[1541] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
NYTimes.com Article: Rich Colleges Receiving Richest Share of U.S. Aid
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (skip@MIT.EDU)
Sun Nov 9 10:21:42 2003
Errors-To: articles-email@ms1.lga2.nytimes.com
Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2003 09:26:55 -0500
Reply-To: skip@MIT.EDU
From: skip@MIT.EDU
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
This article from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by skip@mit.edu.
well, this is embarassing.
--**peter
skip@mit.edu
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Rich Colleges Receiving Richest Share of U.S. Aid
November 9, 2003
By GREG WINTER
If there is any grand, elegant logic behind the federal
government's dispersal of more than a billion dollars in
college aid, then Maria Hernandez is humble enough to
confess that it has escaped her.
Consider her point. Poverty is hardly a rarity among the
students of California State University at Fresno, where
she is the director of financial aid. Many come from
families working in the fields nearby, on farms where
students spend their summer and winter vacations harvesting
peaches and sugar beets to stay in school.
About three hours and a world away sits Stanford. Far fewer
of its students are poor, yet the federal government gives
it about 7 times as much money to help each one of them
through college under one program, 28 times as much in
another and almost 100 times as much in a third, government
data show.
"Pretty sad," if you ask Ms. Hernandez.
Similar discrepancies emerge across the nation, adhering to
a somewhat counterintuitive underlying theme: The federal
government typically gives the wealthiest private
universities, which often serve the smallest percentage of
low-income students, significantly more financial aid money
than their struggling counterparts with much greater shares
of poor students.
Brown, for example, got $169.23 for every student who
merely applied for financial aid in order to run its
low-interest Perkins loan program in the 2000-1 academic
year. Dartmouth got $174.88; Stanford, $211.80. But most
universities did not get nearly that much: the median for
the nation's colleges was $14.38, according to a New York
Times analysis of federal data on the more than 4,000
colleges and universities that receive some form of federal
aid.
Nearly 200 colleges received less than $3 per applicant for
financial aid. The University of Wisconsin at Madison got
21 cents.
Harvard, Princeton, Yale - and all the other members of the
Ivy League, for that matter - were also given 5 to 8 times
the median to pay their students in work-study jobs. That
is money the institutions got directly, to be spent on
behalf of needy students.
And they got 5 to 20 times the median amount of grant money
to look after the everyday needs of their poor students,
despite having some of the largest endowments in the
nation, if not the world. (Harvard and Yale both have
endowments of more than $10 billion. Princeton's is $8.7
billion.)
Such disparities have been a sore point among universities
for years, leftovers from an era when federal money was
given to colleges on an individual, almost negotiable
basis. Now, for the first time in more than two decades,
the nation's financial aid officers are calling for the
imbalances to be wiped away, replaced by a system that
steers financial aid toward the universities that poor
students actually attend, rather than those with the
biggest reputations.
"We're saying, `Hey, is this really fair?' " said Dallas
Martin, president of the National Association of Student
Financial Aid Administrators. "The money ought to follow
where the neediest students are. That's the equity piece
and that's what's missing."
At first glance, it may seem that some universities receive
more money simply because they cost more to attend. But try
telling that to Heather McDonnell, director of financial
aid at Sarah Lawrence College, which costs just as much as
its Ivy League competitors, yet in one category received
only a sixth as much money as any of them.
"It's not even touching reality," Ms. McDonnell said. "It's
not even acknowledging any changes in the economy and how
my families are doing."
Even some of the beneficiaries of the imbalance concede
that it is not entirely rational, and say they would
consent to shedding a few dollars for the sake of parity.
"How could we complain, really?" said Sally C. Donahue,
director of financial aid at Harvard College. "We have been
very fortunate to receive the money that we have. And the
barriers facing low-income students are considerable, so
anything increasing their access to college nationally is
something we would support wholeheartedly."
As for the origins of the disparities, most veterans of
university finance agree that they date back at least to
the 1970's, when regional panels of educational experts,
not formulas, decided how much colleges would receive.
