Starting next fall, Harvard announced on Monday, families earning between $120,000 and $180,000 won't have to pay more than 10% of their annual income towards tuition. The school will also eliminate loans from its award packages and take the equity that a family has in its home out of the financial-aid equation.

Harvard isn't the first school to eliminate loans from financial-aid packages. But none have reached out to the middle and upper-middle class the way Harvard did this week, let alone with a policy that's so easy to understand.

Now that Harvard has taken the lead among other schools in terms of financial-aid offerings, we decided to call some Harvard competitors that have introduced improved aid programs themselves in recent years and see if they planned to match Harvard's move.

Here's what the spokespeople for the schools said:

Yale University: We don't have a public comment at the moment.

FiLife: What will you do when prospective students call to ask you to match what Harvard's offering?

Yale: Well, we're not going to respond to an individual's request with a policy.

Davidson College: No, our program is what it is. We're not trying to compete directly with Harvard.

FiLife: What will you do when prospective students call to ask you to match what Harvard's offering?

Davidson: That's an admissions question.

Williams College (In an email): "Williams, and colleges like it, have been reviewing their financial-aid policies almost continually for years. Ours have changed at least four times in the last five years, each in the direction of more affordability. We would have continued to review those policies even without Harvard's announcement, though it certainly does represent quite a significant change in how financial aid is calculated and communicated. I have no crystal ball but am willing to predict that this isn't the end of change to the financial-aid system at highly-endowed colleges."

Princeton University (In an email): "Princeton's own program also has an assessment that varies based on available family resources, but we believe our program is done on more of a case-by-case basis, examining individual family circumstances. The income contribution for a Princeton family making $120,000 to $180,000 could be 5 percent for a family with multiple children in college, to perhaps 20 percent for a family with one child in college and assets beyond their income.

Given that Harvard's announcement was made only [Monday], I think many institutions may find it too early to assess fully the applications of Harvard's program and how much it differs from what we're currently doing. Again, Princeton initiated many of these similar changes several years ago, and we're delighted that our peers are addressing the challenges faced by middle-income families."

EmoryUniversity: "It's still pretty early to speculate. Right now we have the Emory Advantage program that we introduced last January that eliminates need-based loans for family with $50,000 or less of yearly income. We also cap all need-based loans at $15,000 for all four years of an undergraduate education for families with an annual income of $50,000 to $100,000. We are always evaluating the impact of this program and the desire to do something different or additional. But, it's too early to tell since the news just came yesterday.

There is no pressure to compete. The desire of these programs is all about access. So this is all very healthy. It's about having a dialogue on a national level about access to private institutions."

--Irina Aleksander