Vassar College returns to “need blind” admissions policy

POUGHKEEPSIE, NY — President Catharine Bond Hill has announced that to assure the accessibility of Vassar College to all qualified prospective students, the college will no longer consider applicants’ financial circumstances in its admissions process. The college’s decision to return to a “need blind” admissions policy will follow a 10-year period when applicants’ ability to pay tuition and related fees played a limited role in the college’s admissions practices.

Demands on financial aid resources unexpectedly surged in the mid-1990s, prompting Vassar and many of its peer institutions to begin looking at more than academic credentials when considering prospective students for admission. In the years since, Vassar found it only had to consider the financial circumstances of less than 2% of its applicant pool to remain within its financial aid budget.

“We know that this change in our admissions policy is the right thing to do,” said President Hill. “Excellence and accessibility go hand-in-hand.”

Importantly, President Hill added, Vassar’s move to a “need blind” admissions policy is key to addressing the country’s demographic shifts. “First-generation college students, young people from urban areas, and the new wave of young immigrants constitute the fastest growing segments of the college-aged population. We want all students striving for the best in higher education to know that a Vassar education is within their reach,” she said.

In the past two decades Vassar’s financial aid budget has increased significantly, growing from just over $9 million in 1990-91 to more than $26 million in 2006-2007. For the Class of 2010, nearly 50% of the students received financial aid from the college, with the average financial aid package being $28,890. Vassar’s financial aid program meets 100% of the demonstrated need of all admitted students, and all aid awards are based on financial need, rather than perceived merit.

Vassar will return to need blind admissions for all first year applicants who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents beginning with the 2008 freshman class, including students on the wait list. The Vassar College Board of Trustees unanimously endorsed the college’s new admissions policy, according to chairman and Vassar alumnus William A. Plapinger.

“We’re proud to continue the promise of an accessible and affordable Vassar education for the next generation of top students,” said Plapinger.

A student’s eligibility for Vassar aid is determined through the use of a nationally recognized need-analysis formula. Students who demonstrate financial need to the college receive a package of financial aid. Academic and personal qualifications of the student are not factors in determining the total amount of the support received by any student.

Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.

Source: Admissions – Vassar College

Why I Chose To Study Liberal Arts In The US

This article was written for such a long time ago, but I believed it is still helpful for those who have an ambiguous notion of what Liberal Arts Colleges really are and some of their big advantages/disadvantages, as well as for who considering what college/university to choose for your future higher education.

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Why I Chose To Study Liberal Arts In The US

by RONALD LIM CHYI TUNG

Editor’s Note: Ronald Lim Chyi Tung is a student at Wesleyan University. The following article was written in response to the debate over education reforms in the writer’s home country of Singapore.
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The debate on educational reforms struck a chord with me in view of my personal educational experience.

I am currently pursuing my undergraduate education at a liberal-arts college in the United States. While universities are institutions with large departments, a large student body and a greater focus on postgraduate-level study, liberal-arts colleges are much smaller institutions with smaller student bodies specialising in undergraduate education.

Liberal-arts colleges are known for their small class sizes and intimate learning environment characterised by close interaction between students and faculty members.

By the time a student graduates, he is expected to have taken courses in nine subject areas from each of three categories: the Natural Sciences and Mathematics, the Arts and Humanities, and the Social and Behavioural Sciences. There is also a great emphasis on the interpretation of non-verbal texts (that is, music, art, and dance).

Because liberal-arts colleges are much smaller, they tend to be less well-known, compared to the Ivy League. You might, or might not, have heard of liberal-arts colleges like Wesleyan, Amherst, Swarthmore, Wellesley, and Williams.

I came here to give myself more time to explore, and then to decide what I really want to specialise in. I came here also to get away from the stigma which many Singaporean employers attach to a degree in the Arts and Social Sciences, which is perceived to be ‘useless’. I remember trying to explain to people why I chose to go to an unheard-of-in-Singapore college (Wesleyan University), rather than the prestigious London School of Economics to do a fixed course in the area of Government and Economics, which I wasn’t sure was my cup of tea.

People told me: ‘What’s the use of going to this liberal-arts school? How are you going to get a job with a degree from this place which is not part of the Ivy League?’

I don’t know the answer to that question, the thought of which makes me cringe. It reminded me of the time at the end of secondary school when I decided to go to the arts stream in junior college (JC), as opposed to the science stream, because I knew that Physics and Chemistry were not my cup of tea.

People around me were genuinely concerned that I would deprive myself of the chance of getting a ‘useful’ engineering or medical degree.

