Free tuition for students whose familes earn $75,000 or less per year and a universal shift from student loans to scholarships headlined a series of sweeping changes to Dartmouth's financial aid policy announced by College President James Wright Tuesday. Dartmouth will also move to a need-blind admissions process for international students and eliminate leave term earnings expectations. The changes will take effect beginning in the 2008-2009 academic year.
Wright's announcement follows similar the announcements of similar reforms at other Ivy League institutions, notably Harvard University and Yale University. Dartmouth's program, though, is distinct in its focus on providing significant aid for lower-income students.
The College's financial aid offer for low-income families is now the "strongest in the nation," College President James Wright said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
"For the last couple of years, I have been looking to strengthen our financial aid policy," Wright said. "I started talking to the Board [of Trustees] about this last September."
The Board approved the new financial aid program during a special meeting on Jan. 16.
"The Board has over the last month actually encouraged me to make changes," Wright added.
According to Board Chairman Ed Haldeman Jr. '70, the Board has had a long history of commitment to fully need-blind admissions. The trustees have also worked especially hard to make Dartmouth affordable for low-income students, but what made the most recent changes possible are especially high endowment returns and a very high alumni giving rate, Haldeman said.
Last year, the Board approved an increase in the annual draw from Dartmouth's $3.76 billion endowment from 4.7 percent to six percent.
Yale, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania concentrated on expanding financial aid to middle-class families in their respective reforms.
Families of Yale students with annual incomes lower than $120,000 will pay less than half of the university's tuition, while families with annual incomes that fall between $120,000 and $200,000 will see their tuitions cut by a third or more, the university announced Jan. 14.
Similarly, Harvard lowered the tuition for families earning less than $180,000 to ten percent of their incomes in early December 2007. Penn followed its peers a week later, replacing loans with grants for families earning less than $100,000.
According to Maria Laskaris, dean of admissions and financial aid at the College, Dartmouth's financial aid reform is the first for the College since 2004, when the College replaced loans with grants for families with incomes of $30,000 or less and partially for families with incomes between $30,000 and $45,000.
Although Wright said changes in Dartmouth's financial aid were made in light of reforms at Harvard and Yale, he does not feel that they have "necessarily been done under pressure-time."
"The main components of our new offer would have remained the same without other schools' initiatives," he said.
Although the College focused on aid for lower-class families more than the other Ivy League institutions, the changes will also lessen the financial burden for Dartmouth's middle-class students, Laskaris said.
"It is a significant relief for middle-class families, since their loans would now be zero as opposed to as much as $17,500," Wright said. "We cannot, however, afford to scale the tuition basing on the income level -- Harvard can because its endowment is 10 times bigger than ours."
The new financial aid policy should lead to an increase in the number of students applying to Dartmouth, Wright said.
Beginning in the 2008-2009 academic year, all current students from families with an income of $75,000 or less will receive scholarships at least equal to tuition costs. Additionally, 50 percent of all student loans will be substituted for grants and the leave term earnings expectation policy, which requires financial-aid students to partially fund their education through jobs during their leave term, will be eliminated.
The financial aid reform is very important to current Dartmouth students, Laskaris said. "We wanted to make sure the current students can afford everything that Dartmouth has to offer," she added.
Both Wright and Laskaris said they are fully satisfied with the changes.
"We're the nation's leading institution in terms of socio-economic diversity, and now we make the Dartmouth experience affordable to everyone," Laskaris said.
According to Wright, the College is also constantly looking to expand its facilities and strengthen the institution academically. Wright said he does not agree with the U.S. News & World Report's 2008 ranking of "America's Best Colleges," which ranked Dartmouth as the eleventh university in the nation.
"Dartmouth is surely one of the nation's top 10 institutions," he said. "Specifically, one of the top of the top 10."
The College's drop in rankings has been attributed to relatively low peer assessment, a rankings category in which presidents and deans of other institutions are asked to rate other colleges. Dartmouth scored a total of 4.3 out of five points in peer assessment, the lowest in the Ivy League.
Haldeman said that the Board did not approve the financial aid changes in order to improve the College's peer assessment score. He said, however, that the new financial aid policy will attract positive media attention in contrast to the recent Trustee controversies.
"I'm sure that Dartmouth's image in the media will quickly be repaired," he said.
