Student Loan Blog : Harvard

Top-Performing Students Denied State Scholarship Funds

Student Loan Girl — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 23:02:00 GMT

Some 1,500 Georgia high school students will not receive the state scholarship funds they were promised for becoming valedictorians or for graduating in the top of their class, The Associated Press reports (“Georgia Scholarships to End for 1,500 Students,” April 26, 2009).

In a last-minute decision, state legislators cut the Governor’s Scholarship Program out of Georgia’s 2009 state budget, leaving the state’s Student Finance Commission to notify students they won’t be receiving the financial aid they were promised for the coming academic year.

The scholarship program was created in the mid-1980s to encourage the state’s top high school graduates to choose in-state schools for their college education. Over the past few years the state has significantly reduced funding for the scholarship, cutting the program’s funds from more than $4.5 million in the mid-1990s to $1.3 million in recent years.

Governor’s Scholarship recipients also receive Georgia’s HOPE scholarships, which give students up to $3,500 to cover tuition, fees, and books at the state’s public institutions. The Governor’s Scholarship is intended to help students pay for room and board and other miscellaneous college expenses.

Some state officials have argued that the funding cuts to the program may have made it difficult for the program to meet its intended goal of retaining the state’s top students.

“[$900 is] not enough to say, ‘Instead of going to Harvard or going to Vanderbilt or going to Duke, I am going to the University of Georgia,” said president of the Georgia Student Finance Commission, Tim Connell. “It’s probably became more of an ‘attaboy’ for valedictorians.”

State Representative Kathy Ashe, a former teacher and a member of the House Education Committee, said she wasn’t made aware of the program’s elimination until she received a copy of the Student Finance Commission’s letter to students but she believes that these incentive programs are needed.

“We need to make it a priority to reward these deserving students and keep them in the state,” Ashe said. “I think it’s one of those places where priorities become very clear.”

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Harvard Inks Custom Loan Deal to Help International Graduate Students

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 23:47:00 GMT

At a time when large numbers of lenders exiting the student loan marketplace has made it more difficult for international students to find college and graduate school funding, Harvard has announced an exclusive agreement with JPMorgan Chase that will allow the school’s international graduate students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance without a co-signer, reports The Harvard Crimson (“Harvard Strikes Loan Deal,” March 2, 2009).

Considered the first deal of its kind for the banking giant, the new private loan agreement may make it easier for international students — who are ineligible for U.S. federal financial aid — to get the money they need for school.

The JPMorgan deal was arranged after Citibank announced it would no longer offer loans to Harvard’s international graduate students in October of last year, citing the frozen credit markets and higher loan default rates among international students compared to their American counterparts.

Citibank also cancelled similar arrangements with MIT and the University of Michigan, The Harvard Crimson reports.

Harvard’s arrangement with JPMorgan is part of the school’s pledge to maintain its current levels of graduate student aid for the next school year even at the expense of other programs, says Harvard President Drew Faust — a commitment she deems one of the university’s top priorities.

The university has also unveiled several expanded financial aid programs, including those for Harvard Law School and Harvard Medical School, as part of its renewed commitment to meeting student need.

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Governor Asks Pension Board, State’s Colleges to Help Keep Massachusetts Student Loan Provider Afloat

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:46:00 GMT

A week after the cash-strapped Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority announced that its 40,000 borrowers would have to find a new private student loan provider, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has asked the Massachusetts pension fund to invest $50 million in the state loan agency.

Patrick’s proposal would involve the Massachusetts pension fund buying portions of a $425 million bond sale that MEFA is planning for later this month, reports The Boston Globe (“A Late Try to Salvage Student Loans,” Aug. 7, 2008).

The governor also intends to ask Boston College, Harvard, MIT, and the University of Massachusetts, among other schools in the state, to make similar investments in MEFA bonds.

“This is an idea we’re definitely going to explore,” said Robert Connolly, a UMass spokesman. “We do see it as a potential win-win in terms of providing the university with a sound investment while helping families cope with their financial aid challenges.”

