When Brown University announced last month that it would eliminate the cost of tuition for any student whose family income is less than $60,000, it joined a long and expanding list of elite schools that have recently upped their financial aid offerings to prospective students.
Such changes in financial aid packages have garnered widespread attention - and have left the admissions offices at schools like Tufts questioning their yield models.
Yield models, which are created by admissions offices based on historical data, are used to predict the decision prospective students will ultimately make in choosing a college. The projection helps the admissions office accept, reject and waitlist the correct proportion of applicants.
Because of the shifting ground of financial aid in higher education, University President Lawrence Bacow said this year's projections will be more difficult to make.
"We have no confidence in our yield models," he told the Daily.
With such recent and widespread financial-aid changes, there is no prior data on which to accurately base this year's yield model.
"The uncertainty arises because we are in uncharted terrain; none of us have any historical data with which to construct our models, because there has not been a comparable scenario in which some students will weigh enrollment decisions with loans removed from their aid awards," Dean of Admissions Lee Coffin told the Daily in an e-mail. "There is no precedent for us to frame our forecasts and predict the enrollment decisions these students will make."
This uncertainty stems largely from the changing financial-aid policies of three schools in particular: Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth College. These are Tufts' biggest overlap schools, Bacow said.
At a time when top-tier universities are increasingly seeking both highly qualified and socio-economically diverse students, schools appear to be racing to match each other blow for blow in financial aid initiatives.
Last December, Penn unveiled plans to eliminate loans for many students, while Dartmouth announced an even heftier initiative to eliminate tuition for students whose family income is less than $75,000.
These financial-aid changes came in step with sweeping initiatives taken by Harvard and Yale Universities, which both dramatically reduced tuition burdens for students with family incomes less than $200,000 and eliminated tuition for students with family incomes under $60,000.
At Tufts, financial-aid offerings are expanding, but they still trail those of wealthier schools. While many elite schools have employed need-blind admissions standards for years, Tufts has only recently announced that it will officially be using such a policy.
Tufts also recently announced it would be replacing loans with grants for students with family incomes under $40,000 - whereas Ivies are lining up to make college free for these students.
Because increased financial aid packages will primarily affect students with somewhat lower incomes, Coffin said that the yield-model uncertainty comes strictly from applicants with family incomes between $40,000 and $100,000.
"There is a degree of uncertainty as it pertains to families with incomes between 40 and 100K, which is the range of incomes affected by the various loan replacement policies," he said. "[But] there should be no 'uncertainty' above that income threshold and minimal uncertainty below that range."
According to admissions expert and founder of college planning Web site TheAdmissionGame.com Peter Van Buskirk, the effects of increased financial aid at extraordinarily wealthy schools will only create a minimal and short-term impact on other schools.
"I think that there's certainly going to be some trickle down," Van Buskirk said. "But I also suspect that Tufts has a rich reserve of talented applicants and it will be able to buffer against that trickle down."
Coffin also said that because so many schools have recently upped their aid, the admissions impact may be minimized.
"The uncertainty may, in fact, be minimized by the fact that so many top-tier institutions have implemented some form of this loan replacement policy," he said. "In other words, these colleges may have reset the yield equation at a 'new normal' and neutralized the impact and/or the competitive advantage or disadvantage it will have on the yield."
Coffin said that the university does not plan on admitting extra students to guard against the potential effects of shifting financial aid.
"Since our yield has been increasing from year to year we will not accept more students; that would be a very dicey strategy for Tufts," he said. "[But] as always, the waiting list is an important resource if the yield is lower than expected, although we have not used it in two of the last three years."
At Georgetown University, officials say they are not worried about the potential effects. "We don't anticipate major impact to our applicant numbers and plan to continue our long-standing commitment to need-blind admissions and to meeting the full demonstrated financial need of each eligible Georgetown student," Director of Media Relations Andrea Fereshteh told the Daily in an e-mail.
Van Buskirk said that regardless of growing financial aid, elite schools can still offer admission to a limited number of students, further minimizing the impact of such changes.
"When these announcements came out, it got the attention of folks. It made people believe that education would be tuition-free," Van Buskirk said. "When in fact, you have to get in first, and you have to demonstrate that you have need. I think the headlines are incredibly misleading ... The schools that have admitted these policies are not growing their classes."
Van Buskirk also said that he anticipates that the dramatic changes in financial aid have reached their peak. "I think we've probably seen most of what we will see in terms of the changes in financial aid approaches," he said.
