Bye-Bye Financial Aid

By JANICE C. SIMPSON

For private colleges, few costs rose more quickly during the 1980s than dollars allotted for financial aid. But having a racially and economically diverse student body seemed worth almost any price. Now the economic realities of the '90s are forcing college administrators to make painful decisions about their commitment to students who may not be able to pay their own way. "Need- blind" admissions -- the high-minded practice of accepting qualified students regardless of their financial status -- is "close to a religion" at many schools, says Henry Rosovsky, economics professor at Harvard University. "But there can be no sacred cows in the current period."

Some elite institutions have already offered up that cow for sacrifice. Two years ago, Smith College, which spends $13.7 million a year on financial aid, announced that it could no longer afford a need-blind admissions policy. As a result, 29 otherwise qualified candidates for last fall's freshman class -- 11 of them women of color -- were rejected. Under pressure from students and alumnae, Smith resumed its need-blind policy this year, but the result is likely to be the same. While those 29 students would probably be admitted now, Smith still wouldn't be able to give them any money.

Wesleyan University, which overshot its financial-aid budget by $850,000 last year, is considering a proposal to make a student's ability to pay one of the major factors in determining who is accepted from the school's waiting list. Meanwhile, Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me., despite a professed commitment to admitting students without regard to financial need, rejected 40 otherwise qualified applicants last year when it ran out of aid money. "Letting financial conditions affect who gets in is not an attractive option for us," laments admissions dean Richard Steele. "But we're not assuming that we can be totally need-blind as we approach the 21st century."

Admissions officials say that unless the government provides more financial support, growing numbers of youngsters, particularly in the middle class, may not be able to attend the schools of their choice. "Low-income students get fully funded, and high-income students pay full freight, but it's the middle class that really has a hard time," says Rosovsky. Increasingly, institutions are divvying up their limited funds into skimpy partial-aid packages rather than full grants -- a practice known as gapping. This leads students to overextend themselves by taking on unadvisably large loans or excessively demanding jobs. Both Reed College in Portland, Ore., and Amherst College in Massachusetts, for example, will ask their financial-aid students to kick in about $500 more than last year, either from loans or campus employment.

Though they don't like to admit it, many colleges are actively pursuing wealthy students by intensifying their recruitment of affluent foreign students. International students made up 11% of the entering class at the University of Pennsylvania last fall, compared with just 2% a decade ago. About 45% of the students at Penn receive financial aid, but only 8% of the foreign students do.

While international recruiting and continued support for indigent students will help colleges maintain their ethnic and racial diversity, another kind of diversity is likely to be sacrificed as private colleges feel the squeeze. Without the middle and working classes, says J. Carey Thompson, admissions director at Furman University in Greenville, S.C., "it's the economic diversity that will suffer."