The Schools’ Size

Harvard’s schools vary not only in their mission and in the composition of their faculties and student bodies, but also in financial terms. The most useful public disclosure of those details comes from the Harvard University Fact Book, with a one-year reporting lag. Thus, for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2004, when University expenses totaled $2.56 billion (about $3 billion this year), the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—the College and graduate school, with 10,200 students—spent $760 million, just under 30 percent of the total. Harvard Medical School, with 766 degree candidates, expended $482 million. The disproportion is attributable, of course, to extensive, costly, sponsored biomedical research. The Business School, a much larger entity in classroom terms (1,823 degree candidates), was a nearly $300-million enterprise; but it funds all its own research, and includes in its revenues large income streams from executive-education clients and its publishing operations (Harvard Business Review, cases, and books). The central administration and service departments (maintaining Harvard’s many buildings, for example, or shoveling snow and prettying up the campus for Commencement) each consumed about $200 million. Doing a lot with a little are the dental, design, divinity, and education schools—all enterprises run on $20 million to $55 million per year—and the newcomer, the Radcliffe Institute.