Lessons from Harvard’s Transparency War With the U.S. Government

Last week, Harvard University found itself once again under a federal microscope—this time over its potential hiding of real tuition costs and data on distribution of financial aid. On June 26, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena demanding internal documents and communications from Harvard on how tuition is determined and financial aid awarded. They accuse the university of both failing to respond to prior inquiries and possibly colluding with peer institutions to “maximize profits” through pricing and aid schemes. Harvard insists that the subpoena is “unwarranted, unfair and unnecessary,” and has publicly rejected all accusations lodged against the institution (Reuters, The Hill).

This battle is not being fought in a vacuum. It is the latest fight in a much broader clash between elite universities and the U.S. federal government—one which has resulted in federal funding freezes, allegations of ideological bias, and disputes over international student enrollment (Arise TV).

At first glance, the judiciary committee's demands boil down to one thing: “compliance.” Harvard must deliver documents, data, memos, spreadsheets—the raw inputs of tuition and aid decisions. Such deliberate disclosure of information certainly constitutes one form of transparency, that being procedural or operational. And as of the last week of June, lawmakers argue that Harvard has not delivered nearly enough of the documents requested, and that what it has given lacks sufficient detail (Boston Globe). Harvard claims that it has complied with all of the demands, but that the very existence of the subpoena is politically motivated and the allegations are unfounded (Harvard Magazine).

At an average of $86,926 per year (up to more than $100,000 for some graduate programs), Harvard’s tuition is one of the highest of all U.S. universities. In March 2025, senior leadership announced that families earning $100,000 or less would pay no cost at all—and families earning up to $200,000 would see significantly reduced bills. The real-world outcomes of these purported discounts are yet to be seen (announcing the discounts in March can be seen as an “interesting” strategic move) but will be better known in the late summer and early fall. And what Harvard refers to as “reduced costs,” as far as anyone knows, refers to tuition alone. According to the City of Cambridge Community Development Department, Demographics and Statistics FAQ (2024), a graduate student in a one-bedroom off-campus apartment should expect to pay about $48,500 per year. For a student’s family that brings in $100,000 per year, a Harvard education is actually financially impossible based on income alone. And this fact keeps Harvard—regardless of its display of progressive altruism—an institution that continues to favor the wealthy.

Over the last two decades alone, Harvard has faced repeated criticism for its lack of procedural, governance, and informational transparency. According to Harvard Magazine and The Crimson, governance details and decision-making processes have been notoriously opaque. In a recent talk given to the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, John C. Wilcox, Chairman Emeritus of Sodali & Co., argues that if Harvard is to “restore confidence in the university’s role as a global educational leader,” it must “undertake a comprehensive assessment of its current governance to determine whether it is aligned with the four pillars of good governance: responsibility, accountability, fairness and transparency.”

In the most recent drama, Harvard has been accused of failing to provide comprehensive records and meet legal standards for governance and informational transparency under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, as well as providing public audits that would account for $151 million from foreign governments since 2020, including funds from China and the Palestinian territories.

Alright, so we can likely agree that Harvard is not the beacon of transparency (neither procedural nor informational). And Harvard is not alone—Penn State, the University of North Carolina, the University of Wisconsin system, the University of Mississippi, the University of Miami, and plenty of other major institutions have been caught “with their lights off”—accused of neglecting to disclose (or all-out hiding) important information and internal processes. Perhaps because Harvard stands out for its reputation as the world’s leader in higher education, as well as for its unprecedented endowments (Harvard’s endowment total for FY2024 of $53.2 billion is about forty times larger than the average private university endowment), the news of their opacity reads more like a tabloid than a cause for serious concern and deliberation.

In its many responses to the crackdown, Harvard has described the federal actions as “unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education” and has filed multiple lawsuits against the U.S. government since April. Only one of these lawsuits, which Harvard filed to block the Department of Homeland Security’s revocation of its Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification, led to the Massachusetts District Court blocking the federal government’s enforcement of the revocation.

In their backlash against the federal government, Harvard’s leaders have left out quite an important point. Dozens of bills focusing on transparency in higher education have been introduced into Congress and, since 2000, just two have undergone amendments. The vast majority of higher education transparency-related bills proposed have not become law; most remain at the proposal stage, are reintroduced in subsequent sessions, or stall in committee or in one chamber (NASFAA).

The two bills that have been more recently amended include the Clery Act for better campus crime recording (initiated in 1990 and amended several times since 2000, most recently amended under the Biden administration to stop campus hazing via the Stop Campus Hazing Act), and Trump’s executive order to strengthen Section 117 of the 1965 Higher Education Act (HEA).

Section 117 was originally added to HEA in 1986 to “counteract any distorting influence of foreign money on teaching, research, and culture and provide policymakers and the public with information to assess, detect, and respond to foreign influence operations under the guise of ‘academic’ activities and to threats against the U.S. research enterprise.”

The act was amended in 1988 and only again when lawmakers under Trump returned to it in April 2025 to “take comprehensive actions to ensure full compliance with Section 117,” including decreasing higher education’s “entanglement with foreign adversaries, leading to correspondingly larger and more dangerous foreign threats to American academic freedom, national and economic security, and research integrity.” One significant change to the act this past April was the shifting of enforcement responsibilities from the Department of Education back to the Office of General Counsel.

Just as the Harvard-U.S. government battle is not being fought in a vacuum, the same can be said for amendments to laws dealing with higher education transparency. Trump’s attack on Harvard’s alleged neglect in reporting foreign endowments cannot be separated out from the Trump administration's goals to increase immigration restrictions from all Muslim-majority countries, for example, or diplomacy wars like the one playing out between the U.S. and China.

But whatever the root cause of the “crackdown," the government, its lawmakers, and often institutions themselves have again and again overlooked the most critical stakeholders in the whole matter: the students. In the case of Harvard, when transparency is framed chiefly as a punitive lever—opacity as crime, disclosure as punishment—students become simply collateral damage. They shoulder the real-world costs and consequences of any policy missteps, and are themselves blind to the processes and information that will directly influence their lives. If universities and governments alike lose sight of that simple fact, the very stakeholders higher education purports to serve will fall hardest.