But State Treasurer Timothy Cahill, chairman of the state pension board, remained noncommittal in response to the governor’s request, saying only that the board would consider the proposal.

The emergency measure, put forward to the state pension board yesterday, is meant to generate liquidity for MEFA, which left thousands of families scrambling to find a new student loan provider just weeks before fall tuition bills are due and at a time when a number of other student loan lenders, feeling squeezed by the troubled credit markets, are tightening their credit criteria for private student loans. MEFA would use proceeds from the bond sale to finance new student loans.

Although MEFA, until last week, had still been offering fixed-rate private student loans, the agency stopped offering federal student loans in April, citing the troubled economy and fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis. The nonprofit student loan authority provided more than $500 million in college loans to Massachusetts students last year.

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Governor Launches Website to Help Massachusetts Families Find Student Loans

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:32:00 GMT

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has set up a financial assistance website to help the 40,000 families who were previously served by the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority to find a new student loan provider for the 2008–09 academic year, following MEFA’s announcement on July 28 that it was suspending its private student loan program.

The news that MEFA would no longer be offering private student loans came just weeks before fall tuition payments are due and a mere three months after the state agency suspended its federal student loan program, citing the troubled economy and continuing fallout from the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. MEFA’s announcement last week marks the first time in the lender’s nearly 30-year history that it won’t be able to provide any student loans, federal or private.

The governor’s new student loans website gives borrowers an overview of student loans and the different types of student loans still available, provides links for families to compare the interest rates being offered by certain private student loan lenders, and brings together information on scholarship resources.

“It is critical for our students to be able to pay for the colleges of their choosing,” said Gov. Patrick. “I have directed my team to make available a list of resources to help students and their families locate the information they need to finance education this fall and beyond.”

Late yesterday, Gov. Patrick also made a move aimed at restoring liquidity to MEFA, asking the Massachusetts pension fund to invest $50 million in the state student loan agency by buying MEFA bonds — MEFA would use the proceeds from the bond sale to finance new student loans. The governor intends to approach Boston College, Harvard, MIT, and the University of Massachusetts, among other schools in the state, about making similar investments.

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Senator Pushes Colleges for Enhanced Oversight of Funded Research and Endowments

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 04:57:00 GMT

Sen. Charles Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, wants colleges to be held more accountable in both their academic research and their endowment spending, according to a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Sen. Grassley Pressures Universities on Science Conflicts and Financial Aid,” July 25, 2008).

In an exclusive interview with the Chronicle, Grassley said the National Institutes of Health should revoke any of the grants it awards to scientists if a researcher fails to report a conflict of interest with her or his institution. The senator has singled out several institutions of higher education, including Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of Cincinnati, after his office determined that some scientists at these schools had not fully reported their own financial interests in research projects supported by the NIH, as research institutions are required to do by law.

Grassley has asked 20 other colleges and universities to provide details about possible financial conflicts of interest between university researchers and the NIH.

Colleges Need to Direct More of Their Endowment Funds Toward Financial Aid

The senator has also criticized academic institutions with large endowments for spending too little on financial aid for disadvantaged students. The senator recently asked 136 schools to specify how they spend their endowment income.

Institutions that responded indicated that much of these endowments comes from donors who have earmarked their financial gifts for purposes other than financial aid. The senator said he wasn’t persuaded by the argument and noted that he may still pursue legislation that would require universities to spend as much as 5 percent of their endowments each year, although he hopes such a requirement won’t be necessary.

Grassley stated that he may not sponsor such legislation if more schools begin voluntarily following the example set by some of the nation’s elite institutions that began funneling more of their endowment funds to student financial aid packages earlier this year.

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Massachusetts Shortchanges College Students on Financial Aid

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:04:00 GMT

Although Massachusetts is known as a hub for higher education, the state lags behind other states in awarding financial aid to college students, a shortfall that many educators say is limiting access to a college education for low-income and minority families, according to an article in The Boston Globe (“State Lags on Student Grants,” July 13, 2008).

