Following the announcements this past week that both Brown and Stanford are significantly improving their financial aid offerings, Columbia is feeling increased pressure to measure up.
Responding to demands from students, families, peer institutions, and Congress alike, Columbia administrators have participated in discussions to expand their financial aid package to provide more financial relief to students and families.
“Obviously Columbia would have liked to have made an announcement before Brown to stay competitive,” said Columbia College Student Council president Michelle Diamond, CC ’08, who has been an active member in tuition talks. On Feb. 10, CCSC passed a resolution promising to press the University to do more to help students pay for college.
“The reason that’s holding them up is that they want to give as much as they can,” Diamond said of Columbia’s delay. “They’re looking into other possibilities to give as much as possible, but they don’t want to rush and then realize they couldn’t do as much as they promised.”
Brown and Stanford join a small but growing core of top-tier colleges—including Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and University of Pennsylvania—that have made strides in their aid packages for undergraduates, starting with the incoming class of 2012.
Like Yale and Harvard, Brown said on its Web site that most students with annual family incomes below $60,000 will not have to pay tuition, and like Penn, Brown said that it will eliminate loans for students with family incomes below $100,000. Yale and Harvard plan to do away with loans altogether.
With the most ambitious plan, Stanford said that students below the $100,000 threshold won’t pay a penny toward tuition, and that those below the $60,000 limit won’t pay for tuition, or room and board.
While Brown’s plan focuses on students with the lowest family incomes, Yale and Harvard are leading a strategy to also give aid to the middle and upper-middle classes. Both are planning to use a gradient system whereby families in the $60,000 to $120,000 income bracket will pay between 1 and 10 percent of their earnings. Those above the $120,000 cap will pay on average 10 percent of their incomes.
It seems that the Columbia administration, which is currently discussing ways to revamp its financial aid system, is leaning more toward Brown’s approach of aiding those with greater financial need than the approach of Yale and Harvard.
At his Fireside Chat on Feb. 18, University President Lee Bollinger revealed his concern for the neediest students, discussing debt and a long-term goal of providing need-blind admission to international students.
When a Native American student said that he could only afford to attend Columbia because of scholarships, Bollinger responded: “You raise one of the most important questions we’re facing, which is, how you get someone who lives a life in a rural environment in an Indian reservation or other places, maybe from a low income background. How do you get that person to think it’s possible to come?”
At one point, Bollinger wondered, “Should we give no loans?”
But Vice President for Arts and Sciences Nick Dirks warned that Columbia cannot be expected to match other schools, dollar for dollar.
“We were working on continuing this discussion, then, kazaam! Harvard comes out with its new plan,” Dirks said in an interview on Feb. 14. “But Harvard just has a lot more to work with than we do.”
Dirks also said that Columbia had “a good beginning” when it announced in fall of 2006 that it would replace loans with grants for students whose families earn below $50,000.
Since then, the University has made no further announcements about financial aid reforms.
Joy Resmovits contributed reporting to this article.
lien.hoang@columbiaspectator.com