Financial Aid Reforms Raise Campus Debate

A new round of announcements regarding financial aid reforms designed to keep college within reach for the middle class is turning up the heat on top colleges, including Columbia and Barnard to up the ante.

University President Lee Bollinger has indicated that the University may take a different tack than other schools when evaluating the cost of college. First, some numbers. This year, the total cost of attending Columbia is $49,699. Next year, that number will almost certainly cross the $50,000 boundary. Last year, the average University-provided financial aid package was $27,206. About half of Columbia undergraduates receive some form of financial assistance.

These are the numbers that Columbia, and other similar institutions, are battling with in the latest round of financial aid reforms. These moves have centered around the so-called “middle-class squeeze.” As Harvard Dean of Admissions Bill Fitzsimons told National Public Radio in December, while the institution had strong and explicit aid offerings for families with annual incomes of less than $60,000, “some of those families from $60,000 on up weren’t even applying to Harvard.” This was primarily the result of three separate forces: the lack of availability of financial aid grants to middle and upper-class families, the rising cost of college, and a slumping market.

And so Harvard, with its over-$35 billion endowment, unveiled a sweeping slate of financial aid reforms in December. Harvard will be free to families earning less than $60,000. Families earning under $120,000 will pay up to 10 percent of their annual income in tuition costs, and those earning up to $180,000 will receive other tuition relief.

The announcement was the first in a series. Two days later, Swarthmore and Pomona both announced that they were eliminating loans from their tuition packages. In the past several weeks, Yale and Dartmouth have both announced free tuition for middle class families. Others are also getting on board amid mounting stress for major research universities and top liberal arts colleges to ante up in order to remain competitive.

These moves raise a number of questions. For one, what will happen to schools that can’t compete? Even with one of the largest endowments in the nation, University President Lee Bollinger has repeatedly indicated that Columbia’s endowment, which stands at about 20 percent of Harvard’s, is unable to support financial aid at the same levels as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and other schools with leading endowments. If Columbia can’t compete with a $7-billion endowment, what happens to the thousands of schools whose endowments don’t even reach eight or nine digits? As the economy stumbles, institutions that can’t match top packages may begin seeing less competitive applicant pools for the first time in recent memory.

There is also the question of whether providing more funds to the middle and upper-class will come at the expense of funds for low-income families. In a New York Times op-ed, Columbia humanities professor Andrew Delbanco and former dean of students Roger Lehecka wrote, “While some upper-middle-class families have to sacrifice in order to pay for college and may deserve more financial help, most of their children find a way to attend college. Low-income students earn bachelor’s degrees at less than one-third the rate of high-income students.” In an interview with several Spec reporters on Friday (excluding myself), Bollinger said, “My belief is that whatever resources we can generate for financial aid really should be concentrated to help with low-income applicants,” adding later, “It’s that area—under $75,000—where I will focus on any new initiatives I approve.”

These two questions have received a lot of attention, but a third one has been left mostly unspoken: should college be free in the first place, and if not, how much should it cost? It’s a question that University President Lee Bollinger raised in an interview a little over a year ago.

“I happen to think that it’s important for students to pay for some of their education—whatever your ability,” he said as Executive Vice President for Communications David Stone cringed. (“See everybody’s pens go out!” he said as a bevy of Spec reporters laughed.) “I think that it’s really really valuable to have a sense of the stake that you put into your own education. That said, I don’t want it to be so great that it determines the life courses you will have to take.”

Bollinger has expressed a deep commitment to ensuring that the cost of a Columbia education should not bar anybody from being able to attend the school and that as he put it Friday, all, regardless of income level, “have a chance of improving their position in life” and attend “institutions like Columbia.” But as the debate over financial aid reform continues at Columbia, it may be this normative question of how much students should contribute to the cost of their education—and not the practical question of dollars and cents—that guides the University’s actions.

josh.hirschland@columbiaspectator.com