Still a school for a bunch of rich kids?

Faced with sky-high costs, Yalies confront the reality of paying for a college education.

$32,880.

This is the total in-state tuition for six students at Michigan State University. It's a few thousand dollars shy of the estimated median household income of a New Haven family. And for many of you, it's the number your father writes on a check so you can sit at brunch in JE this year and read, say, the Herald.

SARAH ENGLAND/YH

For many others of you, it's a number that prompts hours of thumbing through scholarship lists, long days at summer jobs, and years of loans and debt as you work to finance a Yale education in the 21st century.

It's not news that Yale costs a lot. It's not news that tuition will probably increase at a rate above inflation for years to come—tuition at most private colleges has been doing so for about a 100 years.

But consider our healthy economy, and a university endowment fund that has just topped $10 billion. Add to the mix Yale's new and decidedly aggressive admissions and financial aid policies—including need-blind admissions for international students and the use of the Common Application—aimed at recruiting students from underrepresented and often less wealthy parts of the U.S. and the world. Altogether, the University stands in a position to address that last frontier: economic diversity. At a school where 60 percent of students currently accept a six-figure price tag for their education, however, the University has a long way to go.

Yale for sale

"Fifteen years ago when I went to college," Jeffrey Penn, spokesperson for the College Board, begins, "all you needed to plug in was a desk lamp and a typewriter. Now you need outlets for your laptop, TV, VCR, DVD player, printer..." Penn, all hackneyed clichés aside, has a point—colleges and universities are charging more because they have a more sophisticated product. The past decade has seen a wealth of new expectations of what a campus should provide: high-speed Internet access in every dorm room, state-of-the-art athletic facilities, better campus security systems, and comprehensive health care programs, to name a few. "The demands that students and their families have are driving the expenses," Penn explained.

Encouraging the trend is the fact that competition among colleges keeps intensifying. The biggest battle—bigger than the battle over who has the best-looking campus—is the effort to attract and retain a faculty who are not only in high demand across academia but are lured by rising salaries in the private sector. "Maintaining high salaries and benefits to employees is always one of our foremost concerns," University President Richard Levin, GRD '74, said. "The market is incredibly competitive." Ron Erhenberg, an economist at Cornell University and author of Tuition Rising: Why Colleges Cost So Much, compares the increased pressures in higher education to an "arms race" that shows no signs of fading. "As long as lines of applicants keep knocking on the door," he said, "no institution has a strong incentive to stop spending."

In other words, Yale needs to spend money—and Yale's spending money is your term bill. What students pay university-wide makes up 22 percent of Yale's operating budget for the 2000-2001 academic year; it is their largest source of unrestricted revenue. This means that, unlike endowment income or alumni contributions that often come with specific requests, the University can use tuition in any way it needs. What you contribute isn't just money: it's the right kind of money. Still, Administrators maintain that they're trying their absolute best to keep the term bill tamed. "We've very self-consciously tried to moderate it to the rate of inflation," Levin said. "We feel it's the responsible thing to do."

Indeed, Yale's 2.9 percent increase was the lowest in the Ivy League in 20 years—it was just above the inflation rate of 2.4 percent as measured by the Consumer Price Index.

Keeping what you earn

Expected family contribution: $13,650 From parents: $11,500 From student assets: $350 From student: $1,800

Total self help: $3,520 Term-time job: $1,000 Federal Stafford Loan: $2,520 Federal Perkins Loan: $0

Total gift aid: $18,100 Outside scholarship: $2,500 Yale Grant: $15,600

All policy, it seems, is driven by an inter-Ivy race for the best students. Take financial aid, for example. That Yale will spend $800,000 so that less wealthy international students will get the aid they need to attend does confirm a certain philosophy: "a real commitment to greater diversity and fully need-blind policy," as Dean of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Richard Shaw puts it. But it also is a strategic move. While Harvard has had a long-standing and successful program for international need-blind admissions, no such program is in place in any other Ivy League schools. "One of our goals," Levin said of the initiative, "is to get out ahead."

In other areas, Yale has played a game of catch-up. This year, the University froze the self-help portion of financial aid packages. While the amount that a student needs to contribute with loans and work-study usually increases annually, this year it stayed at the same amount as last year. Also, Yale has begun to allow students on financial aid to keep all outside scholarships to reduce their loans or work-study requirements. Before, scholarship money had gone automatically to Yale's gift aid portion of their package—the students, in other words, never saw any of it.

