The California Institute of Technology today joined a burgeoning group of elite colleges that have recently replaced loans with grants in financial-aid packages for their neediest students.
The new policy will take effect in the fall-2008 semester, according to a Caltech news release. The institute already provides financial assistance to more than half of its 913 undergraduates, and the average debt burden of students who graduated from Caltech in the 2005-6 academic year was $5,156, much lower than the national average of $19,146 for the same year. —Elizabeth F. Farrell
