president of communications Alfred Ironside
Washington Post: “Does the right have a cancel culture problem?” — podcast feat. Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) president Greg Lukianoff
Wall Street Journal: "Gen Ed Is a Joke at Most Schools" — op-ed by Mark Bauerlein, English professor emeritus at Emory University
Analogue Press: “Seeing Like a Gardener” — op-ed by Stuart Buck (JD ‘00)
Next Turtle Down: "On Symmetry in Political Polarization, Part 2: Why Resistance Liberalism Failed” — by Jesse Smith, Assistant Professor with the Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State University