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AROUND THE QUADS
At a time when need-blind admissions and full-need financial aid are under increasing pressure, University President George Rupp and the presidents of 27 other leading colleges and universities (including three other Ivies) have reaffirmed their commitment to the idea of financial aid based on financial need by endorsing a comprehensive set of principles designed to bring greater clarity, simplicity and fairness to the process of assessing each family's ability to pay for college. In the agreement, which was announced on July 6, the presidents affirmed several general principles: Parents and students should contribute toward educational expenses according to their ability. Families with similar financial profiles should contribute similar amounts. Institutions should evaluate both income and assets in determining a family's ability to pay. Each institution agreed to inform applicants about the policies and practices it applies when measuring a family's ability to pay, carry out financial aid policies consistently, and support the awarding of need-based aid. The presidents also agreed on a new "Consensus Approach to Need Analysis" that campus financial aid officials should use in determining financial aid eligibility. The new guidelines, which address issues not covered in guidelines for federal aid, are designed to make higher education more accessible. In general, the presidents expect that because of this agreement, parent financial contributions to a college education will decrease and the amount of aid provided by the institutions will increase. No institution will reduce the amount it currently invests in financial aid. The guidelines, which could take more than a year to implement fully, are designed to adjust for the higher cost of living in certain areas of the country (such as New York, the Bay Area and Washington, D.C.), protect moderate-income families whose homes have skyrocketed in value, clarify procedures for determining the family income of students with divorced parents, and make allowances for parents not covered in retirement programs. The agreement is the result of the 568 Presidents' Working Group, an ad hoc committee of college and university presidents who have worked together to develop policies to enhance access to higher education. (The name comes from Section 568 of the Improving America's Schools Act, an antitrust exemption that allows colleges that practice need-blind admissions to discuss financial aid eligibility principles, but not financial aid awards.) The group, formed in 1999 under the leadership of Cornell University President Hunter Rawlings, who continues as its chair, and Harry Payne, then-president of Williams College, focused exclusively on strengthening need-based aid programs. To make the awarding of financial aid more transparent and less confusing, the 28 schools pledged to carry out the principles consistently. "We need to restore confidence in the process of determining family contributions, and we need to do so before the American public's confidence in the financial aid system erodes further," said Rawlings. Within the Ivy League, Cornell, Penn and Yale also signed the agreement, but Dartmouth, Harvard and Princeton did not. Both Princeton and Harvard, which have endowments substantially larger than Columbia's, recently announced new financial aid packages for their students. According to The New York Times, the two schools said that they endorsed need-based financial aid, but would not sign the agreement because it would have reduced the aid they could give students. (Brown, which does not offer need-blind admissions, was not legally permitted to participate in the agreement, although it can adopt the principles voluntarily.) Other universities that have agreed to the guidelines are Duke, Emory, Georgetown, MIT, Northwestern, Rice, Stanford, Chicago, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest and Wesleyan. Colleges that have signed on include Haverford, Middlebury, Pomona, Swarthmore, Wellesley and Williams.
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