I’m supportive of the entrepreneurial spirit, but this is more than a little bit annoying. The idea behind Unithrive is that current Harvard students ask for no-interest, $2,000-max loans from Harvard alumni, to help them make ends meet during the school year, or for special projects or trips over the summer. Since Harvard already has a terrifically generous financial aid policy for its undergraduates (basically, if your parents make less than $60,000, Harvard meets your entire demonstrated need with grants, not loans), this is more about these financial aid students asking for help paying the $2,000 a year that the school currently asks them to contribute through some sort of work-study program. From one of the program’s founders:
Mr. Kushner noted that the college still asks scholarship students to contribute a few thousand dollars a year from summer and school-term jobs.
“I have friends who would spend 10 hours a week when they are not in class working at a coffee shop or in the dorms,” said Mr. Kushner, 24, referring to time that he considered wasteful. “I think the most special thing about college is not just what you do in class, but what you do out of class.”
Something about this rubs me the wrong way. Having to work 10 hours a week to help contribute a token amount to your free ride at Harvard isn’t asking a lot. 10 hours is not a lot. Like, seriously – not a lot. It allows for plenty of time to go to class and do homework and take on all sorts of resume-enhancing Harvard-approved extracurricular activities. The point seems to be that working in a dining hall or a coffee shop is a waste of time, contributing nothing to one’s higher education experience. As someone who worked 10-15 hours a week all throughout my undergraduate education (except for my year abroad), this grates. You learn things when you wash dishes, or clean bathrooms, or work at the campus computer center (all of which I did – true!) Things like: how to be on time, how to interact with a wide variety of people, some of whom are snotty and/or unhelpful, how to do things efficiently, how to think on your feet.
I’m all for this innovative model of peer-to-peer lending, but Christ, more money for Harvard students to get a leg up in life?
Or maybe I’m just cranky because Harvard keeps asking its alums for more money, despite clear evidence that overambitious and poorly-diversified investment choices were largely responsible for the university’s huge endowment drop.
It’s entitled, greedy, well-connected middle class assholes taking advantage of the charitable impulse to get even more money spent on them when they don’t need it.