In the endless crusade to afford the ever-increasing cost of college, a new source of relief may be on the horizon.
Top-tier colleges, such as Harvard, Yale and Duke, have recently introduced significant financial aid initiatives aimed at lessening the pressure for both lower- and middle-income families.
According to Fairfield’s Director of Financial Aid Erin Chiaro, Fairfield’s commitment to need-based aid is strong.
“In the past two years, Fairfield has invested over $6 million in new money towards financial aid,” said Chiaro.
Since 2001, more than 30 schools have expanded their financial aid policies in response to the growing burden a college education is on the average American family.
While many schools are diligent about ensuring that need-based students, usually defined as those whose families’ incomes are under $60,000, are mostly or fully covered by either loans, grants or a combination of the two. What is notable about the recent financial aid overhauling is that coverage is expanded to households earning up to $180,000, or even $200,000 in the case of Harvard and Yale, respectively.
Here at Fairfield, however, expanded coverage of such a broad range of incomes isn’t likely in the near future. According to Chiaro, approximately one quarter of students’ families have incomes under $50,000.
“We are deeply committed to making sure they can afford to be at Fairfield,” Chiaro said.
While the majority of the schools that have recently expanded financial aid policies have established, long-standing institutions with endowments of at least $1 billion, Fairfield is a newer school and simply isn’t there yet.
“We’d like to be able to help all students, but we are still a young school with a growing endowment,” said Chiaro.
Fairfield’s permanent endowment in 2007 was $256 million, compared to the $34.9 billion and $22.5 billion endowments of Harvard and Yale, respectively.
With a long history, prestige and a large endowment to boot, schools such as Yale and Harvard can afford to cover middle- to upper-middle class students and to eliminate loans all together.
According to a recent New York Times article, critics of the movement say it “could lead less-well-off colleges to reduce aid for lower-income students as they tried to compete for upper-income students.”
But as of right now, that is not the case at Fairfield.
“Fairfield University also limits how much money we spend on our merit scholarships so we can put at least 90 percent of our financial aid funds into our need-based aid, where we can assist our neediest students,” said Chiaro.
And while that may be beneficial for the need-based quarter of the student population, it means that Fairfield is not able to offer full merit scholarships.
The highest merit-based Fellows Scholarship awards students $15,000 per semester and $1,000 research stipend.
Students have mixed opinions about Fairfield’s focus on need-based over merit-based aid.
“I do think Fairfield should use 90 percent of its financial aid funding for need-based awards because that allows students who are academically eligible to have a Fairfield education when they wouldn’t have the funds for one otherwise,” said Michael Embersit ’08.
David Dudish ’10 advocated a different method.
“That seems like a pretty good approach, but with only allowing 10 percent to go towards merit scholarships, we wouldn’t be bringing in as many academically advanced students,” Dudish said.
“If we raised the merit scholarship percentage, Fairfield would probably be able to cut the distance and be more closely associated with Ivy League schools over time,” he added.
These sweeping changes, although great for potential Ivy-Leaguers, won’t likely trickle down to smaller and newer colleges, according to a recent article from The Christian Science Monitor.
“Historically, the decisions of Ivy League schools have been influential in terms of financing college,” said Anya Kamenetz, author of Generation Debt.
“Colleges – in the extent that they are able to – have followed in the footsteps of what these Ivy Leaguers are doing. [This time,] however, to the extent that they’re able to is a big if,” according to the book.
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