In an effort to make an MBA more accessible to students from all socioeconomic backgrounds, HBS announced last year that it would cover the total cost of tuition and fees—approximately $150,000 over the course of two years—for those with the greatest financial need, approximately 10 percent of the student body.

“Affordability is of paramount importance because it enables people from all backgrounds, experiences, and interests to enroll at HBS,” says Matthew Weinzierl, the Joseph and Jacqueline Elbling Professor of Business Administration and senior associate dean of the MBA Program. “Our case-based approach to teaching and learning relies heavily on exposing HBS students to a wide variety of perspectives because we’re preparing them to be leaders in organizations and in a world marked by vast human difference and diversity.”

Two of these future leaders are David Velasquez (MBA/MPP 2023, MD 2024) and Tristan Bagala (MBA 2023), who are set on a path to pursue personally meaningful work that contributes to the greater good of society.

‘Would the Trade-Off Be Worth It?’
As a teenager, David Velasquez (MBA/MPP 2023, MD 2024) never imagined himself going to college, let alone HBS, the Harvard Kennedy School, and Harvard Medical School. The son of immigrants from Central America, he grew up in a low-income community in Southern California, and both his older brothers had foregone higher education to get jobs and help support their family. A scholarship from the University of Southern California (USC) changed Velasquez’s trajectory, making it possible for him to become the first person in his family to attend college.

But that was just the initial step toward Velasquez’s ultimate goal: to become a doctor and create a more “accessible, effective, and equitable” health care system in the United States. That dream still seemed far away, because every additional year he studied was one more year he was spending and not earning. “I struggled with that a lot,” Velasquez says. He decided to enroll as an engineering major at USC because it would take less time to join the workforce, but his mother encouraged him to pursue his real passion despite the time commitment. And when he arrived at Harvard Medical School in 2017 and later realized he would need to study business and policy, in addition to medicine, to achieve his goal, he hesitated again.

“Would the trade-off be worth it?” Velasquez wondered. “It’s a question a lot of low-income students grapple with,” he says. It was the generous financial aid he would receive from HBS that ultimately convinced him it would be possible to pursue an MBA alongside his other studies.

It has also enabled him to make a difference in health care while still a student. Velasquez has worked with Massachusetts General Hospital, MassHealth, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health on questions of care delivery and equity, and at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he and some of his fellow medical students and doctors founded GOTVax, a mobile clinic that vaccinated about 8,000 people in Black and brown communities in the greater Boston area. “What I hope to do is to help others,” Velasquez explains. “That is why I’m here. Through this financial support, HBS will help to make that come to fruition.”

A Chance to Go Home Again
For Tristan Bagala (MBA 2023), the full-tuition funding he has received for his second year at HBS has opened up career opportunities for him after graduation. Prior to HBS, Bagala was the business and development manager for the United States—and sole US employee—of a Canadian pastry company. The job exposed him to many facets of the food and tourism industries, but it also kept him on the road 200 nights a year, and Bagala yearned to go home to New Orleans.

Bagala calls himself “a child of the BP oil spill,” the 2010 disaster that devastated the environment and businesses along the Gulf Coast, including in the small town south of New Orleans where he grew up. Bagala watched his father’s business falter and then fail in the aftermath, and he wanted to do something to rebuild those communities.

A graduate of the University of Georgia, Bagala saw HBS as a way to make a difference, but when the first year’s tuition bill arrived, he began to fear that even with the substantial financial aid he was awarded—nearly half of all MBA students receive need-based fellowships, averaging $43,000 per student per year— the loans he would need to take out to finance the rest of his education and living expenses would limit his future career choices. Nevertheless, he decided to pursue his MBA.

In August 2022, Bagala got texts from his roommates telling him about the expanded fellowship program that HBS had just announced. A few hours later, he received an email from the School saying he would receive a full-tuition fellowship for his second year. Bagala knew instantly what that would mean for him: After graduation, he would be able to commit himself to the same type of work he had done at New Orleans & Company, an economic development corporation, the summer between his two years at HBS. Bagala was able to take that summer job because of the Social Enterprise Fellowship he received from HBS, which supplemented his nonprofit salary.

Hearing the news about the additional financial aid he would receive astounded Bagala. “Without this level of investment, I wouldn’t be able to consider something like going to work in New Orleans after HBS,” he says. “Now I can. I eventually want to do something in the hospitality sector that’s meaningful and impactful for the city.”

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