Financial Aid
As educational costs have risen sharply over the past few years, the number of applications for financial aid and the number of scholarships granted to in-coming students might logically have been assumed to rise with them. Logical, yes; true, no.
To the contrary, in a trend observable at Dartmouth and at other similarly high-cost, high-quality colleges and universities, both applications from and grants to new students have been dwindling by a marked degree. That portion of the College's nearly $2.5-million financial aid budget set aside for freshmen has been underspent the last few years.
According to Harland W. Hoisington Jr. '48, Director of Financial Aid, only 45.5 per cent of applicants to Dartmouth's Class of 1978 requested financial aid, as opposed to 50 per cent of the Class of 1977. This year's freshman class includes slightly under 300 scholarship recipients, compared with 330 last year. Even more concrete evidence over a longer time-span is the difference between the 30 per cent of current freshmen receiving scholarship help and the 41 per cent awarded financial aid during the 1970-71 academic year.
Since the percentage of Dartmouth students coming from poverty-level economic backgrounds has remained stable, Hoisington's conclusion is that many middle-income families are put off by the high cost of a Dartmouth education even before they find out that ample scholarship funds are available. Students whose families have incomes as high as $30,000, he points out, have received financial aid if, for example, they have several children in college at the same time or have been under heavy medical or other extraordinary expense. And for those who do not quite qualify for scholarships, low-interest-rate loans are available from the College. The range of financial aid this year, he added, is from $200 for students who need only a little help to a scholarship, work-study, and loan combination designed to cover the full cost of a year at the College for sons and daughters of families who are able to contribute nothing toward their education.
Where families in the income bracket of $12-20,000 comprise 24 per cent of the American population as a whole, children of families in that income span made up 17.2 per cent of applicants to the Class of 1978, a figure Hoisington would like to see brought up to the national statistic. With the percentage of students from very low income families essentially stable, any significant drop in that 17.2 per cent would be reflected in a corresponding rise in the upper-income level group, whose families can absorb the entire cost of their sons' and daughters' education. Hoisington's concern, if present trends continue to their logical conclusion, is not so much that the Dartmouth student body would be weighted heavily at the high and the low ends of the economic spectrum as that the College would have a disproportionate number of high-income students.
Revisions this year in the statistical tables prepared by the College Scholarship Service to indicate what share of their children's educational expense parents of varying income levels might be expected to bear may well result in more and larger grants to middle-income students, at least for next year, Hoisington says. The CSS, a national organization used by Dartmouth and some 1,000 other colleges and universities to help determine the amount of financial aid students should receive, has recently revised upward its grant recommendations to reflect the erosion by inflation of family income.
Although the Trustees have not yet met to decide whether to accept the new recommendations of the College Scholarship Service, Hoisington considers it likely that the Class of 1979 will be affected by the changes. Whether the new guidelines would be used for additional grants to students already in college is less certain.
Tom Wesselmann and Thomas Eakins. The stylistic differences between Wesse. mann's contemporary nude and Eakins' 19th century portrait, both shown above nicely point up the range of the College art collection, which was shown off to great advantage this fall by Jan van der Marck, a transplanted Hollander who is Dartmout new director of galleries and collections. In the several galleries of Hopkins Center were three centuries of European paintings, five centuries of nudes, a century (the 19th) American paintings, and examples from the triumphant centuries (the 18th and early 19th) of American silver. The punch strainer at top was crafted by John Coburn, superb 1745 teapot by Jacob Hurd. Both pieces are part of a collection donated to the College by Frank L. Harrington '24 and Mrs. Harrington.
Tom Wesselmann and Thomas Eakins. The stylistic differences between Wesse; mann's contemporary nude and Eakins' 19th century portrait, both shown above. nicely point up the range of the College art collection, which was shown off to great advantage this fall by Jan van der Marck, a transplanted Hollander who is Dartmout new director of galleries and collections. In the several galleries of Hopkins Center • three centuries of European paintings, five centuries of nudes, a century (the 19th) American paintings, and examples from the triumphant centuries (the 18th and early 19th) of American silver. The punch strainer at top was crafted by John Coburn, superb 1745 teapot by Jacob Hurd. Both pieces are part of a collection donated to the College by Frank L. Harrington '24 and Mrs. Harrington.
Tom Wesselmann and Thomas Eakins. The stylistic differences between Wesse mann's contemporary nude and Eakins' 19th century portrait, both shown above nicely point up the range of the College art collection, which was shown off to great advantage this fall by Jan van der Marck, a transplanted Hollander who is Dartmout new director of galleries and collections. In the several galleries of Hopkins Center were• three centuries of European paintings, five centuries of nudes, a century (the 19th) American paintings, and examples from the triumphant centuries (the 18th and early 19th) of American silver. The punch strainer at top was crafted by John Coburn, superb 1745 teapot by Jacob Hurd. Both pieces are part of a collection donated to the College by Frank L. Harrington '24 and Mrs. Harrington.
Tom Wesselmann and Thomas Eakins. The stylistic differences between Wesse; mann's contemporary nude and Eakins' 19th century portrait, both shown above. nicely point up the range of the College art collection, which was shown off to great advantage this fall by Jan van der Marck, a transplanted Hollander who is Dartmout new director of galleries and collections. In the several galleries of Hopkins Center were• three centuries of European paintings, five centuries of nudes, a century (the 19th) American paintings, and examples from the triumphant centuries (the 18th and ealy 19th) of American silver. The punch strainer at top was crafted by John Coburn, superb 1745 teapot by Jacob Hurd. Both pieces are part of a collection donated to the College by Frank L. Harrington '24 and Mrs. Harrington.
