“This is an important private-sector policy innovation — a very good template for a socially minded organization,” said Mr. Summers, whose tenure was sandwiched between his service as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration and his time heading the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama. But he acknowledged that the experiment carries trade-offs.

Even if the goal is laudable — lifting workers from the bottom of the labor market into the middle class, stimulating the economy and pushing against the country’s widening wage inequality — Mr. Summers noted that policies like these “make it more expensive to do the things you do.” Setting too high a pay floor could force businesses to hire fewer people, making many worse off.

Still, some 45 million Americans work in low-end service jobs — personal care aides, cooks, janitors, sales reps — typically earning less than $30,000 a year. By 2026, the government projects, the number will be 50 million. Outsourcing is one of the main dynamics keeping their wages down, and the Harvard experiment is a useful case study of how institutions can use their clout to force a remedy.

Recent research by economists at four top universities and the Social Security Administration concluded that the parceling out of less-skilled work to low-wage contractors — Goldman Sachs outsourcing its janitorial services, say, or Apple contracting out the assembly of its iPhones to Foxconn — could account for around one-third of the increase of wage inequality in the United States since 1980.

That concern is on the mind of David Weil, who headed the wage and hour division of the Department of Labor during the Obama administration and is now dean of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. “The question is can we re-establish some normative minimum that is presumably above what sheer market forces would drive wages down to,” Mr. Weil said. “The idea is to set a wage norm through a contracting standard.”

How Student Protesters Forced Harvard to Change

Harvard didn’t institute its parity policy simply out of the purity of its institutional heart. Rather, in April 2001, several dozen students from the Harvard Living Wage Campaign took over Massachusetts Hall, which housed the offices of the university’s top administrators, demanding a better deal for campus workers. How could one of the richest educational institutions in the country, they asked, with an endowment worth billions, pay so many people so badly? At the time, nearly 1,000 workers at Harvard made less than $10.68 an hour (a little more than $15 today), the “living wage” wage minimum set by the city of Cambridge for some of its contractors.

“After three days we escalated,” said Benjamin McKean, an undergraduate founder of Harvard’s Living Wage movement. “We had 100 people sleeping in tents in Harvard Yard.” Senator Edward M. Kennedy joined in the sit-in. Senator John Kerry also came by. The protest was covered in The Boston Globe and The New York Times. By the third week, the Harvard president at the time, Neil Rudenstine, yielded and asked a committee to report on how to improve workers’ lot.