For the upcoming 2008–09 academic year, Massachusetts will only award about $83 million in college grants, an amount that trails the grant budgets of comparable states. Indiana will award $331 million in grant aid to students, while South Carolina, which has about 2 million fewer residents than Massachusetts, has dedicated $273 million.

With little money awarded in state grants, Massachusetts students often need to take out student loans, particularly private student loans — which tend to be more costly than federal college loans — to cover the remainder of their college costs.

“There’s simply not enough money in the system,” said Massachusetts Senator Robert O’Leary, chairman of the Joint Committee on Higher Education. “It just hasn’t kept pace with the growth in costs and the increasing number of students who need financial aid. Every year, we’re losing ground.”

The escalating cost of tuition at public and private colleges and universities makes this funding shortage more acute. Massachusetts state grant aid covers less than 5 percent of college costs compared with the national average of 19 percent. Educators say the problem has been magnified by the state’s reliance on its deep-pocketed private colleges like Harvard and MIT to provide the bulk of financial assistance.

Low-income students who qualify for Massachusetts’ main grant program are awarded an average of $780, an amount that doesn’t even cover the total cost of textbooks, which cost students an average of $900.

Governor Deval Patrick is expected to sign a bill that would increase financial aid by $3 million.

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Davidson College Sees Positive Results After Eliminating Student Loans

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 03:44:00 GMT

While Princeton was the first university to completely eliminate student loans from its financial aid packages in 2001, it was Harvard’s announcement to follow in Princeton’s footsteps this fall that garnered national media attention as no-loan financial aid policies for 2008–09 began to turn up at elite colleges and universities across the country: Amherst, Columbia, Dartmouth, Stanford, Swarthmore, Yale.

So far, some 50 institutions across the country have implemented no-loan and loan-cap financial aid policies, according to the Project on Student Debt, a nonprofit advocacy group — in some cases for all students; in others, only for students whose families fall below a certain income cutoff, although that cutoff runs as high as $150,000 a year at some schools.

After stinging rebukes from legislators critical of yearly tuition-hikes that have outstripped inflation and the proliferation of costly private student loans in undergraduate debt loads, many of the nation’s richest schools have moved to reduce student dependency on college loans and to entice greater numbers of low- and middle-income students to enroll at their institutions.

But it’s a small, selective liberal arts institution in North Carolina — Davidson College — that’s already seeing the results of eliminating student loans from its financial aid packages (“At Davidson, Getting Rid of Loans Shows Early Signs of Success,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 11, 2008).

While the long-term, broader nationwide impact of these new financial aid policies may not be seen for a few years, Davidson — which got a head start over the rest of the Ivy Leagues by instituting its no-loan policy a year earlier, in the fall of 2007 — has already experienced a three-percent jump this year in the number of incoming students who demonstrate financial need.

Although Davidson’s endowment of $489 million is much smaller than the multibillion-dollar endowments of its Ivy League competitors, the school has set a goal to have 40 percent of its incoming students receiving only need-based aid by 2011 — a plan that Davidson’s dean of admissions and financial aid, Christopher Gruber, says will cost $3.5 million to implement.

"We're moving in the right direction with a year to promote it," Gruber says.

Davidson’s early results aren’t surprising, says Jonathan Epstein, from the education consulting firm Maguire Associates. But families shouldn’t expect no-loan policies to become the norm. “My take is, it’s not something that, as announced policy, is going to spread across the country.”

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In Fight to Lower Tuition, Small Universities May Be Harmed

Student Loan Girl — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:43:00 GMT

Some small U.S. colleges and universities are concerned that they may be the target of a new bill that would force schools with multi -billion dollar endowments, like Harvard, to reduce their tuition costs, and place other high-tuition institutions without large endowments at a financial disadvantage when competing for students, according to an article on Bloomberg.com (“Kennedy’s Tuition List Targets Harvard, Wounds Bates” June 19, 2008).

