Reed College goes insensitively need-sensitive
by CarolineReed College, in need… — Reed now costs $50 thousand a year, has an endowment of more than $350 million, and will not be accepting students who need too much financial aid. This is need-sensitive as opposed to need-blind, which the New York Times stupidly describes this way:
… accepting students based purely on merit, without regard to wealth, and still meeting their financial need. Only the nation’s richest colleges do that.
My alma mater, Beloit College, was need-blind until some point in the last few years, with a student body similar in size to Reed’s and an endowment of, wait for it, about $100 million. I call bullshit on this Reed debacle. Moreover, Beloit sure as shit didn’t cost $50 large a year, and only around one third of students paid the ticket price of around $35 thousand — most were accepted on an assumed discounted tuition rate (myself included), with variable aid on top of that depending on academic performance and other application factors.
Reed is the Harvard of weirdy schools, and many Beloit students either longed to go to Reed or had friends who ended up there. The last thing weirdy schools need is to have even wealthier student bodies.
2 responses
To say my statement was misleading is a quibble — for most students, acceptance is contingent on financial aid, and the bottom line is that Reed can’t support them anymore.
Beloit’s financial profile has changed a lot since I was there, which is why combining 2003 numbers with 2009 numbers isn’t working out for you. As I stated here, they went need sensitive, and I have no idea what the new numbers are or how they impact the budget. My numbers are based on my time there, when I paid about a third of total ticket cost after grants and work study.
This article also led me to believe the existing student body would draw less aid, maybe not this year but in the future. Of an enrolled student whose mother lost her job this year:
In any case, your comments are well received. I feel the same way toward Beloit’s aid as you do toward Reed’s — there’s so much entendre and neologism that it’s almost impossible to really understand how financial aid works, and in any case it stinks.
“Reed [...] will not be accepting students who need too much financial aid.”
Misleading, if not outright wrong. Reed accepted and continues to accept a lot of students without regard to financial aid needs and they meet 100% of the “demonstrated need” (a piece of doublespeak endemic to higher education) of the students they admit.
The issue is what happens once the entire financial aid budget is allocated before enrollment targets have been achieved. At that point, Reed starts skipping over students with financial aid needs in favor of those who can pay full tuition. This year, that point came much sooner than usual, because there was less money for aid at the same time that more students needed aid, and needed more of it.
It’s interesting that Beloit’s endowment is only $100M while managing to maintain a similar financial aid budget. Tuition, room and board there is up to $40K. A lot of the difference between that and Reed’s tuition is probably accounted for by the higher cost of living for both students and staff between PDX.
Something seems odd though. If 1/3rd of Beloit’s ~1300 students pay full price, that works out to ~$17M. The total budget is about $55M, ~75% of which comes from tution, which works out to $41M. That leaves $24M to be covered by the other 2/3rds of the student body, which works out to almost $28K each on average. I’m using your estimates of full tuition students since I can’t find any official numbers on Beloit’s site. I’m also using a budget number from an interview with the acting president.
The average grant to Reed students receiving financial aid is $28K, and the average total aid package with grants, loans and workstudy is $32K, so the average Reed student with demonstrated need is paying or taking loans of $22K a year, $6K less than what the average Beloit student receiving aid is paying. On the other hand, only about 50% of Reed students get aid. For 2009-2010, I’m not sure how these numbers are going to change. Presumably more freshmen will be full-tuition, but that is going be offset by continuing students who are drawing aid that haven’t drawn aid before, and the entire financial aid budget increased 2x as fast as tuition. The aid numbers come from Reed’s office of institutional research.
In any case, I wasn’t happy with Reed’s financial aid funding before this crisis, and I still not happy about it. I have a vain hope that this will be the kick in the ass some alumni need to step up on both contributing to the college and getting the college to focus their contributions on financial aid.