Dartmouth's Office of Financial Aid is joining with nine other colleges to establish a new and hopefully more accurate way to calculate international students' financial aid needs.
The new system was designed in consultation with Dartmouth's financial aid staff, according to Virginia Hazen, who directs the office.
The old system was overhauled in an effort to help financial aid workers more easily determine how much to award international students, whose relative family incomes are difficult to measure because of the discrepancies in purchasing power. For example, an American family with an annual income of $40,000 would expect to receive financial aid if they sent a child to Dartmouth, yet $40,000 of annual income would make a family in another country relatively wealthy.
The colleges take these discrepancies into account by employing this "global consensus" system, using a global coefficient to calculate appropriate financial aid awards.
"You need to understand what wealth in another country is," Hazen said, citing international differences such as variations in investments and savings.
In order to calculate the global coefficient, a country's gross domestic product is divided by its population and then compared to the identically calculated U.S. value. While generally successful, the system still has its flaws. It cannot be used for Canadian students, since their financial situation is so similar to that of Americans, and it does not adequately represent regions where wealth is unevenly distributed. The new system works the worst for students who come from comparatively wealthy families in exceedingly poor nations.
Although Hazen supports the new method, she admits that it is not ready to replace all other systems to become the sole calculator of international financial aid. The eventual plan for the global consensus system is to adapt it so that it can be used by the College Board to create standardized financial aid forms for all international applicants to all colleges.
While Hazen said she looks forward to such an outcome in the future, she emphasized that it will take more time before the system is ready for that kind of expansion.
Dartmouth ran the new system alongside the current one during the last financial aid calculation season and found that they would be awarding international students less financial aid under the newer system.
Other schools that experienced similar results argued that the change didn't cause them to lose any students, but Hazen is not so sure.
"How could they know?" she asked.
Hazen is worried that because it reduces the amount of financial aid given to international students, the new system may mean that fewer accepted international students will attend Dartmouth. Even now, need-blind admission is not offered to international students outside of Canada and Mexico, although if they are accepted, the College promises to meet all demonstrated need. Hazen said she attributed the lack of need-blind admission and practice of capping the total number of international students to the high financial aid costs that often accompany them, although she said she hopes some day the College will be able to extend the need-blind policy to internationals.
Critics of extending need-blind financial aid to international students point out that many students in the United States cannot afford education. In response to this argument, Hazen said the problem lies more in fighting the myth that private colleges are unaffordable than in being unable to fund American students from low-income families.
The lack of such domestic applicants, Hazen said, is unfortunate, but she also said the College's goal is to bring the most talented, aspiring and diverse students to campus -- wherever they come from.
