In the Times, scholarship consultant Roger Leheka and historian Andrew Delbanco, both Columbia-affiliated, take aim at Harvard and Yale’s new financial aid plans with what is perhaps the most serious criticism yet of those new proposals. (Due more to the location of the argument than its novelty.)

Next year, each of these institutions will add more than $20 million to what they now spend on financial aid, reducing the cost of a college year for families earning $180,000 to $18,000, from $30,000. That’s good news for students at Harvard or Yale. But it’s bad news for many hoping to attend other private four-year colleges — and for the nation in general.

The problem is that most colleges will feel compelled to follow Harvard and Yale’s lead in price-discounting. Yet few have enough money to give more aid to relatively wealthy students without taking it away from relatively poor ones.

The authors point out that 99% of colleges in the U.S. have an endowment that is less than 1% of Harvard’s.

And here’s where it gets really interesting: The writers then note Larry Summers’ stated concerns about the lack of lower-income students at Harvard and elsewhere, and suggest that this is a far more important issue than the extension of financial aid to middle-class families.

In 2004, Lawrence Summers, then Harvard’s president, pointed out that three-fourths of the students at selective colleges come from the top income quartile and only 9 percent from the bottom two quartiles combined. ….The problem Mr. Summers described is only growing worse.

The authors don’t come out and say so, but they strongly imply that Summers was primarily concerned with the plight of lower-income kids, while Drew Faust and Rick Levin are actually hurting lower-income students.

It is understandable that Harvard and Yale want to make themselves more affordable. But the way they’re going about it sets an example that is likely to make it even harder for low-income students to attend the best college for which they are qualified. Harvard’s stated motive is to stop prospective students from “voting with their feet” by choosing public universities or other private colleges. But surely this is not a very serious problem for a university that each year turns away hundreds of high school valedictorians and whose yield (the percentage of admitted applicants who enroll) is around 80 percent.

Is that fair? I’m not so sure—who knows if Larry Summers wouldn’t have enlarged financial aid in the same way that Drew Faust just did? (After all, surely the original “free tuition” plan was not his idea, just as this recent enlargement was not Drew Faust’s.) And it doesn’t seem at all unrealistic to me that a family with an income of $150,000 would have trouble paying Harvard $50,000 of that. Moreover, will those 99% of colleges really take money away from poor kids in order to compete for kids with Harvard and Yale, when surely the applicant pool has little overlap?

Nonetheless, the impression that will linger in the minds of anyone who reads this piece is pretty clear: Summers right, current (unnamed) Harvard president wrong.

The answer, according to Leheka and Delbanco, is more government aid to colleges less “well-endowed,” to quote a certain Harvard president—i.e., rich—than Harvard and Yale.

Otherwise, America will be the loser, no matter who wins the Harvard-Yale game.

I think this line of criticism has now reached the point where Drew Faust and Rick Levin need to respond….