Duke: No plans to follow 'Carolina Covenant'

Although University officials did not entirely dismiss the possibility of a financial aid package akin to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's recently announced "Carolina Covenant," they said Duke is not currently considering the adoption of such a plan for its own low-income students.

Under the Carolina Covenant, announced Wednesday, UNC will pay for all the costs of a four-year undergraduate education for low-income students, as long as the participating students work on campus 10 to 12 hours per week. The plan will go into effect next fall and will be available to all UNC students whose family income is at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level.

James Belvin, Duke's director of financial aid, noted that Duke currently has a financial aid program for low-income students, which does not fund students' education entirely through grants, but does provide a reduced loan amount in student aid packages. There are currently about 275 students participating in Duke's low-income financial aid program, which is applicable to students whose family income is less than $40,000.

Belvin said the University has not yet made any decisions regarding the Carolina Covenant, but that he will consider the issue as he considers all of the University's various financial aid packaging policies during the budget process in late fall and early spring.

William Chafe, dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences, said a package at Duke similar to the Carolina Covenant is not a likely possibility given the current state of the Arts and Sciences budget.

"Overall, considering the cost of our tuition, it's probably not possible to eliminate the loan component, although we do make every effort to cap it at a reasonable rate so that no one is burdened by excessive debt when they graduate," Chafe said.

He noted that the amount the University spends on financial aid has gone up at a much higher rate over the last year, and is expected to increase at an even greater rate in the next three years than it has in the past five years.

"We're already spending a significantly larger amount on financial aid than we were in the past in terms of overall budget," Chafe said. "To push it even further might well create more problems."

Arts and Sciences faces budget deficits for the foreseeable future, in part because its financial aid costs increased with reduced federal support and an increased eligibility for financial aid following a change in the formula used to calculate students' financial aid gifts. Recently, the University's central administration capped the amount Arts and Sciences must contribute to students' financial aid in order to alleviate some of the budget problems.

Belvin agreed that funding would be an issue should the University decide to adopt a program like the Carolina Covenant.

"We provide a huge amount in grant resources already to support needy students and ensure access and affordability," Belvin said. "Public universities don't provide such substantial amounts of grant support because tuition is already so low."

Still, Carolina's new policy will require it to raise $1.38 million for financial aid for low-income students. "There's cost accounting, not only here, but there as well," Belvin said. "As you can imagine, there's not a lot of money just sitting around at a university. For us, it would be a question of reallocation of resources or of fundraising for new money."

Belvin added, however, that funding is not the only thing standing in the way of a Duke version of the Carolina Covenant. Even if the University had the additional resources to fund a "Duke Covenant," he said, it would still have to keep in mind the needs of those students whose family income falls above Duke's definition of "low-income" and ensure that those resources were distributed equitably.