Up till the end of JC, has the purpose of my education been to get into university so that I could get a good job?

Was I just a human resource who could be moulded into ‘the creative workforce of the 21st century’, or was I supposed to be that individual who was nurtured to articulate his thoughts and question the world?

I came here to find myself constantly engaged in the spirit of exploration, whether or not I was in the classroom. Students who came through the portals of a liberal-arts college were not regarded as a human resource which was to be trained for the workforce.

They were regarded as individuals, each with their own opinions, who came together for the sole purpose of learning and having an education that could be considered as ‘liberating’.

I found that one main difference between the system that Singapore tried to adopt from America and the American system itself was that, in Singapore, the end towards which policy-makers tried to work was to produce an individual equipped with thinking skills so that they could have a ‘creative workforce’ for the new economy.

In America, however, education and the spirit of exploration were the end in themselves. An educated individual who questions the world he lives in is the desired outcome, and it is in this spirit of exploration and learning that one learns to think and view everything from different perspectives.

It is only when one is true to the spirit of learning for learning’s sake that the desired result of a ‘thinking’ individual is reaped.

One more thing I learnt is that creativity and individualism are intertwined and that you can’t have one without the other.

This led me to ponder whether one can engineer a ‘creative workforce’, which is an oxymoron because ‘creative’ denotes individualism and ‘workforce’ denotes assimilation.

As I got to know the Americans, I found that they came here with a different mindset. Not everyone intended to graduate and lead a high-flying Wall Street career.

A close friend of mine is majoring in Art History and intends to go into museum work. Another person I know spent a semester in Tibet and intends to specialise in Tibetan Buddhism at the postgraduate level. Someone else I know is an East Asian Studies major and intends to teach English in Japan before specialising in Japanese Studies in graduate school. Others spend a great time engaging in political and social activism.

I realised that society does not penalise each of them for the decision they make, unlike in Singapore where the oppor-tunity costs of doing so at the expense of job security are too high.

Coincidentally, I realised that many employers here, like in Singapore, are still biased towards people who graduate with degrees in Economics than in other subject areas.

While the American job market is not as accommodating of people who choose to major in ‘impractical’ areas of study, there is a place in American society for each and every one of these persons who choose to study what they like.

Price of College Too Steep

In a couple of weeks, thousands of local students will graduate from high school.

A couple of months after that, many of them will be starting college.

And four years after that, most of them will find themselves tens of thousand of dollars in debt.

Such is the ritual that’s becoming ever more problematic for our nation’s young people and their parents.
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College tuition is rising beyond most people’s ability to afford it. At the same time, college has become a prerequisite for most careers, meaning more high school students are being steered toward college as a way to get decent jobs. Because of the high demand for their services, colleges can charge whatever they want. They can also be more selective in who they accept and be more discriminatory about what kind of financial aid they hand out, and to whom.

High school guidance counselors say kids are not only having more difficulty getting into college because of the glut of students, but they’re also having to select colleges based not only on the quality of the education, but on what they can afford.

Many families cannot afford the $30,000 or $40,000 a year that it costs to send one child to college, let alone two or three. Then once they graduate, these students who are trying to establish careers and families — a time when they are struggling the hardest — find themselves crushed by their college debt.

According to the U.S. secretary of education, students are graduating with nearly twice as much education-related debt as they did a decade ago. In New York — where annual private college tuition averages $30,367 and public school tuition is about $13,000 — nearly three out of five undergraduates take out loans. The Public Interest Research Group found that nearly 40 percent of college students nationwide leave college with “unmanageable” debt levels.

What we have here is a crisis. And the solutions, while there are many being examined, aren’t coming fast enough.

Last month, Gov. Eliot Spitzer appointed a Commission on Higher Education to look at ways to improve higher education in the state.

Perspective students and their parents attend a Skidmore College open house in 2001. With the rising cost of college tuition, students and their parents must consider more and more what colleges the student can afford.

To order copies of staff-produced photos from The Post-Star, please visit http://reprints.poststar.com/.

In addition to boosting the quality and image of the state university system, the commission’s tasks include analyzing the financing of public universities, evaluating the role of community colleges, determining a reasonable cost of education, and evaluating the types and amounts of financial aid from provided by the state and federal governments, private sources, alumni and tuition.

In Congress, the Senate Finance Committee is working on ways to expand federal income-tax credits for higher education, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. To pay for the credits, the committee is considering limiting tax-free tuition benefits that colleges offer employees, taxing endowments, and perhaps initiating tuition price controls.

Last fall, the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education recommended a series of reforms that included boosting financial aid, restructuring the entire financial aid system to make it simpler, and boosting incentives for colleges to better manage costs.

Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand, for her part, has offered an amendment that would help financially strapped undergraduate students by offering scholarships if they enroll in science, technology, engineering and math programs. The amendment is still pending. And during her successful election campaign last year, Gillibrand advocated an income tax deduction of up to $10,000 a year for college tuition expenses.

State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has rooted out illegal relationships between colleges and loan companies that result in higher interest payments for students.

And locally, Adirondack Community College is working to make a bachelor’s education more affordable by expanding its relationship with four-year-colleges such as the College of St. Rose and Plattsburgh State. This summer, construction is expected to begin on a $7 million Regional Higher Education Center that will allow that relationship to expand.

But change is not happening fast enough to help the millions of students across the nation who will find themselves in this nearly overwhelming predicament in the coming years.

The state and federal government need to do more to reduce the onerous burden of tuition costs and student loans by reforming education assistance and re-evaluating the cost and operation of student loan programs.

And they need to examine the root causes of tuition hikes and seek ways to rein them in. In New York, that means encouraging state-operated colleges to operate more efficiently (cheaper) and ensuring that educational programs are worthwhile and relevant to the changing marketplace.

A bachelor’s degree is the high school degree of the 21st century. If students can’t afford that degree, then their futures are in jeopardy.

A lot is already being done. But there’s still a long way to go.

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Our view: Government needs to do more to rein in burden of higher education on families.

Source: PostStar.com

The University of Chicago receives anonymous $100 million gift for undergraduate financial aid

The University of Chicago has announced that an anonymous donor and College alumnus has given a $100 million gift, the largest in University history, to be used in the launch of a $400 million undergraduate student aid fundraising initiative at Chicago.

“This gift ensures that the most talented students, no matter their economic circumstances, will have the opportunity to benefit from the uniquely powerful and rigorous Chicago education,” said University of Chicago President Robert J. Zimmer. “Providing access to the College for these students comports with our highest values, is central to our mission, and has the potential to greatly enrich the life opportunities for our students and their families for generations to come. We are deeply grateful for this extraordinary gift and the inspiration it provides for others to support students and the University.”

The $100 million gift, which is entirely expendable over 15 years, will establish Odyssey Scholarships, a program that will allow the University to reduce student loans among undergraduate students whose families demonstrate low or moderate income and high financial need. For those students whose annual family income is less than $60,000, the loans could be replaced entirely by grants, and for families whose income is between $60,000 and $75,000, the loans could be cut in half.

“I am giving this gift to the University of Chicago because I believe it had a profound effect on my life and in particular on allowing me to survive untold failures and persevere in mad adventures that have rewarded me with the financial resources to make this gift,” said the donor in a written statement. “I give this gift in the hopes that future generations of students will not be prevented from attending the College because of financial incapacity and may graduate without the siren of debt distracting them from fulfilling unremunerative dreams.”

Odyssey Scholarships will go into effect in the fall of 2008 and provide assistance to all qualified students in the College. Almost 1,200 undergraduates, including international students, are expected to benefit from the program at a time — almost 25 percent of the entire College enrollment.

As part of Odyssey Scholarships, about 50 students who could benefit from a summer enrichment program to prepare them for their College experience will be invited to campus during the summer before their first year to spend eight weeks working with faculty. Those students will also be relieved of work-study during their first year in the College in order to help them engage more fully in their academic experience.

The $100 million also includes a component designed to challenge the University to raise an additional $300 million and to create incentive for other donors to contribute to endowment to support the program beyond the first 15 years of funding.

“Although I fell far from the academic vine, my education in the College convinced me (in a way that no event or person has yet to undermine) that I was in fact, as Hanna H. Gray declared at my graduation, somehow a worthy citizen of an ancient and honorable community of scholars. The self-esteem that comes from a sense of citizenship in that tradition, however upon reflection marred it may be, has been the simple fixed point of the Archimedean comedy of my personal and professional successes,” the donor wrote in reflecting on the enduring influence of his Chicago education.

A central part of the College education is the Core curriculum, which Dean of the College John Boyer believes to be the heart of what makes the College experience so distinct.

Boyer said, “I am delighted that this gift comes to us on the 75th anniversary of the College’s Core curriculum, the general-education curriculum which has been central to creating and sustaining the University’s distinctive interdisciplinary character and which does so much to shape the intellectual skills and values and the subsequent professional careers of our undergraduate students. This gift will ensure that all talented and qualified students, regardless of family resources, will be able to participate in the University of Chicago’s great educational traditions,” Boyer said.

Source: The University of Chicago News Office