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WITHIN THE FAMILY

Columbia Moves Forward on Financial Aid

By Alex Sachare ’71

Columbia recently made two announcements regarding financial aid that come as welcome news. When President Lee C. Bollinger unveiled the $4 billion Columbia Campaign, he announced that one of its initial priorities would be to raise $440 million to endow undergraduate financial aid. That came on the heels of an earlier announcement that starting in fall 2007, the University will replace student loans with grants for undergraduates whose families earn less than $50,000.

Like so many things, the two announcements are intertwined. A financial aid endowment will enable the University to reduce dependence on tuition, annual giving and other revenue streams to cover the costs of financial aid, including offering grants instead of loans to lower-income families.

The objective of this initiative is to ease the financial burden that many College students have faced upon graduation. The need to pay back significant loans can influence graduates’ career choices; it’s hard to choose to work at a not-for-profit rather than a Wall Street brokerage when you leave school with $20,000 in loan debt.

The change from loans to grants also will keep Columbia in a strong position when it comes to competing with peer institutions for promising students from lower-income families.

Several other prominent schools already have gone this route. In 1998, Princeton replaced loans with grants for students whose families earn less than $46,500. Since then, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Penn and Stanford have made similar moves, setting various cutoff points; Princeton, meanwhile, replaced all loans with grants in 2001.

Columbia, eager to retain its historical place as a school that was attractive to lower-income students and minorities, developed its own plan. The College long has prided itself on having a diverse student body and wants to maintain and build on that status.

Bollinger said so in announcing the change. “I’m proud of Columbia’s longtime leadership in attracting such a diverse student body and providing opportunity to students from families who can least afford to pay for a private college education,” he said. “It is essential for us to continue expanding our commitment to financial aid that ensures any qualified student can afford to come to Columbia. The replacement of loans with grants for more students is another step in the right direction. Our goal is to try to provide students across the board with the kind of financial freedom to make life choices so that they’re not burdened by loans.”

It is estimated that the change will impact 15 percent of College and SEAS students, or about one-third of the approximately 45 percent who receive financial aid in the form of grants, loans and work-study jobs.

Of course, nothing occurs in a vacuum. For the current academic year, need-based institutional grants to the College and SEAS total more than $55 million, according to Bollinger’s announcement, and the new loan-elimination initiative will add approximately $3.5 million annually to financial aid expenditures. It’s a hefty price tag, and that’s where the Columbia Campaign and the endowment for financial aid comes in.

Right now, most of the cost of financial aid comes from tuition and annual giving, revenue streams that are needed for other purposes including student services and academic enhancements. Building a significant endowment for financial aid and doing so quickly, at the start of the capital campaign, will not only offset the cost of converting loans to grants, but free up funds that currently go toward financial aid for use on other priorities.

It’s a win-win situation for the College and its students, as long as alumni and others step up and get the endowment for financial aid off the ground.

We are pleased to introduce two new members of the CCT family.

Rose Kernochan ’82 Barnard is our new assistant editor. She will oversee our vibrant Class Notes and other sections of the magazine, including Bookshelf and Columbia Forum. Kernochan is an experienced editor who most recently was senior editor at Word.com and editor-at-large at Zoetrope. She also has a Columbia pedigree; not only is she a Barnard alumna, but her father was a longtime professor at the Law School.

Taren Cowan is our new advertising manager, succeeding Natasha Clermont, who laid the foundation for a successful advertising program but left to work closer to her New Jersey home. Cowan has had sales experience at Cablevision, Verizon and Multiplier Industries.

We welcome both to our family and hope you will enjoy their efforts as reflected in these pages.

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