This year President Bush is expected to review the portion of the reauthorized Higher Education Act that requires the Department of Education to maintain lists of schools that have the highest and fastest-growing costs of attendance. These lists would have rankings in six categories for nine different types of schools, including four-year private schools and for-profit two-year or technical colleges. If approved by the president, the lists would go into effect in 2011.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, who called the rankings a national “watch list” last July, is pushing for the legislation to hold schools “accountable for skyrocketing college costs.” College administrators counter that they’re being punished for expenses beyond their control, and smaller colleges, that don’t have huge endowments, may be the most affected.

“It is totally unfair and it is cheap politics,” said Leon Botstein, president of New York’s Bard College. “This is fighting the wrong people. Most colleges are being penalized due to the actions of a few wealthy ones.”

Watch Lists Portray Schools’ Costs Inaccurately

College officials like Terry Beckmann, vice president for finance at Bates College in Maine, believe that the lists, known in the industry as “the wall of shame,” have the potential to be embarrassing for schools and misleading for students.

He cites his college’s ranking as evidence: Bates is listed as having the most expensive tuition in the 2006—07 academic year among private four-year schools. While room and board are included in Bates’ $44,350-price tag, other schools listed lower on the list do not incorporate these figures, creating an inaccurate representation of actual costs.

Alternately, Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif. who originally proposed the watch lists, believes the rankings will “help parents and students make better decisions” for college.

McKeon commented that grocery stores have several different price options when selecting one type of apple over another. “In education, you don’t really get that kind of opportunity,” he said.

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Harvard Professor Urges Students to Consider Public Service Over Wall Street

Student Loan Girl — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:53:00 GMT

A Harvard University education professor is challenging undergraduates at elite colleges to forgo high-paying consulting and finance jobs, for careers in public service.

The professor, Howard Gardner, is leading seminars at Harvard and, Amherst College in Massachusetts, and Colby College in Maine, to encourage undergraduates to reflect more seriously on the connection between their education and their aspirations, according to an article in The New York Times (“Big Paycheck or Service? Students Are Put to Test,” June 23, 2008).

“Are Ivy League schools simply becoming selecting mechanisms for Wall Street?” Gardner asks.

Gardner’s question has college officials at these schools contemplating whether too many of their top students, some of whom might otherwise choose to enter professions that aren’t measured by financial success, are choosing money over their ideals.

“We’re in the business of graduating people who will make the world better in some way,” says Anthony Marx, president of Amherst College. “That’s what justifies the expense of the education.”

Corporate Jobs Hold Big Appeal for College Graduates With Student Loans

Some universities, like Amherst, Harvard, Tufts University, and the University of Pennsylvania, are so concerned about corporate America’s hold over new graduates, that they have expanded their public service fellowship and internship programs.

This year Tufts announced it would pay off college loans for graduates who choose to work in the public-service sector. And officials at Harvard, Penn, Amherst, and a number of other colleges tell the Times that one reason they have begun offering financial aid packages that offer more grant money than student loans, is so their students don’t feel pressured to pursue lucrative careers just to be able to pay off their college debt.

While colleges and universities are taking steps to give graduates more freedom in choosing a career path by offering expanded financial aid, some students still prefer the safe, financially secure route.

Akshay Ganju, who wanted to become a doctor when he enrolled at Harvard four years ago, recently accepted a full-time job with Bain & Company, a global management consulting firm. The generous salary, he says, will make it possible for him to pay off his college loans.

“I don’t think the point of our education is to make us rich,” Ganju said. “We all feel we want to do something meaningful beyond just accumulating wealth.”

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Laptop Bans by College Professors May Improve Class Discussions

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:39:00 GMT

Some professors at the nation’s most prominent law schools are resorting to classroom laptop bans to help reengage law students in lectures and discussions, and, despite students’ claims that the anti-laptop policies deny them a proper education, professors are seeing positive results, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Law Professors Rule Laptops Out of Order in Class,” June 13, 2008).

Don Herzog, University of Michigan Law School professor, conducted a one-day laptop ban as an experiment.

“Not only was I stunned by how much better the class was, the students volunteered that it was much better,” he said. Herzog will make the ban permanent when he begins teaching again this fall after completing his sabbatical.

