Funds should help low-income students pay high tuition
Regarding 'University should lead charge to end welfare for elites' (Tues., Nov. 11):
The usually reliable New York Times missed the mark in its article last weekend on federal financial aid, and unfortunately Tom Hale relied on it in writing his opinion piece.
It is not the case that Princeton simply receives "an extra $1.42 in taxpayer money for every $1.00 Princeton students got in federal [Pell] grants." These additional funds are not "matching" funds; they are grant funds for Princeton students that come from a separate federal program (the Supplemental Grant, or SEOG program) that was created explicitly to help needy students afford institutions with higher tuitions. The program requires that the institution make a $1,000 grant to each student who receives these funds, although in Princeton's case we do 25 times that, with a $25,000 Princeton grant, on average, in each aid package for students who receive these federal funds.
Given the nature of the SEOG program, it is not surprising that these funds are concentrated in higher-cost institutions. For reasons of history, some institutions do receive higher allocations than others — not because they were "well connected" in the past, but because their financial aid programs were well established when these programs began.
Over the years, Princeton has been sympathetic to the idea of developing fairer policies for the allocation of federal student aid funds, but we have not been sympathetic to the idea that these funds should only be used to help low-income students attend low-tuition schools. We have believed that the government also has an interest in helping low-income students attend higher tuition schools when those schools are right for them. Bob Durkee Vice President for Public Affairs
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