pril is the cruelest month in the financial-aid
calendar. High-school seniors are receiving acceptance letters and
their parents are trying to figure out where, or whether, or how,
their children can go. Forms are due. Costs are catalogued and figures
are totaled, and totaled again. And the phones in the financial-aid
office start ringing, not to stop for nearly a month.
"Parents are in a very anxious period of time," says
James A. Belvin, director of financial aid at Duke and a nationally
recognized author and lecturer on the subject. "They feel,
and I think correctly, that their student has done all she was asked
to do. She did well in high school. She got admitted to a place
like Duke. So the student has done her job. The parents feel like,
'If I can't afford it, I'm the failure--my child did the right thing,
I need to do all I can.'
"It's a very anxious, very stressful time for parents, and
it certainly is for us. As you can imagine, we are trying in this
short period of time to do what's important. I describe it as the
process of trying to create the possible."
The process is a familiar one to almost any parent. Taxes, income,
expenses, unusual circumstances--some numbers go into standardized
federal forms, some into hopeful, heartfelt letters, and all go
into a file that lands on the desk of one of the financial-aid officers.
Belvin describes what comes next as the "personal banker"
approach.
"What we try to do is take a national formula that's not
particularly personalized, personalize it, and give it individualized
attention," he says. "We go through these formulas and
we determine what those parents can afford to pay toward the cost
of sending their child to Duke. We look at the student--can the
student afford to pay some of it? What we establish is a budget,
a full cost structure, and a student should be able to come to Duke
and have a good year with this budget."
That budget includes parent contribution, student contribution,
and the school contribution, which comes in a combination of loans,
work-study jobs, and grants. (It may also include outside scholarships,
and while by law those must be deducted from Duke's aid package,
Belvin says his office deducts them first from the amount of loan
and work-study required.) At Duke, the grants make up the rest of
the family's "demonstrated need," or the difference between
the budget and the family contribution plus loans and work.
"Some schools make no pretense about meeting need,"
Belvin says. "They'll say, 'Here's what we're offering.' Some
schools will provide 90, 80, 50 percent. Theoretically, we've identified
one dollar in resource for every dollar in cost the student will
incur. That's really 100 percent of demonstrated need."
In the past, many schools could make that claim. However, Belvin
says, the number has shrunk to "not more than fifty, and probably
closer to twenty-five or thirty. Duke is one of the diminishing
number of institutions in this country that meet full need and promise
equal opportunity."
Promising equal opportunity has been a hallmark of Duke admissions,
as stressed by public policy professor and former associate provost
Charles Clotfelter '69, who has written extensively on financial
issues in higher education. "Here's a respect in which Duke
is very much on the high road--it is legitimately, honestly, and
completely need-blind in its decisions on admission. That cannot
be said for all selective institutions."
Nor, even in uncertain economic times, will that change. "President
Keohane came on fairly strong on this point not two years into her
tenure," Clotfelter says. "She said, this is one thing
we're going to stick with. It's the right thing for our university."
At a meeting in February, the board of trustees also reaffirmed
Duke's commitment to its need-blind admissions policy and need-based
financial aid packages, through which four of ten Duke undergraduates
receive financial assistance from the university. The annual average
grant to a financial aid recipient is projected to be more than
$19,500 in 2002-03.
"Because our endowment is not as large as many of the institutions
in both the public and private sectors with which we compete for
the best students and faculty, Duke depends on tuition income as
a critical source of budget support," says Provost Peter Lange.
Duke will be expending $36.7 million of its institutional resources
for financial aid, up 8.3 percent from last year.
Lange also says Duke will not increase the amount that financial
aid recipients are expected to provide through work-study programs
or low-interest loans. This means that any additional increase in
costs for students who receive aid from Duke will be covered through
direct grants from the university. Lange notes that the university
is continuing a new program expected to increase the international
and socio-economic diversity of its student body. "We believe
it is especially important that our students be exposed to people
of different backgrounds and cultures, and, with the trustees' support,
have initiated for the first time this year a program that will
provide financial aid to support some twenty to twenty-five students
each year from other countries," he says. "That will continue
next year."
"As times have changed, as institutions--both public and
private--have become more expensive, as resources have become more
difficult to come by, many institutions have moved away from those
policies," Belvin says. "The singular statement about
Duke is that Duke has, through the years, made this commitment.
It says that we are the kind of education that is for the brightest--once
the student has demonstrated that they deserve to be here, finances
should not hold them back."
This has value for the students, and for Duke as well. When a
school decides that only the top 60 percent of its applicants will
be deemed eligible for aid consideration, 40 percent have, in a
sense, paid up front to get in simply by being able to afford to
enroll. Says Clotfelter, "We have a challenging academic program,
and at the end of those four years, you get a degree, and that has
some value. Some of it is market value, some of it is nonmarket
value, but it is value.
"It is in our interest to say that that degree cannot be
bought in any way, either up front with money or with being more
affluent. If we have to say, 'Yes, but the bottom third of the class
doesn't have aid given to them,' that begins to take us away from
being able to say the poorest young woman in the worst barrio of
our country, if she exerts herself and shows promise, can get into
Duke and her way will be paid."
This brings up a question, however, and it is one for which Duke
has been seeking an answer. Does the cost of Duke--even with financial
aid--create a privileged undergraduate student body? While the long-term
answer might be changing, the short-term answer is yes, to the chagrin
of administrators, who saw the figures they are working to change
go national in a Wall Street Journal article last summer. The article,
which focused on then-junior Julie Byrd and her economic circumstances,
charged that Duke has "the worst economic diversity" among
five similar schools in a 2000 survey--that it was a university
of "haves and haves."
"It's recognized that the average income of families sending
their kids to Duke is about as high an average as you're going to
find at any institution," says Clotfelter. "We're not
in danger of being overrun by needy students. And I think it's a
legitimate criticism you could make, that Duke and many of its ilk
don't give enough attention to the low-income non-minority student."
"You know as well as I do that Duke has a wealthy student
body," says Belvin. "And we have a very, very poor group
of students here as well. We've probably got 300 or so students
whose parents can't afford to pay a dime. There are a number of
students whose only [financial aid] expense is to work during the
summer, and have work-study jobs during the academic year. There's
no required contribution from the parents, because we've looked
at the numbers and we understand that they can't do it. There are
a surprising number of kids like that on campus."
One of the implications of The Wall Street Journal article was
that while the poorest, most disadvantaged students received assistance
and the wealthiest, most advantaged students didn't need any, some
students from the lower-middle-class were falling through the cracks.
While Belvin says financial-aid policies are sometimes necessarily
constrained by federal requirements, his office exists not only
to pass out funds, but also to help families manage the financial
burden of college. "You can run into a parent who wants to
pay for the first year the first year, the second the second, be
done when the student graduates," he says. "That's nice
if you can do that--it's probably not realistic for most families.
Most of us are paying for everything with tomorrow's dollars.
"We view the entire student body as our constituent group.
Even for families that have the resources and can afford to come
to Duke, there can be a question of how they're going to pay for
it," he says. The office helps families find loans, formulate
a time-payment policy, uncover work options for the student.
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