In addition to Herzog, law professors at Florida International University, the University of Wisconsin, Georgetown, and Harvard, have enacted laptop-ban policies for their classroom lectures.

David Cole, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, stopped allowing his students to bring laptops to class two years go. A survey of Cole’s students conducted last year regarding his “no laptop” policy found that approximately 75 percent of his students favored the laptop ban and 95 percent admitted to using the internet to engage in activities not related to the class lecture.

“If half the people [in class] are checked out, then the conversation just isn’t going to be as rich,” Cole said.

Not All Educators Agree with Anti-Laptop Policies

Ann Althouse, University of Wisconsin Law School professor, says that there will always be distracted students with or without the internet. Before the web, she says, students doodled, fidgeted, or stared absentmindedly out the window.

“The idea that we're going to somehow save these students from being distracted is a bit absurd,” Althouse told the Chronicle.

With the proliferation of iPhones, Blackberrys, and other PDAs, it may soon be difficult to regulate who’s surfing the Web, says Harvard Business School professor John Deighton.

“Ultimately the only way to ensure that a class member is not on the Web,” he says, “is to conduct an engaging class.”

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Oxford to Raise $2.5 Billion to Compete with U.S. Ivy Leagues

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:34:00 GMT

In an effort to keep up its better-funded Ivy League competition in the United States, the University of Oxford in London has embarked on the largest fundraising campaign in European academic history, reports The Christian Science Monitor (“Oxford Shakes Up British Higher Education with Fundraising Drive,” May 29, 2008).

Instead of raising tuition, which is currently capped at £3,000 (roughly $6,000) a year, and at the behest of the British government, which is urging British institutions to “become as useful as their U.S. counterparts,” Oxford announced a plan to raise a target $2.5 billion in endowments and alumni support. The school has already received commitments for an approximate $1.15 billion during the campaign’s pre-launch phase.

The money will go toward recruiting top academic talent from around the world, toward supporting Oxford’s unique one-on-one tutorial system, and toward keeping up with the school’s U.S. rivals.

“We want to stay world class; we want to be the best in the world,” said university chancellor Chris Patten, noting that Oxford lags well behind at least three Ivies — Harvard, Yale, and Princeton — in terms of funding. “We want to compete in the world economy for the best academics.”

The combined endowments of all British universities total less than half of Harvard’s $34 billion endowment, according to numbers from the Sutton Trust, an educational charity.

“The extent of endowments in the U.K. is minuscule in terms of what U.S. universities are receiving,” said Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education at the University of Buckingham.

Oxford and the University of Cambridge together account for 80 percent of the British endowment total, with the other more than 100 British universities barely reaching a collective $3.8 billion. Cambridge, for its part, launched a fundraising campaign of its own three years ago, raising over $1.3 billion.

“The U.S. is a long way ahead,” Cambridge spokesman Gregory Hayman told The Monitor, “but our view is that the reason there hasn’t been a culture of giving in the U.K. is that there hasn’t been a culture of asking.”

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Controversial Saudi Prince Funds Islamic Centers Abroad

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:34:00 GMT

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Alsaud, a member of Saudi Arabia’s ruling family, has endowed $31 million to Britain’s Cambridge and Edinburgh universities to create research centers devoted to Islamic studies.

The two academic centers will focus on projects designed to encourage understanding between Islamic and Western cultures. The prince has also financed the creation of two centers for American studies in the Arab world, at the American University of Beirut and the The American University in Cairo.

Yasir Suleiman, director of the Centre of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Cambridge, told The Chronicle of Higher Education the prince’s donation has not yet raised any concerns about each centers' scholarly independence, as the prince’s similar donations to Harvard and Georgetown universities did three years ago (“2 British Universities to Benefit From Saudi Prince’s Gifts,” May 9, 2008).

In 2005, the prince donated $20 million to each Harvard and Georgetown to further the schools’ long-standing traditions of scholarship in Muslim and Arab cultural studies.

At the time, some U.S. lawmakers expressed their concerned that the prince, who completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees in the United States, would attempt to use his donations to exert influence over the academic direction of the centers. But John Esposito, director of Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, said the prince has been hands off in his endeavor.

