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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Top-Rated Colleges Drop SAT Requirement for Admissions Applicants

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:27:00 GMT

Smith College in Massachusetts and Wake Forest University in North Carolina recently joined the nearly 30 percent of all 760 four-year colleges and universities in the country that no longer require the submission of SAT or other standardized test scores as a condition for admission, according to an article on CNN.com (“More Colleges Move Toward Optional SATs,” May 30, 2008).

Although many other institutions have previously gone SAT and ACT-optional, Smith and Wake Forest are the first top-30 schools on U.S. News & World Report’s Top Liberal Arts Colleges list and Top National Universities list, respectively, to drop the requirement. Smith College ranked 17^th on 2008’s top liberal arts colleges list and Wake Forest came in 30^th out of the nation’s top universities.

"We in admissions have put up a barrier to these students to say all of your hard work and all of your academic achievement is being negated by one test, and we don't feel like that is fair," said Martha Allman, Wake Forest’s director of admissions, in the Chicago Tribune (“University to Drop Required ACT, SAT,” May 27, 2008).

Under the new policy, Wake Forest will still allow applicants to submit SAT and ACT scores if they choose, but will start placing more emphasis on personal interviews, academics, and extracurricular activities.

College consultant Jack Maguire, founder of Maguire Associates, believes that schools which become test-optional, like Wake Forest, focus their admissions decisions on what’s really important.

"I do think it improves a school's image," he said. "It shows… they're really interested in increasing diversity."

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Student Loan Blog : Maguire Associates

Davidson College Sees Positive Results After Eliminating Student Loans

Top-Rated Colleges Drop SAT Requirement for Admissions Applicants