Because each university had to make its own case for the
money, those with long histories and a certain financial
savoir-faire tended to do particularly well. In fact, the
panels were sometimes composed of their peers.
"If a school was politically savvy and well connected
enough, they would end up with the lion's share of the
funds," said Ken Redd, research director of the financial
aid officers association.
Congress tried to correct the imbalance in 1980, voting to
divide the aid according to a "fair share" formula. But
that applied only to whatever new money flowed into these
programs, guaranteeing that no college would receive less
than it was already getting. It is a guarantee that still
exists.
The compromise averted a political melee over
redistribution, but because spending in these programs has
grown relatively slowly in the last 20 years, it did little
to eliminate the disparities. Today, about 60 percent of
the money is still spent honoring old pledges.
"I wish I had been at the table when the decisions were
being made," said JoAnne Boyle, president of Seton Hill
University in Pennsylvania. "It just drives me nuts."
It is the magnitude of the disparities that irks many
college officials. At most universities, for example,
whenever low-income students get money from the federal
government under the Pell grant program, the college
receives some, too - to help the student with tuition,
books, housing, meals and so forth.
For every Pell dollar one of its students received in the
2000-1 academic year (and they could each get up to
$4,000), the median college got an extra 7 cents. Harvard
got 98 cents. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology got
$1.09. Princeton got $1.42.
At the other end of the scale sit institutions like the
City University of New York, which had the most financial
aid applicants in the nation that year. It got 4 cents on
the dollar. More than 50 colleges got a penny.
So what does this mean for students? For Princeton in
2000-1, a poor student meant up to $5,680 in extra grant
money from the government, money that could have gone
toward the student's tuition, room, board or other
educational expenses.
The same student would have brought in only $2,000 at Sarah
Lawrence, even though its tuition is higher than
Princeton's. Sarah Lawrence could have spent its own money
making up the difference (although its endowment is less
than 1 percent of Princeton's). Or the student could have
taken out bigger loans.
Then there is the money that campuses receive to place
students in work-study jobs. For each of its aid
applicants, the median college got $87.67 to help pay
wages. Yale got $592.75. Duke got $600.28. Columbia got
$677.93. But nearly 100 other colleges got less then $20.
Even under the fairest of systems, college officials say,
some protections need to be built in so that low-income
students continue to attend elite universities. And given
that private colleges typically cost more than twice what
public universities do, even after accounting for living
expenses, they should usually receive more money, the
officials say. But 10 times more than the median? Or 20?
"The problem is, once people start to see resources start
to shift away from them, they do what's necessary to
protect their interests," said George Chin, director of
financial aid for the City University of New York.
Indeed, the call for redistribution has put many
universities on the defensive, particularly those that
worry about doing worse under new rules.
"Any time you talk about reallocating money when there
isn't new money, you're going to pit institutions against
one another," said Kate Jeffery, director of student
financial support for the University of California. In some
areas, her campuses do worse than most universities. In
others, they do better. "It just doesn't seem appropriate
to take it from one school and give it to another," she
added.
In fact, few universities seem to know exactly how they
would fare under a new system, though the financial aid
officers association has a pretty good idea of who would be
the big beneficiaries: community colleges and, perhaps most
surprisingly, for-profit universities.
A generation ago, neither kind of institution had the same
national presence it does now, and both enroll high
percentages of low-income students. These two factors would
probably win them a greater share of federal dollars.
The geography of higher education has also changed.
Enrollments in Arizona, Texas, Georgia and other states
have more than doubled in the last 30 years, while the
cluster of Northeastern states that once seemed to anchor
higher education have not grown nearly so fast. That, too,
could affect where the money goes.
But, some wonder, at what cost?
"The idea of fairness is
certainly a valid one, but there are so many schools below
their fair share that any redistribution may have a very
negligible impact on their schools," said William
Schilling, director of financial aid at the University of
Pennsylvania. "But the schools that would lose money would
face a major problem."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/education/09AID.html?ex=1069388015&ei=1&en=80725a9977f67847
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