Category Archives: Paying For College
April 19, 2013, 4:55 am
By Beckie Supiano
In 2004, Harvard University announced generous new financial-aid policies under which families making less than $40,000 a year would not have to contribute to their child’s education. The university also said it would increase its efforts to recruit disadvantaged students. Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard’s president at the time, described the moves as a way to narrow the gap in opportunities available to students from different backgrounds.
So, did the backgrounds of students attending Harvard change after the aid policies did? The short answer: yes, especially in the first year.
A new paper by a Harvard senior, Nicholas Galat, takes up that question. The paper, “Addresses and the Aid Initiative: A Geospatial Analysis of the Harvard Student Body, Classes of 2003-2011,” examines whether and how the makeup of classes changed after the policies were introduced.
Mr. Galat, who expects …
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April 2, 2013, 11:00 am
By Beckie Supiano
Consumer advocates have complained for years that financial-aid award letters are difficult for students to understand and compare, and have called for the letters to be standardized.
The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators opposes the idea of a standard aid-award letter, saying colleges should be free to design formats with their own would-be students in mind. But the association does say that the letters should contain standard elements.
To clarify which approaches seem to work best, the association hired the research firm JBL Associates Inc. to subject to a consumer test the federal government’s “Shopping Sheet,” a letter designed from the association’s own recommendations, and a hybrid of the two. A report with the results of that consumer testing was released on Tuesday.
“No single award-letter proposal is perfect,” the report says. The largest…
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February 28, 2013, 4:56 am
By Beckie Supiano
A greater share of prospective students are using net-price calculators, online tools that let them estimate their bottom-line price to attend a particular college, according to a poll released on Thursday by the College Board and the Art & Science Group, a consulting firm.
Forty-four percent of college-bound seniors, who were surveyed in 2012, said they had used a calculator on at least one individual college’s Web site, up from about a quarter the year before. Colleges have been required to offer a net-price calculator on their Web sites since late 2011.
Eighteen percent of students said one of their parents had used a calculator. But use of net-price calculators was more common among high-income parents than among low-income ones. For the most part, families that had tried out calculators found them fairly easy to use, the survey found.
Still, more than half of the high…
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February 27, 2013, 2:40 pm
By Beckie Supiano
Washington — Worries about debt are widespread among college students, but that doesn’t stop some of them from engaging in risky financial behaviors, according to a survey of 40,000 students released on Wednesday. Financial-literacy training can help, says a report on the survey’s findings, but to be effective it must be mandatory and occur at multiple stages in people’s lives.
A panel discussion tied to the report’s release used its findings as a jumping-off point to address students’ relationships with money and what role colleges should play in shaping them.
The notion that college students aren’t always financially literate did not surprise Steven C. Bahls, president of Augustana College, in Illinois, and one of the panelists. Mr. Bahls said that his own children lacked a great grasp of money issues during college. One son, an English major, “mastered the intricacies of…
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February 27, 2013, 6:01 am
By Beckie Supiano
While the average graduating senior who took out student loans leaves college with what should be a manageable level of loan debt—around $26,500—concerns about student debt are persistent and widespread.
The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators took account of that broad concern and decided to convene a task force of its members to comb through research and trends, and offer recommendations for improving the student-loan system.
On Wednesday the association, known as Nasfaa, released a report laying out those recommendations, which have been endorsed by its board.
The recommendations call for:
- Allowing aid administrators to set lower loan limits under certain scenarios. (Nasfaa also included a version of this idea in its white paper for the Reimagining Aid Design and Delivery project, sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)
…
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February 26, 2013, 12:01 am
By Beckie Supiano
Parents are optimistic that they’ll meet their college-savings goals, but many of them are not on track to do so, according to a report released on Tuesday by Sallie Mae, the student-loan and financial-services company.
Families that are saving for college plan to put aside an average of $39,000 per child, according to the report, “How America Saves for College 2013,” which draws on survey results. Seventy percent of families that had set a specific goal said they expected to meet it.
But according to the report’s projections, they are being unrealistic. The report took what each family said it had saved so far per child, added that amount to what the family saved last year, and multiplied the sum by the number of years until the child turns 18. Sallie Mae found that the average family will have saved just under $20,000.
While a majority of families saw college as an investment …
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February 22, 2013, 10:57 am
By Diane Lambart Fleming
In a guest post today, Diane Lambart Fleming shares some questions financial-aid offices should explore before dipping their toes into social media. Ms. Fleming recently retired as an associate director in the office of scholarships and financial aid at Central Michigan University. She is one of several professionals who will write occasional guest posts for Head Count this year.
For several years I have been wrestling with social media as a means of communicating financial-aid information to enrolled students. Years ago colleges and universities depended on the printed word to provide information, request action by a student, or both. With the advent of e-mail, the printed word has become almost obsolete. Electronic communication became an acceptable and, more important, legal mode of communication, at least as far as the U.S. Department of Education was concerned. We have…
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January 30, 2013, 3:09 pm
By Eric Hoover
In an article today I describe a new paper by Jerome A. Lucido, executive director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice. Colleges, he proposes, should form a “league” in which cooperation tempers the competition among them. He imagines a consortium of colleges functioning more like the National Football League, bound by the same rules and collaborating for the common good even as they strive to “win.”
Mr. Lucido did not pull this idea out of thin air, of course. From 1954 to 1991, nearly two dozen selective colleges formed the Overlap Group, whose members met regularly to compare aid packages given to students who had been accepted by more than one of the colleges. The group’s stated purpose was to keep bidding wars in check and so spread aid funds to as many students as possible. The federal government, however, brought…
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January 24, 2013, 1:17 pm
By Beckie Supiano
A coalition of higher-education experts, civil-rights organizers, policy makers, and others is endorsing a set of proposals to improve the student-aid system.
The group, organized by HCM Strategists, a consulting firm, is offering recommendations in three broad categories: making the system simpler and more transparent; dealing with the needs of all students, especially nontraditional ones; and asking colleges, states, and students to share responsibility for completion.
The proposals were released on Thursday in a report, “The American Dream 2.0: How Financial Aid Can Help Improve College Access, Affordability, and Completion.” The report is one of HCM Strategists’ contributions to the Reimagining Aid Design and Delivery project, financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
HCM Strategists also released findings from public-opinion research about college affordability…
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January 10, 2013, 11:23 am
By Robert J. Massa
In a guest post today, Robert J. Massa, vice president for communications at Lafayette College, responds to a draft pledge opposing the use of merit aid released by a group of presidents this week. Mr. Massa spent 20 years prior to joining Lafayette as the chief enrollment officer at Johns Hopkins University and Dickinson College. The opinions below solely reflect the views of the author.
I applaud the effort introduced by Kenyon’s president, Georgia Nugent, to end financial-aid bidding wars and to refocus aid on those who need it. I couldn’t agree more, though years of trying to persuade colleagues and presidents in my own state of Pennsylvania have left me somewhat jaded regarding the prospects of such a move.
The weaker an institution’s market position, the more it will use discounting to enroll its class. And if the practice starts at the so-called “bottom of the chainâ…
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