Tufts' clear priority during this year's capital campaign, officially unveiled Friday night, is to make Tufts' undergraduate admissions process need-blind.
"That's goal number one," University President Lawrence Bacow said in an interview with the Daily. "We've stuck a stake in the ground and said we're going to be need-blind. It's important. We have to do it."
Tufts has always been classified as need-sensitive in its admission process, which means that an applicant's financial standing can be a factor in an admissions decision.
The capital campaign aims to raise $200 million towards the goal, Dean of Admissions Lee Coffin said.
"The ideal was to educate everyone, not just the elite in American society," Coffin said. "Need-blind admission is true to that mission."
"Need-blind sends a message about the institution and what our values are," Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser said. "Getting to need-blind would be a statement [that] our practices match our values."
Furthermore, it adheres to the mission that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings set for the country in September in her final report on the Commission on the Future of Higher Education.
"Every student in the nation should have the opportunity to pursue postsecondary education," the report said. "We recommend, therefore, that the United States commit to an unprecedented effort to expand higher education access and success by ... addressing non-academic barriers and providing significant increases in aid to low-income students."
Coffin has found that financial aid is a "point of anxiety" for many students at Tufts. Applicants have asked him if applying for aid could jeopardize their admission.
"It might," Coffin said.
This may lessen Tufts' chances of recruiting the best students when, Coffin said, most of Tufts' competition is already need-blind.
According to a May 3 article in the Boston College Observer, Director of Public Affairs Jack Dunn puts the number of need-blind schools in America at 30.
The last school to become need-blind was Brown University, which accomplished the change three years ago by setting a monetary goal and following the "same trajectory" that Tufts is following now, Coffin said.
But he could not think of a third university that instituted fundraising efforts geared toward achieving need-blind status.
"I feel very passionate about this personally," Bacow said. "Both my parents were immigrants ... There are very few countries in the world where people can go from off the boat to the kind of opportunities I've had."
These opportunities, Bacow said, come "largely, but not exclusively, through the power of higher education."
"We have to ensure that every student we believe ought to be at Tufts is able to attend Tufts," he said.
In becoming need-blind, Bacow expects that Tufts will see an increase in the socio-economic diversity of the student body.
"A great university should embrace diversity in every dimension," Bacow said.
There is no definite time frame for when the university will become need-blind, although the administration hopes to reach that status by the conclusion of the capital campaign.
"It's purely a function of time," Coffin said. "If someone gave us a giant gift tomorrow, we would be need-blind immediately."
Efforts to increase the availability of financial aid for Tufts students are hardly novel.
According to Coffin, the university has used donations over the past two to three years during the quiet phase of the capital campaign to serve this very purpose.
After the Class of 2010 was accepted, some financial aid money was left over - a new development that signals the strength of fundraising to this purpose.
As more funds are raised by the campaign, the budget that Admissions can spend on financial aid will become more and more flexible in the coming years, Coffin said.
Nevertheless, financial aid is always "a moving target" that adjusts with the growing cost of education, he said.
"[The] rising costs and increased competitive pressures from other colleges and universities will always put pressure on the university's financial aid resources," he said. "In other words, Tufts, and places like us, will always be raising resources for financial aid."