The prince has been attempting to foster intercultural dialogue with the United States since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Chronicle reports. However, his $10-million offer to the Twin Towers Orphan Fund — an educational and welfare assistance program for children orphaned after Sept. 11,2001 — was rebuffed after Rudolph Giuliani, then mayor of New York City, learned the prince said the United States’ policies in the Middle East were among the “issues that led to such a criminal attack.”

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Stanford School of Medicine Won't Follow Harvard's or Yale's Financial Aid Initiatives

Student Loan Girl — Sat, 10 May 2008 18:04:00 GMT

Students at the Stanford School of Medicine will not be offered the same type of tuition breaks students attending rival medical schools Harvard and Yale will see next year.

Harvard Medical School and the Yale School of Medicine recently announced they are eliminating the expected family contribution for households that earn less $120,000 and $100,000, respectively.

Charles Prober, Stanford’s senior associate dean of medical student education, told The Stanford Daily that there are no plans to extend such an offer to Stanford medical students (“No Change in Store for Med School Aid,” May 5, 2008).

Stanford a Leader in Minimizing Medical Students Loan Debt

However, he pointed out that Stanford is already a leader in medical school affordability. Stanford graduates have less student loan debt than those who graduate from competing schools, he said. Stanford’s 2007 graduating class had a debt of $78,000 in student loans, compared to $98,953 at Harvard and $115,385 at Yale.

The median medical school debt is $140,000, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Stanford also sets a cap on the amount of federal student loans that can be borrowed each year, which this year is $13,500. If students have remaining tuition costs after the estimated parental contribution is determined, the school covers up to $30,000 of a student’s remaining costs with a need-based grant.

Student Loans Aren’t the Only Option

Students must cover any remaining costs with private student loans or other sources but Stanford, Prober said, offers its students a number of alternatives to student loans.

Medical students can earn up to $72,000 in Stanford’s Medical Scholars research Program by doing health-related research projects. Students can also offset their tuition costs by working as teaching assistants, a job in which they can earn about $18,000 per quarter. After 13 quarters, Stanford drops its tuition costs by 80 percent.

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Elite Korean Schools Prep Students for American Ivy Leagues

Student Loan Girl — Sat, 10 May 2008 17:11:00 GMT

South Korea has some 103,000 students studying at American colleges and universities, outnumbered only by students from India and China, nations which have more than 20 times the population of South Korea, writes Sam Dillon of The New York Times (“Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League Skills,” April 27, 2008).

“Going to U.S. universities has become like a huge fad in Korean society, and the Ivy League names — Harvard, Yale, Princeton — have really struck a nerve,” said Victoria Kim, a Harvard University graduate who attended Daewon Foreign Language High School in South Korea.

Secrets to Their Success

Those attending Kim’s alma mater have become notorious for achieving outstanding success — all but a few of the 133 Daewon students who applied to selective American schools this spring were accepted, Dillon says.

The school’s formula is a relatively simple one.

Administrators place South Korea’s top-scoring middle school students who want to attend an American university in special English classes.
These English-specific classes focus on teaching composition skills which are critical for taking American standardized tests and producing college admissions essays.
The school emphasizes unceasing study during rigorous 17-hour days.

Stringent Standards, Requirements, and Fierce Study Habits Produce Results

At schools like Daewon and its rival, the Minjok Leadership Academy, the requirements of students are much different than those at the average U.S. high school or even most U.S. prep schools.

The admissions process resembles those used by American colleges and universities. Just one admission requirement of Daewon’s students is fluency in at least two foreign languages besides English. And both Daewon’s and Minjok’s academic years are one month longer than those of American high schools, Dillon says.

Grueling days filled with hours of studying are commonplace. Students’ often start at 6 a.m. followed by hours of English-based and South Korean-based curriculum. Classes end at 7:45 p.m., but the bell indicating the end of study hall doesn’t ring until 10:50 p.m. and even then teachers still end up receiving emails from students until 5 a.m.

