Student Loan Blog : Princeton

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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Teach for America Sees Surge in Applications

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:40:00 GMT

Teach for America, the nonprofit program that recruits graduates of elite colleges to become teachers at underserved public schools, is on a winning streak, according to U.S. News & World Report (“Plenty of Praise for Teach for America,” June 20, 2008).

This year Teach for America applications jumped to 25,000 from 18,000 last year — a 37 percent increase. And this fall, the organization will place 3,700 new teachers in classrooms across the country, up from 2,900 last year.

A recent study by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research institution, concluded that Teach for America is successful at turning high-achieving college graduates with no prior experience or coursework in education, into effective teachers. Authors of the study found that “TFA teachers’ effect on student achievement in core classroom subjects was nearly three times the effect of teachers with three or more years of experience,” particularly in math and science.

Founded by Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp, who was recently named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people, Teach for America looks for candidates with strong critical thinking skills, solid grades, and who have the ability to influence and motivate others.

Among this year’s recruits, 90 are from the University of Michigan, 60 are from the University of Illinois, and the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Texas each have 50 graduates joining Teach for America.

The program will place teachers in more than 100 school districts located in 29 urban and rural areas this fall.

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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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