The Board of Trustees voted at its termly meeting on Friday and Saturday to eliminate loans from the financial aid packages of students with family incomes of $100,000 per year or less, an increase from the $75,000 cutoff that has been in place since the 2011-2012 academic year.
This policy will take effect for eligible current and incoming students at the beginning of the 2012-2013 academic year, according to a press release from the Office of Public Affairs.
"[The $100,000 threshold] is double the median income of the United States, and we feel very good about that," College President Jim Yong Kim said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
Kim noted that the average indebtedness of Dartmouth students coming out of college is about half the average indebtedness of college students in the state of New Hampshire.
The College decided in February 2010 to resume issuing student loans for students whose families earn at least $75,000 per year. The threshold for the no-loan policy, which was originally instated during former College President James Wright's administration, was capped at $75,000 as part of the College's effort to cut $100 million from its budget while still preserving financial resources for the lowest-income families.
Due to the 2010 policy change, the number of incoming freshmen receiving College scholarships without loans in the 2011-2012 academic year decreased from 44.3 percent for the Class of 2014 to 42 percent for the Class of 2015, the first class the first class to receive its financial aid packages after the $75,000 threshold was announced, according to statistics from the Financial Aid Office.
"It is our goal to continue to enroll one of the most economically diverse groups of students in the Ivy League," Kim said in the release. "Against the backdrop of intensifying national conversation about rising college costs and families' inability to keep pace, the enhancement to our financial aid program announced today reaffirms our commitment to affordability."
Undergraduate tuition for the 2012-2013 academic year will be $43,782, marking a 4.9 percent, or $2,046, increase from the current year, according to the release. Tuition, room, board and fees for the 2012-2013 year will total $57,998, a 4.8 percent increase from the 2011-2012 academic year.
Tuition for Dartmouth Medical School will increase 6.0 percent to $50,646, and tuition for the Tuck School of Business will increase 5.0 percent to $56,160 for the coming year.
During the Board's weekend meeting, it also approved the College's 2013 fiscal year operating budget of $934 million as well as a capital budget of $54 million for building repairs, renovations, campus-wide master planning and building planning, energy and sustainability initiatives, and computer services and information technology projects.
Also included in the capital budget is design funding for the Williamson Translational Research Building on the medical school's Lebanon, N.H. campus, according to the release. Funds for the building of the facility will come from a 2007 gift of $20 million from the Williamson family, according to Kim.
The new research building is part of the College's 20x20 initiative, which aims to push DMS currently ranked 32nd into the top 20 nationally ranked medical schools by 2020, according to Kim.