Kim Hyun-kyung, a 17-year-old Daewon student, views each day as an accomplishment.

“I feel proud that I’ve endured another day,” she told the Times.

To drive home how seriously the school takes studying, at one time a banner hung on one of the Minjok buildings that read: “This school is a paradise for those who want to study and a hell for those who do not.”

Families Push Just as Hard as Schools

The expectation of excellence doesn’t end with teachers and administrators.

“Most Korean mothers want their children to get 100 on all the tests in all the subjects,” said one student’s mother. Her daughter, a recent Daewon graduate, learned this lesson from watching her older sister being scolded for getting anything less than a perfect score on her tests.

If statistics are any indicator, all that studying and pressure to do well may be paying off for many of these students.

Sixty-seven Daewon graduates achieved perfect 800 math scores on their SATs, Dillon said. And, the average combined SAT score (verbal and math) for Daewon students was 2203 out of 2400. As a basis for comparison, students at Phillips Exeter, the prestigious New Hampshire boarding school, scored 2085 on average on their combined SAT scores.

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The New Financial Aid Landscape

Student Loan Girl — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 19:41:00 GMT

In the last few months, the media has been drawn to the potential student loan crisis, focusing on how students will be able to weather accessibility issues to get the funds they need for college next fall.

At the same time, many of the country’s top colleges and universities have been revamping their financial aid programs to better assist parents and students in covering their college costs.

Schools Modifying Financial Aid Programs

To date, about 50 schools have made substantial changes to their financial aid programs, writes Anne Marie Chaker of The Wall Street Journal (“The New Math of College Financing,” April 21, 2008).

Several schools have chosen to replace student loans with grant money that won’t need to be repaid, effectively lowering their tuition. Others have waived tuition costs altogether for families that fall below a specific income. Some have capped the amount of money a family is required to contribute toward college costs at a certain percentage of the family’s yearly income.

Student Loans Being Replaced with Grants

Undergraduates attending Stanford, Dartmouth, Harvard, M.I.T., Yale, or Cornell next fall now have a better chance of graduating with less debt from student loans, thanks to a significant shift in the financial aid programs at these schools.

Under pressure from Congress, with legislators questioning growing student debt levels and skyrocketing tuition costs that outpace inflation even as the wealthiest schools report endowments of $500 million or more, colleges and universities with sizeable endowments are tapping into those endowments to replace student loans with grants in their financial aid awards.

Although Harvard is using grant awards to eliminate student loans from its financial aid packages entirely, other schools are reserving these loan-replacement grants for families at qualifying income levels, Chaker notes.

Cornell, for example, in the 2009–10 academic year, will only replace student loans with grants for families making less than $75,000 annually. (The threshold was $60,000 for the current school year.) Students from families earning between $75,000 and $120,000 a year may still be awarded student loans, but those loans will be capped at $3,000 for 2009–10.

Tuition Waivers for Middle-Income Families

A handful of the nation’s top schools have also implemented programs that eliminate tuition charges completely for middle-income and even upper-middle-income families, with qualifying income levels as high as $100,000.

At M.I.T. and Dartmouth, families who make less than $75,000 a year will be able to send their children to college at zero tuition cost (although they may still have to cover room and board, books, and other living expenses). At Stanford, the income cutoff for a tuition waiver is $100,000 (with assets typical for that income level).

Family Contribution Capped Even for $100K+ Incomes

Last year, Harvard announced “one of the most ambitious [financial aid] plans out there,” writes Chaker, allowing families earning between $120,000 and $180,000 a year, with standard corresponding assets, to put just 10 percent of their annual income toward their child’s cost to attend — in other words, paying only between $12,000 and $18,000 of the 2008-09 sticker price of roughly $50,000.

Yale followed on Harvard’s heels with its own 10-percent policy that went even further up the income bracket, applying to families who make up to $200,000 a year.

As part of these new financial aid plans, both Yale and Harvard require that students contribute between $2,500 and $4,000 of their own funds, earned through a part-time or summer job or both, in addition to their parents’ 10-percent contribution.

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