With about two weeks until Debora Spar’s inauguration as the college’s president, Barnard may be seeing some changes on the horizon.
Spar’s presidency will most likely bring changes to the school’s financial aid policy as well as its Leadership Initiative, although change may be months, or even years, down the road. Barnard administrators also say they are looking forward to reopening the corridor into Milbank, which has been blocked for the past year due to Nexus construction.
The financial aid office, which recently brought in Nanette DiLauro from Columbia’s financial aid office across the street to serve as director, will likely see reforms, Spar said. She added that DiLauro will be forced to find “creative” ways to bolster aid to students in Barnard’s endowment.
While it is unlikely that Barnard will see sweeping aid changes the way that Columbia experienced last semester, Spar acknowledged that the school would have to take a hard look at its own aid program. With its modest endowment, Barnard, she said, would be unable to afford or compete with competitor schools in the kind of aid that it could offer students.
“What they did at Harvard and Princeton and Amherst are things that Barnard fundamentally cannot do because our endowment is tiny by comparison,” Spar said. “Even if we upped our endowment spending to 10 percent, which we should not do, it would be a drop in the bucket. What I believe deeply Barnard has to do is figure out what forms of aid policy makes most sense given our endowment size, our student population.”
Barnard Dean Dorothy Denburg echoed these sentiments, underlining the commitment the college has to financial aid despite its limited resources.
“One of the interesting things about Barnard with its tiny endowment is, we have spent a huge part of our budget each year on financial aid,” Denburg said. “Our drivers are more about assuring that we have the student body that we want ... but we’re coming off of a position where we have enrolled higher proportions of student on aid than our peers.”
To reassess financial aid, a work force made up of administrative staff and faculty will report to Spar next month. The work group, Spar said, will use a formula-based tool “that will enable us to really understand on a mathematical level ... how our financial aid policy is working.
By February, Spar said the work group plans to bring their findings to the full Barnard board, and hopes to pull together a new financial aid package for the incoming Barnard class.
The Barnard Leadership Initiative may also see changes. Spar said the program, which is meant to offer curricular and extra-curricular opportunities to develop leadership skills in students, is “under construction.” She said that its focus must be to help women attain and maintain leadership positions in the work place.
The BLI was the topic of discussion at the last Student Government Association town hall meeting, as Spar and administration solicited advice from students on how to improve the program. As for any particular changes she could mention, Spar said it was too early to tell.
