Last week, Stanford University joined the growing number of universities that are increasing financial aid for students from lower- and middle-income families. Despite aid policy overhauls by peer institutions such as Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Penn and Cornell, Princeton has ...(back to the article)
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Thank you for calling attention to this issue. I would also add that the Univerisity's "all-grants" policy is really false advertising. Some families need more assistance than can be demonstrated on FAFSA to the financial aid office's satisfaction. This includes mine. As a result I will be graduating from Princeton with nearly $20,000 in debt, and I know I'm not alone. Don't get me wrong. I'm very grateful for the grant money I was awarded. But the policy is not as clean cut as it is advertised. There are many reasons to improve financial aid beyond the obvious applicant yield issues. For instance, if I wasn't graduating with $20,000 in debt, I might be more inclined to take a summer doing community service before beginning med school in the fall. Instead, I'm just focused on finding some way to make some cash. Graduating with debt limits post-grad plans. So if we're really supposed to be in-the-nation's-service, it would be nice if the University didn't send us out into the "real world" with this enormous weight on our shoulders. And when I hear about the size of the endowment, I can't help but wonder why the University can't pick up the rest of my tab here. And sometimes I wonder why I didn't take the much better offer I received at another excellent university.
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