Many Ivy League schools have announced in the past year that they’re taking action to reduce tuition for low-income families. Whether or not Syracuse University will follow suit remains unknown.

Institutions like Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Yale University and Harvard University have announced plans to relieve students in low-to-middle income families of the financial burden that comes with affording a private education.

As a result of such decisions, chairman Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and ranking member, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) of the Senate Finance Committee wrote to all universities with endowments of more than $500 million requesting information on their tuition costs and endowments.

The committee’s request said it seems clear from actions by top universities that large endowments can help control tuition costs for low-to-middle income families.

SU released its response to the Senate on March 3.

Cornell is one of the schools replacing student loans with grants, said Cornell Provost Carolyn A. Martin in a press release.

Students from families with incomes under $60,000 will qualify in 2008-09, and the maximum income will increase to $75,000 in 2009-10. Cornell will cap student loans at $3,000 for students from families with incomes up to $120,000. The rest of the financial aid will be supplied by grants.

‘We think the entire campus will benefit in our ability to enroll a diverse and talented student body,’ said Simeon Moss, Cornell public relations office director.

Other members of the Ivy League made similar announcements during the past two months. Princeton University first replaced loans with grants seven years ago.

‘The fact that so many have done it all at once was a little unexpected, but the fact that they are doing it is a trend that started ten years ago,’ said Tony Pals, National Association of Independent Colleges director of public information.

Among the announcements, Dartmouth College is offering free tuition for students from families with incomes under $75,000, according to an announcement from the college on Jan. 22.

Harvard University is making the financial burden easier on its students by announcing on Dec. 10 that tuition for students in families with incomes under $180,000 would be 10 percent of the family’s income. The amount will decline steadily to 0 percent for families making under $120,000 a year.

The University of Pennsylvania is eliminating all student loans and replacing them with grants, a Dec. 17 announcement said.

Yale University is eliminating student loans through increased on-campus student employment, said Caesar Storlazzi, Yale’s director of student financial services. The minimum hourly rate for on-campus student jobs will be $11.30.

Parents making under $60,000 will not be expected to contribute any money to their students’ Yale educations.

Storlazzi said student groups like the Yale Common Council had to do with the decision.

‘They’re very intelligent, well-thought-out positions that have been taken from these groups,’ Storlazzi said. ‘And the strongest message from both groups have been the worry about getting too far into debt.’

The competitive landscape of other schools in its tier has also prompted Yale’s decisions.

Unlike the case at Yale, no student group at SU has ever formally filed a complaint to the financial aid office. But the decisions by Ivy League schools may have a ‘trickle down effect’ on schools like SU, said Kaye Devesty, SU interim director of financial aid.

‘I think you sit up and take notice,’ Devesty said. ‘You start discussing exactly what’s going on: What steps should we take? Should we make any changes?’

Informal discussions at SU have taken place over the initiatives other institutions are offering, but no official decision has been made, Devesty said. A change would be made at the chancellor level and by the SU Board of Trustees.

The aid and tuition changes by the Ivy Leagues will not affect the makeup of SU’s incoming classes or financial aid in the short term, said Donald Saleh, vice president of enrollment management.

‘I think what is happening here though is a movement toward realigning financial aid programs that try to meet the needs of presumably low income students,’ he said.

A trickle down effect has started to take place in at least one school outside of the Ivy League. Northwestern University announced the same day as Cornell that it will replace its student loans with grants.

‘For us at Syracuse, we have been looking at our financial aid programs and trying to see how we should be focused on providing access to the university for the most financially needy students,’ Saleh said.

‘And we’ve been doing that over the years, but I think now we’re in an era where we’ll probably be putting more energy in within the next year to take a look at where we are.’

Most of the schools are drawing a greater percentage on their endowments to fund the increased aid. Cornell plans to have a fundraising campaign and increase the payout of its $5.4 billion endowment from 4.7 to 5 percent. Yale’s payout of its $22.5 billion endowment will be between 4.5 and 6 percent, said Moss and Storlazzi.

Seventy-six colleges had an endowment of over $1 billion in 2007, according to a study released by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

SU passed the billion-dollar mark in its endowment in 2007, making it the 47th highest endowment in the report. The SU Office of the Treasurer’s Web site is quick to point out the fact that the report ranks the endowment value per full-time student 205th, and experts don’t know how feasible it will be for other schools to emulate the Ivy Leagues.

‘Even for the schools with the billion dollar endowments, most of them haven’t been able to follow Harvard and Princeton,’ Pals said.

According to its response to the Senate, SU spent nearly 7 percent in the 2006 and 2007 fiscal years.

‘Many of those schools that have announced have endowments that are several times larger than ours,’ he said. ‘So it’s easier for them to dip into their endowment.’

In light of the recent announcements, government officials have been urging private institutions to use their endowments to offer lower tuition. While Yale’s financial aid director said he thinks schools with Yale’s endowment size should use it to offer aid to students from low-income families, Cornell’s public relations director hopes these announcements don’t shift the responsibility of funding higher education disproportionably to just universities from family and government contributions.

‘We are aware and mindful of the fact that we don’t want to tip that balance,’ Cornell’s Moss said. ‘And that might affect other institutions. Some institutions can afford to do certain things, but there are many, many, many more institutions that can’t.’

Pals, from the National Association of Independent Colleges, is particularly concerned about universities and student aid programs funded by the government.

‘If anything, the government isn’t doing enough,’ Pals said. ‘If you look at public universities, they’re very concerned that state budgets aren’t going to be high enough for them to continue to fulfill their mission, that the state budgets won’t provide enough funding to keep their doors open to all students regardless of their background.’

Pals also pointed to increases in maximum Pell Grants, a form of federal student aid that had lagged behind inflation this decade. He noted a reversal in that trend in the last year, but said there’s ‘still a lot of ground to be made up for.’

rsbalton@syr.edu

Published on March 4, 2008 at 12:00 pm