After Harvard, Yale boosts aid

Correction appended

Yale announced this week that it will change its undergraduate financial aid policy for all students this fall. The changes are meant to make college more affordable for middle and upper-income families and follow in the footsteps of a similar policy enacted by Harvard last December.

"We want all of our students to make the most of Yale — academically and beyond — without worrying about excessive work hours or debt," Yale president Richard Levin said in a press release. "Our new financial aid package makes this aspiration a reality."

At both Yale and Harvard, parents with annual incomes below $60,000 a year will not have to contribute toward their child's college education, and families with incomes from $60,000 to $120,000 will now pay between 1 and 10 percent of their incomes toward tuition.

The policies differ with respect to the families that will pay only about 10 percent of their incomes. At Yale, families that earn $120,000 to $200,000 annually qualify, while at Harvard, that range is $120,000 to $180,000.

Yale also plans to exempt the first $200,000 of family assets when calculating the amount of financial aid students will receive.

Princeton does not plan to institute an income-tier system similar to Harvard's or Yale's, President Tilghman said in an interview.

Though the University does not intend to adjust any aspect of its financial aid policy in the near future, "we are continually updating every single year and reviewing each year to make sure that we're keeping up with the financial realities that our applicant pool and our student families face," Director of Undergraduate Financial Aid Robin Moscato said.

Tilghman said that "there is no question in [her] mind" that Harvard and Yale made their financial aid reforms in response to Princeton's prior reforms. "I believe that the financial aid officers at Harvard and Yale have been watching Princeton over the last six and a half years."

Many of the other changes in Harvard's and Yale's financial aid policies are similar to ones instituted at Princeton in 2001, including replacing loans in a student's financial aid package with grants, eliminating home equity when calculating students' financial aid packages and decreasing expected student contributions.

Moscato said that it is "pretty widely known" that Harvard and Yale are following in Princeton's footsteps.

With Harvard and Yale adopting their new loan-free policies and lowering the expected contributions of middleand upper-class families, Princeton may lose an advantage it has held since 2001. Adelle Lykes-Kim '11 chose Princeton in part because of the generous financial aid: "there wasn't any other Ivy that gave me the amount of money Princeton gave me," she said.

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Moscato said that "it is hard to make a direct comparison" between the financial aid policies of the three universities, adding that "at Princeton we've really done quite a lot over the last seven years to increase the consideration that middle- and upper-middle-income families receive under our aid program."

To pay for the increase in aid, Yale will buttress its financial aid budget from $24 million to over $80 million. Yale decided last week that the increase will be made possible by boosting its endowment spending.

Tilghman said that "Princeton has a significantly larger percentage of its students on aid" than Yale. "When they finally, at the beginning of next year, increase their financial aid from $24 million, only then will they [be] comparable to us this year," she explained.

At Yale, the cost of tuition, room and board will be held at a 2.2 percent increase — the expected level of inflation — for the 2008-09 school year.

Correction

The original version of this article incorrectly quoted Robin Moscato regarding Harvard and Yale following in Princeton's footsteps. The Daily Princetonian regrets the error.