Under no-loan policy, record number of freshmen receive aid

As freshmen arrived on campus this year, the University announced that the Class of 2007 has 52 percent of the students receiving aid.

The percentage of incoming freshmen receiving financial aid has steadily risen since 38 percent of the Class of 2001 received aid.

The high number of financial aid recipients this year can partially be attributed to improvements in financial aid in the last several years, said Don Betterton, director of undergraduate financial aid since 1975. In the 2001-02 school year, for instance, the University replaced all student loans with grants.

"Around that time, the Board of Trustees voted to increase the spending rate on the endowment," Betterton said. "The increase gave us extra resources to dedicate to our scholarships monies."

Each fall, the Priorities Committee – a group of students, faculty and administrators that distribute discretionary funds from the University's coffers – appropriates the financial aid budget for the upcoming school year.

"We submit a budget to the Priorities Committee in the fall and they approved the budget," Betterton said. "The budget did predict that about 52 percent of the freshman class would receive aid."

Betterton said he believes that the University will continue to stand behind the existing financial aid policies in years to come.

Before 2001, when the University made the move to erase all loans, Princeton had already begun replacing loans with grants for low-income students. The University also reduced the amount students are expected to contribute from their personal savings and incorporates a variety of work-study options in its financial aid packages, Betterton said.

"I think Princeton's grants give a lot of students the chance to go to a university that otherwise might not have been financially feasible," Alex Ryder '05 said. "At least that was the case with me. I didn't want to have a lot of loans to deal with after I'm through."

The University operates under a "need-blind" admissions policy that dissociates a student's ability to pay from the ability to achieve academically and extracurricularly at Princeton.

Already, Princeton's policies appear to have influenced financial aid policies at schools like Harvard University, Yale University and Stanford University — schools that largely compete for the same pool of high school candidates.

"After we did [our improvement to financial aid], Harvard, Stanford and Yale improved their aid programs," Betterton said. "They each made major improvements toward our direction."

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The Ivy League, Betterton added, also has a policy to bridge the gap between the differences between financial aid packages at Ivy League institutions at which a student has been accepted.

Those schools that offer financial aid have an obligation to exchange their financial offers with each other, giving the institution that offer a lesser package a chance to revise its offer before sending it to the accepted student.

The degree to which the offer might be changed is, however, a matter of the each institution's financial aid policies and preferences.