Duke's Dec. 8 commitment to dramatically increase financial aid to middle- and low-income students has not gotten nearly as much attention as it deserves, probably because Harvard became the first top-tier college to eliminate loans for all undergraduates just three days later.
But unlike Harvard's move, which merely augments that university's commitment to reducing loans for needy students, Duke's decision represents the most aggressive and unprecedented expansion of benefits in University history.
Under the new scheme, students from families with incomes under $40,000 will pay absolutely nothing toward their educations, while parental contributions will be eliminated for families making less than $60,000. No student will be obliged to borrow more than $5,000 per year, and additional loan relief will be available to those from families earning less than $100,000.
These changes are in keeping with a recent trend among elite universities, which are competing harder to attract a more socio-economically diverse student body. But Duke's decision to dramatically increase financial aid is especially surprising when you consider the relatively anemic performance of our Financial Aid Initiative.
That drive-which began as a push to create a $300-million endowment to permanently fund need-based aid (including $230 million for undergraduate support)-will conclude this year. Although the $300-million initiative began with a $100-million grant from the Duke Endowment and other early investors, progress toward the drive's core mission-raising money for need-based undergraduate aid-has been alarmingly slow.
Indeed, although the FAI is meeting or exceeding its goals for smaller programs like athletics and the Fuqua School of Business, fundraising for need-based undergraduate aid stood at $130 million in December 2007, which is $100 million short of the initiative's $230-million goal.
Even more worrisome was news that the FAI took in just $10 million for the five-month period from July 1 to Nov. 30 of last year. It took in $20 million for that same period in 2006 and at the current pace of $2 million per month, the FAI will not meet its target for undergraduate aid by this the Dec. 31, 2008 deadline.
As someone who relies on financial aid to pay for my college education, I dearly hope that this additional commitment to Duke's neediest students can reinvigorate the FAI. It is a very worthy cause that merits enthusiastic support from alumni and friends.
And yet it's hard not to notice that middle- and upper-middle class families-who make up a majority of aid recipients-are largely left out of this new plan. Although 40 percent of the student body receives financial aid, just 10.8 percent of Duke families had incomes of less than $40,000 in 2004, meaning that as much as 75 percent of financial aid recipients will still rely on student loans even after next fall's overhaul.
Viewed in this light, we can see that beneath the highbrow rhetoric, the University's new financial aid commitment serves an extremely pragmatic purpose: It is a "branding" mechanism, a way for Duke to attract more qualified applicants from the bottom half of America's income spectrum.
That is a valid institutional goal, but it also sends an unfortunate message to students from higher-income families (up to $200,000), whose needs are no less real.
Indeed, the fairness of creating a five-tier pricing system that guarantees a debt-free education to only the richest and poorest students at Duke is worth debating, since even higher-income families couldn't have anticipated that runaway inflation would leave them unable to afford college for their children.
In fact, for a University whose president has called financial aid "crucial to Duke's long-term ability to attract the very best students and to make quality education affordable for all families," it may be time to ask whether Duke shouldn't consider spending more of the multibillion-dollar windfall it's realized from profitable investments over the past two decades.
This, too, is a growing trend among our peers-including Yale, which announced just last week that it would begin drawing extra money from its endowment to fund a sharp increase in financial aid. Given that earnings from Duke's endowment, which reached nearly $1 billion last year, will fund much of the recent increase in aid, the next step is clear: Eliminate the need for harmful double standards in the financial aid process.
Even if Director of Financial Aid Jim Belvin is quite right to note that "it is not inappropriate [for] students to consider helping support their cost of attendance," we should never be satisfied with the recent decision to concentrate that burden among a progressively smaller group of financially needy students.
Kristin Butler is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every Tuesday.
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