NY Times contributor Sarah Vowell reminisces about the major educational boost she received in college from the financial aid of federally-subsidized Pell Grants, made possible at least in part by Senator Ted Kennedy, and why the Democratic party's commitment to education is a big deal for college students.
NY Times: Op-Ed Contributor: Bringing Pell Grants to My Eyes
Stanford is the latest college to severely cut costs for students, expanding financial aid well into the middle class. Students from families earning less than $100,000 will pay no tuition under the new system, and families earning less than $60,000 also get a break on room and board. Stanford has the third largest endowment of all American universities at over $17 billion, so this was not exactly unexpected after Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth announced similar plans in recent weeks.
If this keeps up, your younger siblings might actually go to quality schools without putting your parents out of early retirement.
You might be aware that last month Harvard radically changed its financial aid policy to greatly benefit students from families with annual incomes of up to $180,000 as well as financially less well-off ones. Not to be outdone, last week Yale announced that it will do the same for students whose families earn up to $200,000. Dartmouth is the latest college to announce a major overhaul: a new plan revealed this week provides completely free tuition to all students from families with less than $75,000 in annual income, replaces all loans with scholarships, and extends need-blind admission to international students.
So what's next from less uh, well-endowed schools? Harvard has a $35 billion endowment, Yale stands at $22.5 billion, Dartmouth has a little over $3 billion, and all three have high growth rates. Clearly their new financial aid policies are excellent news for students accepted there, but what kind of precedent are they setting for the rest of the country? Besides the Ivy league and gigantic state universities, you won't find many schools with this much to spend, and there's little chance of Wesleyan (and other smaller schools) scrounging up enough billions of dollars to completely bail out students who could use a break on their tuition. It's nice that schools like Wes are dropping loans for the lower income range, but there are inevitably many students who are going to end up dealing with a lot of debt after graduation. Does this guy have a valid argument in his New York Times Op-Ed about how Ivy League discounts put stress on less well-endowed schools to skew financial aid so it benefits wealthier students at the expense of poorer ones? Can SuperRoth help us out here by the time he's done? Only time will tell.
Whoah! Whoah whoah whoah yes. Yes.
"Beginning with the first-year class enrolling in the fall of 2008, most students whose total family incomes are $40,000 per year or less will receive an aid package that substitutes grants for any loan obligation. Beginning with the same class, all other students who receive aid will graduate with a four-year total loan indebtedness reduced by an average of 35 percent. Aid packages will include a single student loan, the federally subsidized Stafford Loan."
Awesome. I wish that I had taken two years off after high school, but awesome. I've been wishing that Wesleyan could do this for a long time but all I've heard is that we don't have the money. And so I give the $26 million Zelnick Pavilion dirty looks and go on with my life.
I'm glad. It seems like all we've been talking about lately is building (Good thing we're free of MoCon! Good thing we're free of Davenport! Hall Atwater is so 20th century... let's spend another 126 mil. And while we're at it, don't you think the Usdan is getting a little dated?) — so this is refreshing news. Administrators do care! (okay, feel free to comment on that). It also makes me believe that we actually will eliminate loans for all students when we can.
The announcement is here.
I don't think I'll ever get enough of helicopter parents. Not ever, ever. But I reported on the the crazy parents posting about googling their kids' roommates a few weeks ago and how weird it sounded.
Well, ABC reported today about a literally batshit mother who printed out 44 pages of her daughter's roommate facebook file to make the case that the girl was just unsuitable as a roommate.
Students say it's good to know a roommate before actually meeting the person. And now, even curious parents are sneaking peaks at profiles.
"I was excited," said Kristin Mueller, the parent of a college freshman. "I was anxious to find out more about her new roommate."
But it's not always love at first surf for parents.
"What I saw on Facebook was a lot of alcoholic beverages in the background, a lot of liquor bottles, beer bottles, kind of lewd behavior," Mueller said.
Mueller took action by helping her daughter file a formal request to the college's housing office demanding a change. She isn't the first parent to do so.
Across the country college administrators said they are getting more pleas than ever from Facebook frazzled parents.
"They call based on the information that they see on Facebook and they say that their son or their daughter can't possibly live with that person," said Deb DiCaprio, Marist College's dean of students.
Syracuse University has formulated a response to such a request.
"Our response to that is, we do not move students. We do not discriminate at all," said Syracuse University housing director Robin Berkowtiz-Smith.
....
But Mueller was determined to switch her daughter's assignment, even when her initial request was denied. She printed out 44 pages from the prospective roommate's Facebook profiles and took them to the university. The school finally granted a change.
"Transferring her into a quiet study dorm was best," Mueller said. "It's going to make her more comfortable, and I know I am going to be more comfortable."
But ABC News parenting contributor Anne Pleshette Murphy said parents should be careful when using online profiles to judge roommates.
"It's a mixed bag, and like most things it all depends on how you use it," Murphy said. "On one hand, Facebook is a great tool that wasn't available to me or even my daughter, who's now a senior in college. It can be a way for your college-bound child to get to know their roommate, taking some of the anxiety out of moving out and going to school."
Murphy said people should not judge the page by its content.