Both these initiatives were put in place mainly as a response to other universities' policies. Yale's self-help requirements—now at $6,025 for freshmen and sophomores and at $8,120 for juniors and seniors—were higher than at other schools. Harvard, for one, makes its underclassmen pay $5,150 and its upperclassmen $6,000. "It helped to keep Yale competitive where we'd been falling behind a bit," Caesar Storlazzi, associate director of University Financial Aid, explained. In terms of the outside scholarships, Storlazzi said that Yale was pressured by the fact that every Ivy League school besides the University of Pennsylvania had the policy in place—despite the fact that they disagree with it in principle. "Our philosophy is that students should first contribute what they reasonably can before we calculate need," he said. "But if six out of eight Ivy League universities have this policy, our not having it would have put us at a significant disadvantage."

Yale is relying partly on income from its endowments to fund these projects. "We're going to try to raise additional endowments to try to support this," Levin said, particularly of the international need-based aid. "It's already a very popular move, people think it's a good idea," he said. "I don't think we'll have trouble raising funds for it."

Earning your keep

Grace Rollins, CC '01, a student on financial aid, is the first to be skeptical. "I always thought there was a huge divide here between work-study students and non-work-study students. I would even say it's the biggest divide," she said. "The mandatory time commitment's the big thing. I think it makes the experience here completely different." Having to work, she said, puts financial aid students at a disadvantage in a place where people are already strained for time, automatically making it harder to participate in extracurriculars and to pursue outside interests.

To address these issues, Rollins, who is also a political coordinator of the Women's Center, started the Amy Rossborough Fellowships. Through the Center, it offered stipends to five work-study students so that they could pursue activist projects instead of having to work. "It's for people who wouldn't normally have time," Rollins explained. "The stipend eliminates their need to have a regular work-study job." Dwight Hall also started a similar program where financial aid students can receive a stipend to serve on ExComm instead of having a regular work-study job.

Jennifer Nou, CC '02, who is one of the five Rossborough Fellows, said that such programs make sense for Yale students. "Before the fellowship, I did feel like I was working under some time constraints," she said. With the fellowship, she has been able to work on a program that deals with domestic violence issues in New Haven. Despite the program's success, however, there is the feeling that there is room for more like it—or, at least, more encouragement from the Financial Aid office to find work-study opportunities outside of the on-campus dining hall or clerical job. "My freshman and sophomore year, I didn't know anything about this. Had I not dropped in these random doors next to Durfee, I probably still wouldn't," Nou said. Oana Marian, PC '02, another financial aid recipient, expressed similar sentiments. "They didn't really tell you much at the office. My freshman year I just went into the Student Employment Office and checked for jobs that were posted there," she said. "And I definitely had more resentment toward having to work freshman year." Marian, who now works at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that students received little direction in finding opportunities that met their interests.

"There are a lot of jobs out there," Rollins said. "You can definitely turn the work-study option into something that you like." Still, she suggested that Yale tried to keep students on on-campus jobs because it was in the University's best interest. Because Yale receives money from the federal government to pay a percentage of the wages for work-study, she said, "They save tons of money by employing students to do the work it needs to have done anyway—in the library, in the dining halls, in departments and labs and offices."

Storlazzi did admit that the University saves money by employing students. "Yes, if the students didn't do the work we'd have to hire other people who would cost more to employ," he said. "But we certainly do not keep the jobs hush-hush because we want [students] to do jobs on campus." And how to explain the lack of publicity for off-campus opportunities? "We obviously need a forum where we can address these concerns," he said.

He added, "We do work-study not because we want to make it harder on students. We do it because we believe students should contribute to their own education." He said that every student has the option not to work, though he did admit that this meant having to take out more loans. "Now, is that a reasonable alternative? That's a good question," he said. Rollins, for her part, pointed out that loans place greater burdens on families already standing on shaky ground. "It can be extremely scary coming from an unstable financial background, especially if you want to study something that isn't necessarily lucrative like women's studies, for instance," she said.

For now, however, the standard work-study and loan formula for financial aid does not seem likely to change—especially as ever-important Ivy peers are content to stick with it too. Up at Harvard, Sally Donahue, director of Financial Aid, expressed satisfation with their policy. "We don't see any problems with our work-study program," she said. Apparently, the eyes of policymakers haven't reached the level of the individual student.

Statistics used in graphic are based on a family with a combined income of $70,000 and net assets from savings and home equity of $110,000. The student has $1,000 in savings.