Stanford gives large boost to aid

The University’s financial aid policy may no longer be the single “strongest need-based financial aid program in the country” as advertised on the University’s financial aid website, Undergraduate Financial Aid Director Robin Moscato said in an interview.

On Wednesday, Stanford University joined the ranks of Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Penn and Cornell by announcing an overhaul of its financial aid policy. Starting next year, Stanford will fully subsidize undergraduate tuition for families with incomes lower than $100,000, fund tuition, room and board, and other expenses for all families earning less than $60,000 annually and eliminate student loans as part of financial aid packages.

Many of the institutions in the Ivy League have made similar changes in the past three months, specifically replacing loans with grants or scholarships and setting an income level below which students’ families will not be expected to contribute to tuition.

Harvard and Yale set the threshold at $60,000, while Dartmouth placed it at $75,000. Stanford, Harvard and Yale have also announced initiatives to reduce the contribution to tuition made by families in higher income brackets, those earning under $200,000.

How does Princeton match up?

Though Princeton offers grants in lieu of loans, the University does not provide a cut-off income level below which families are exempt from all tuition and room and board expenses.

The University does not have plans to make such a change, Moscato said, maintaining that Princeton is not being outpaced by its peers.

Despite its distinct lack of income bracketing, Princeton’s current financial aid policy, instituted in 2001, is roughly equivalent to the new ones announced at other institutions, Moscato said.

“I think places like Stanford and Harvard are doing a little bit of catch-up with what we’ve been doing for the last five years,” Moscato said. “Frankly, I’m a little surprised that it took some of these schools so long.”

President Tilghman echoed these sentiments in an interview with The Daily Princetonian earlier this month, before Stanford’s announcement.

“I have always been slightly puzzled why our peers did not follow more quickly in our wake,” Tilghman said, specifically citing Stanford as a school that could afford major aid reform but had not yet implemented it.

Princeton’s financial aid packages are not based on specific income brackets because income is only one of many factors that go into the office’s complicated aid analysis procedure, Moscato explained.

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The University provides an online financial aid estimator tool that prospective students can use to approximate the specific aid package they would likely receive from the University.

“Instead of trying to make blanket statements that say ‘you will receive this much aid up to this income cut-off,’ we have the aid estimator which allows families to put in the specifics for their own financial circumstances,” Moscato said.

The estimator website receives about 45,000 hits each year, Moscato said, and often gets more than 500 hits per day during August and September. The estimator has been available on the financial aid website since 1998, and Moscato said she believed it was the first tool of its kind to be developed at a University.

“We’ve been ahead of the curve on this,” she added.

The financial aid packages Princeton has been offering for the past five years are essentially equivalent to or better than the ones Stanford will begin offering next year, Moscato said. At Princeton, the average financial aid grant for families with incomes under $100,000 covers the cost of tuition, she explained. Additionally, the average grant for families earning under $75,000 covers the tuition, room, board and other expenses, she said. This is roughly equivalent to what Stanford will be offering students whose families earn below $60,000.

“We’re all doing the same thing, it’s just a matter of how we describe it,” Moscato said about the different programs.

Will this hurt Princeton?

Princeton has not shared the national spotlight with peer institutions that have announced major aid reforms this year.

It is important, however, for the University to continue publicizing and explaining its policy to prospective students, Moscato said.

To that end, Moscato wrote a set of questions and answers about the University’s aid program for the financial aid office’s website. The Q&A was posted on the day Dartmouth announced its financial aid changes.

“That was a very sensible thing for us to do ... to get out there and provide the information I suspect that families are looking for,” Tilghman said of Moscato’s Q&A. “[It was] very effective in saying we don’t see things changing very much.”

The expanded aid programs at peer institutions will be unlikely to affect overall yield at the University, Moscato said.

“I don’t think [the financial aid reforms] will make a very big difference overall as to where people choose to go to school,” she said.

Students who are offered better need-based aid packages at other schools often have their Princeton offers adjusted accordingly, she added.

“I think that it’s a very good thing that so many top schools are now devoting the [type of] resources that we have [been devoting] for the past six years to improving financial aid,” Moscato said. “This benefits a much larger number of students.”

Maria Kang ’10, who was accepted to both Princeton and Stanford, said her final choice would not have been affected by a better financial aid offer from Stanford.

“Princeton’s financial aid office made coming here possible, and I wanted to come here,” Kang said. “I don’t think anything Stanford could have offered would have changed that.”

The future of Princeton’s financial aid

Though there are no plans to make major changes to Princeton’s financial aid program, it will continue to change and grow every year, Moscato said, citing the recently increased upperclassman room and board allowance as an example of the University’s ongoing commitment to improving financial aid.

“[The Financial Aid Office is] concerned not just about attracting applicants, but also about what happens to students once they’re on campus,” Moscato said.