Ivies Race to Reform Financial Aid, Admissions

After a year of reforms in admissions and financial-aid policies throughout academia, Columbia appears to have kept pace with its Ivy League peers.

The first six months of the year were marked by a cascade of announcements from major universities trumpeting new undergraduate financial-aid policies likened by some to an “Ivy League arms race.”

The plans took two forms. Brown, along with several other schools, targeted its new financial aid commitments to the lowest income brackets, eliminating any tuition payments for families whose income is under $60,000 a year and all loans for families making less than $100,000. Other schools, including Yale and Harvard, aimed their reforms more at the middle class, creating elaborate plans that will put a limit on the amount of money that families in several income brackets will have to pay. Among schools that announced sweeping reforms were Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford.

Columbia did not announce its new plan until March, months after the announcements of many of its peer institutions. The much-anticipated reforms to the financial-aid policies of Columbia College and the School of Engineering and Applied Science include the elimination of tuition, room, and board payments for families making less than $60,000 annually, as well as a decrease in loan and tuition burden for families making up to $180,000. Previously, only families making below $50,000 were exempt from loans and there was no guaranteed tuition, room, and board exemption.

“The principle is that we should try to do as much as we possibly can to help people from families with low-income and moderate, middle-class incomes to be able to attend Columbia,” University President Lee Bollinger said at the time of the announcement. “This is part of a great American commitment to mobility across socioeconomic lines and we have always, as a university, been committed to it.”

According to Bollinger, the changes were made possible by a donation last year from John Kluge, CC ’37, committing at least $200 million to financial aid, though funding the new policies will also require increasing the spending rate on the schools’ endowments.

The School of General Studies concurrently announced an increase of over $1 million to its financial-aid budget, but many GS students said that their school’s financial aid was still insufficient. Unlike CC and SEAS, GS does not guarantee that it will meet all demonstrated financial need.

“It seems like a half a Tylenol for a broken leg,” James Kusher, GS, said at a General Studies Student Council meeting shortly after the announcements. “Will this help? Yes. Will it alleviate pressure? Not really.”

But GS Dean Peter Awn responded that financial aid must function differently at GS because students often have a more complicated relationship with their families and the school’s endowment is also comparatively smaller.

In addition to the financial-aid reforms, the Ivy League also saw a record-setting year of declining admissions rates. Columbia College received over 19,000 applications, a 5 percent increase over last year, and the school’s overall admit rate dropped to an all-time low of 8.7 percent. SEAS received a similar surge in applications, and the school’s admit rate dropped to 17 percent. The rate for the two schools combined was 10 percent. Barnard’s admission rate stayed at 28 percent.

The increase in applications to Columbia and other Ivy League schools, which also reported declines in admit rates, was fueled both by the largest class of applicants ever and the elimination of early admission by Harvard and Princeton last year. Because some students might, in previous years, have committed to Harvard and Princeton earlier, admissions professionals said that they were not sure whether the low numbers would be followed by a low yield rate in what Columbia Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jessica Marinaccio called “an unpredictable year.” As of the first week of May, Columbia had not yet announced its yield rate, although some other schools reported that they dipped deeper than usual into their waitlists.

jacob.schneider@columbiaspectator.com