"There's a lot of boasting that goes on, and some kids use the page to point fun at themselves, or lampoon the whole idea of Facebook," she said. "A dangerously subversive kid is not going to be on Facebook. You have to take everything with a grain of salt."
A good way to prove this is to look at your child's page to see whether it paints an accurate picture, Murphy said.
"Most likely, you'll find that there are more than a few liberties," she said.
Some parents are even looking up school organizations, Murphy said.
"Parents are even Facebooking and Googling fraternities and sororities and complaining when their child doesn't get a bid, and so on," she said.
But she said parents should learn to give their children some room.
"As much as I understand the impulse that drives parents to do this, there is an element of 'helicopter parenting' here," she said. "These parents have to face the fact that their child is leaving home and they have to let go. Instead of being overprotective, parents should bolster their child's confidence by saying, 'Look, I believe in you and I think you can handle living with someone with different values.'"
Avoiding 'Financial Aid' Students
Murphy said she learned some parents are asking colleges to weed out roommates by code.
"One of the most disturbing things I heard from college housing administrators is the code some parents use when asking to switch their child's roommate. They don't want a 'financial aid' student, which may be code for a student of a different race or economic background," she said.
"Parents must remember that one of the most important things about the college experience is the opportunity to meet new people, from different backgrounds. Facebook information should not be used as a veil for prejudice and discrimination."
WTF. Seriously, what the fuck. I have nothing substantial to say about this except what the fuck. Screening for finaid kids?! Printing out 44 pages of facebook profile? Holy shit! Who the fuck are these people?
From Inside Higher Ed:
Amherst College announced Thursday that it is eliminating all loans for students, effective with the Class of 2012. In 1999, Amherst eliminated loans for students from families with incomes of less than $40,000, but many students continue to borrow. In 2006-7, almost one third of Amherst students received aid packages that included loans. Anthony W. Marx, Amherst’s president, said in a statement that the shift “broadens” the commitment made in 1999 “by eliminating barriers for middle income families.” The college expects to spend about $1.6 million next year to replace loans with grants. While a number of colleges have eliminated loans for those below certain income levels, blanket policies like this one are rare. Princeton University eliminated loans in 2001 and Davidson College did so this year.
Davidson College, a pretty neat liberal arts school down south, just instituted a policy that offers aid aid packages comparable to the new polices some of the Ivies have been introducing-- eliminating all loans for low-income students and encouraging careers in public service.
[A]n economist of higher education said he saw the logic to the move. Michael McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation and former president of Macalester College, said that many private colleges these days focus on “how to get more paying applicants,” so it is commendable for a college to be thinking about ways to get more low-income students.
McPherson said there is evidence that a very simple message can have a big impact. In 2004, Harvard University announced that it was eliminating all expected contributions from the families of students with family incomes of up to $40,000 (a level since increased to $60,000 ). When the university adopted its policy, it saw an immediate increase in the proportion of new students from low-income families
Before Harvard had its new policy, it was also giving very generous aid packages to students in this group, probably identically good, McPherson said, but applicants responded to the simplicity of the revised policy. “Anyone could have seen that if you got into Harvard, you would be able to afford it, but it seems true that when they publicly stated in a new way what they were already doing, they got a lot more of these applicants,” McPherson said.
A straightforward message “can be effective,” he said.
Robert F. Vagt, Davidson’s president, said it was also important to send a message to those who enroll about their post-graduation options. In the last year, he said, he has heard from at least six seniors who told him that they wanted to be teachers or work for a nonprofit group or take some socially valuable, but financially not so lucrative, job. “They are telling me, ‘I can’t afford to do that,’ ” Vagt said. “Debt is affecting students’ choice of careers,” he said.
By combining the need to attract low-income students with the goal of encouraging all students to consider service-oriented jobs, Vagt said, “this is the right thing to do.”
Anonymous passes on this fascinating article about the presidential vacancies at Wesleyan and Haverford on Inside Higher Ed."Let’s start by blowing the whistle on the tired formula for elite higher education — accept only the perfect; incarcerate and coddle for four years; pass on to the dreariest jobs. No clothes on this emperor.
When will elites concede that students who began competitive sports, classical music, and SAT prep in utero have finished traditional college long before freshman year begins? Students said so in the buried New York Times article “The Incredibles.” The reaction of mighty Stanford to students arriving with a B.A. full of Advanced Placement credits: Simple — ignore AP exams, for credit or placement. Among my crazy ideas is that education is a process for everyone — students and faculty — to learn and to stumble and to grow.
As president, I’ll redraw the playing field. A liberal arts education is about curiosity and imagination and creating solutions from connecting disparate facts and ideas. Let Wesleyan or Haverford guarantee to create citizens with the courage to pummel the new problems of the 21st Century, not more who prattle back standard answers. Forget U.S. News college rankings. Tie my pay to the Washington Monthly rankings, which measure net contribution to a better world."
Read the full article here.
Who is this guy?!?
After four years of being stuck at $4,050 (and hardly being touched at all since Bush took office in 2001), the Congressional Appropriations Committees decides to increase the Pell Grant to $4,310.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate education committee, called the increase “an important down payment by Democrats on our commitment to help families with high college costs.Hmm, considering just the price of housing in a dorm single jumped from $5,916 to $6,390 this past year alone...yeah, that pretty much covers nothing.
