Dollars and Sense

Changes to Dartmouth's financial-aid program amount to more than keeping up with our peers.

DARTMOUTH'S STRENGTH DERIVES in large part from our talented students. Keeping Dartmouth accessible to a wide range of students is at the top of my list of priorities. As soon as I became president in 1998 we expanded our financial-aid program, adding $2.6 million to the scholarship program, lowering the amount of loans we expect students to carry, providing more generous consideration of a family's assets in needs analysis, and allowing students to use the full amount of outside scholarships with no reduction in their Dartmouth aid.

Dartmouth is proud to be one of the few institutions that is need-blind in its admissions process and provides 100 percent of a students assessed need. Some 40 percent of our students receive scholarship support. In 1999-2000 Dartmouth spent $29 million to make that happen.

The College funds financial aid in various ways. In recent years nearly 50 percent of aid has come from endowment funds specifically designated for scholarships. Federal sources provide another 7 percent. The rest comes from the annual operating budget. Four years ago Dartmouth initiated the Dartmouth College Fund Scholar Program to allow alumni to direct their annual giving to scholarship support. Each year hundreds of donors ask that their annual gifts go toward scholarship support. Those who give $15,000 may support a named scholar in either the junior or senior class and have the opportunity to meet that student. This program has been highly successful. Each year more donors have chosen to participate, and in 2000-2001 we had 156 Scholar Program students.

This year Princeton, which has the highest endowment per student and fills 95 percent of its financial aid from funds restricted for that purpose, enhanced its financial-aid policy by replacing all loan requirements with grants. Harvard and MIT have also undertaken major new initiatives in this area. We needed to decide the extent to which we could do more without jeopardizing other institutional needs. If we were to enact the exact same financial-aid policy as Princetons, we would need to cut programs that are as critical to the educational experience as the financial aid we offer.

Competition with other institutions, while important, is not our only consideration. While Dartmouth must have a system of financial aid that is competitive with our peers, it must also meet the needs of our students and be equitable. Simply matching individual awards from other institutions or getting into bidding wars would not be adequate. It would be troubling if students who shared the same room and who came from similar backgrounds discovered that they had very different Dartmouth aid packages because one of them had previously received a better offer from another school. We need a financial-aid system that treats all students equitably.

There is a philosophical issue to consider as well. One of the assumptions behind our financial-aid policy is that it is acceptable for students to graduate with some debt, so long as the debt remains reasonable. In 2000 the average financial-aid student (who had received aid for all four years) graduated from Dartmouth with a debt of $17,000. We would like to reduce that amount, and we are looking for ways to do so. Most financial-aid students fund their education through a combination of grants, loans and work. Our financial-aid program includes an expectation that students will work during their vacation terms and throughout the academic year. Typically financial-aid students contribute 14 percent toward the cost of their education.

With an eye to maintaining the underlying fairness of the Dartmouth system, we have enhanced our program for 2001-02 by adding another $1.6 million to the scholarship program. We have reduced the loan expectations for all families who earn less than $75,000. Students from families who earn less than $45,000 will have no loans at all in the first year and will graduate with only $3,000 in loans after four years. The result will be that one third of all financial aid students will have no loans at all in the first year. To bring Dartmouth more in line with our peer institutions, we also have reduced the amount of money we expect students to earn each year. The avarage total reduction (in both loans and the earnings we expect of students) for the typical financial-aid student will be $2,000 per year. Individual students will continue to have the ability to tailor the combination of loans and work expectations to their own situations and needs.

Together these changes provide our students with one of the most generous scholarship programs in the country. Our new financial-aid initiative will ensure that Dartmouth continues to be accessible to all qualified students. It is an effort of which we can all be proud.