Transcript

The School ran a very successful campaign earlier in this decade, and we had thought clearly about what some priorities were before we went out and asked our alumni for more funding. And at the top of the list had to be fellowship support for our students.

And I just wanted to explain just how important those fellowships are to the School. Because at the core, we want to have as strong a student body as possible. And the tuition here, and at other institutions, is high. And we do need-blind admissions, but more than that, we didn't just want people to be able to come here, and get some fellowships, and a lot of debt. Instead, we really wanted people to not worry about what the level of debt is that they had to take out, in terms of coming here.

First of all, that's important in terms of enticing more people to think about coming to this place who might not otherwise have thought it was even possible. But then once they have thought about this, and they've been admitted, we don't want students when they're here to be focused too strongly on having to take a job upon graduation that is the highest-paying job, for the sole reason that they need to service a high level of debt.

So it has been a huge priority, starting with Dean Clark, and very much extending with Dean Light, to grow the fellowship budget for students as aggressively as we could. And about ten years ago we were spending five million dollars on student fellowships, and this year it's almost twenty-five million dollars. So it's grown pretty much fourfold in a ten-year period. And this has just had a huge impact, I think. At, you know, at this point, the average fellowship that a student could be receiving in an individual year is over twenty thousand dollars.

It's a really big number, and the impact of the campaign cannot be minimized here. This was something that I think rang true with many of our donors as something that they had benefited from during their time here, that they would not have been given the opportunity to come to the Harvard Business School. And they are very appreciative of the difference that the education has made for them, and they want the next generation to be able to have the same opportunity.

So the campaign made a huge difference. And in addition, we've been fortunate that the people who manage the endowment that these gifts have gone into have done extremely well over a long period of time. So there's been a long rise in the overall endowment, starting with the new gifts from the campaign, but very much supported as well by the strong returns that have ultimately provided more in fellowships.