Yale Shifts Aid From Wealthier Families to Help Poor Students
Yale University is redistributing its financial aid to give more to low-income students and less to those from wealthier families, as it increases its total aid budget by 8 percent.
Beginning with students who enter this August, parents who earn between $130,000 and $200,000 a year will be asked to pay an average of 15 percent of their income, up from 12 percent for the previous three years, said Caesar Storlazzi, Yale’s chief financial aid officer, in an interview. Yale will also increase the income cap for families who pay nothing to $65,000 from $60,000.
Yale, in New Haven, Connecticut, will charge $52,700 for tuition, room and board before aid next year. In 2007 and 2008, Yale joined Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in raising financial aid to students from families making as much as $200,000 as endowments reached record highs. Now Yale is rethinking how it is allocating its aid as parents struggle financially, Storlazzi said.
“Hard times demand a hard look at what we were doing,” Storlazzi said. “Yale’s mission is to be accessible, especially to low-income families.”
Yale said its financial aid budget is expected to be $117 million next year. About 57 percent of students receive financial aid.
The programs that enhanced financial aid for wealthier families were created to allow colleges to keep up with one another, Michael McPherson, president of the Chicago-based Spencer Foundation, which funds education research, said in a phone interview.
“Competing acts of increasing generosity were not really warranted relative to other plausible priorities for these universities,” McPherson, an economist and former president of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, said. “I’m glad that they had the courage to say we overreached and were pulling back somewhat. Nobody promised these policies would last forever.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Oliver Staley in New York at ostaley@bloomberg.net Janet Lorin in New York jlorin@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Kaufman at jkaufman17@bloomberg.net