When it comes to financial aid, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Rice have it right; Duke has it wrong.
That is why President Richard Brodhead's recent commitment to a new fundraising initiative devoted to financial aid is so important and why students and faculty alike must hold him to it. Over the last decade, the universities we like to call our peers have diversified their student bodies by making a superior education more affordable. Yale watched Harvard free parents earning $40,000 or less from paying anything, witnessed their application rate soar and then instituted a similar policy with great success.
This is one area where our new president can borrow some wisdom from his alma mater.
Over the past decade, Duke has taken a starkly different course. The magnificently successful $2.2-billion Campaign for Duke, for which most credit goes to good ol' Nan, was terribly unbalanced. Duke has already earmarked nearly all of the funds for new buildings, departmental enhancements and other campus improvements.
That's all well and good-though I wait for the day when Trinity is subsumed into the Pratt University of Duke-but it should not be at the expense of a more progressive financial aid policy. What Duke has done is make the university more attractive to the students who can already afford to go here.
One need only to think back two years to the infamous Wall Street Journal article that detailed Duke's unique policy of pursuing the rich in an effort to get their sons and daughters to apply (read: attend). This policy comes, of course, at the expense of admitting 100 to 150 more qualified and ethnically diverse applicants.
Duke even has its own army of more than 200 super-wealthy, non-alumni parents who do the work of sniffing out vats of greenbacks in America's suburbs-when they're not busy scribbling five- and six-figure checks to the University.
As one of these Duke parents said of her daughter, who graduated last year but whom I will not name, "Did my normal child take the place of somebody who could really make a difference in the world? Sure, yes, to an extent. But there are so many things you can lose sleep over." Is this the attitude Duke wants to emulate in its admissions process?
The numbers suggest that it is. As The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle and Thread have all published, the largest single block of Duke students-30 percent-come from families earning more than $200,000 a year as of 2003. That's up from 2001. Thus, a demographic representing a plurality of Duke students reflects only 2.5 percent of U.S. households. Students from families earning $100,000 to $200,000 comprise another 33 percent of the Duke population.
The trend of wealth consolidation at Duke is disturbing for many reasons. I will include myself to two. First, colleges and universities are centers of exploration and learning, minus the caveat, "when financially feasible." If universities pride themselves on bettering society by introducing well-trained critical thinkers into the world-as we assume they do-then it is hypocritical to merely help students rise from privilege to power while neglecting the rest.
Second, the more wealthy and super-wealthy students that enroll, the less Duke will feel like a liberal arts school and the more it will become a pre-professional stepping stone to law school, medical school and a successful career in i-banking. The fact is that more high-income families have professional careers in the high-octane, less reflective fields of business and finance than in academia, public service and the like. Students' preferences for professional careers oftentimes reflect those of their parents, making it no mystery why economics is consistently Duke's most popular major.
Duke will have lost something if its students are more concerned with getting somewhere in the world than in shaping it through reflective analysis.
Finally, all the whining over Duke's paltry endowment as a financial obstacle has to stop. Money has something to do with it, but priorities play a much bigger role. Duke's endowment is $2.8 billion, and while that's not nearly Harvard's $22 billion or even Stanford's $10 billion, it is much closer to that of Rice.
How can Rice, a comparable university to Duke with a measly $3-billion endowment, offer a top-notch education for $32,800, while Duke must charge nearly $42,000? And how can Rice wipe out all costs for families earning less than $30,000, but Duke can't? Free iPods, anyone?
It's about priorities. President Brodhead's initial promise to make Duke more accessible to the less-than-super-wealthy is a step in the right direction. Now he must put Duke's money where his mouth is.
Jared Fish is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Thursday.
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