In U.S. News and World Report, Kim Clark (not the former HBS dean, so far as I can tell) takes a skeptical look at the real value of Harvard's newly expanded financial aid plan.

Harvard thrilled middle-class parents last week by capping its tuition for families with incomes of up to $180,000 at 10 percent of their earnings. ...But many point out that these gestures will affect only a few hundred lucky students. The outlays are so comparatively small that they are unlikely to divert pressure for reforms in the ways colleges spend their money—especially the estimated $380 billion of endowment funds stored in tax-free accounts.

Clark points out that Harvard has something like $1 million worth of endowment per student, while half of all colleges have only about $2,000 in endowment funds saved. Which means that Congressional critics such as Iowa senator Chuck Grassley will continue to push legislation that would force wealthy colleges to spend a certain amount of their endowments every year. (What sense this makes, only an elected official would know.)

Meanwhile, on the Huffington Post, Peter Sacks looks at Harvard's financial aid expansion from another critical perspective.

Colleges want these students so much that they're willing to pay for them -- bribe them, really, in order to entice them to enroll. Under the guise of "merit," colleges in recent years have drastically increased the amount of scholarship money they offer high-scoring students.

What's wrong with [Harvard's plan]? Nothing if your objective is to take limited scholarship funds from the truly needy students who wouldn't be able to afford college without financial aid. And nothing's wrong with that if you're a policy maker who isn't concerned about raising the overall college-going rates in your state. That's because the "merit" scholarships go most often to relatively affluent students who would be going to college regardless of the scholarship money. Still, as a policy maker you'd be happy with the transfer of wealth from the needy to upper middle class because they vote more often than poor people.

Such articles suggest that, despite the substantive merits and the PR value of Harvard's latest move, the attention its vast wealth is attracting won't go away—and neither will the resentments and the concerns prompted by that wealth.