University President Lawrence Bacow was among the many panelists who spoke about college affordability and financial aid on Feb. 29 at the first in a series of forums dedicated to the affordability issue.
Tufts co-hosted the event at its Boston campus along with the Action Center for Educational Services and Scholarships (ACCESS), a Boston-area organization that seeks to provide financial aid and advising to students.
"We launched this series of forums with the goal to begin to raise the public's consciousness about issues related to college affordability," said Bob Giannino-Racine, executive director of ACCESS.
Giannino-Racine explained the reason for holding the forum. "Most people in general know that ... college is expensive and that it needs to be made more affordable," he said. "But quite honestly, I don't think that they have a really strong sense of just how much of a crisis it is."
This first forum was designed specifically to increase awareness of "the merit-based financial-aid practices that many schools are using today to try to enhance their student body towards an end of rising up to compete with the Tufts of the world," Giannino-Racine said.
Bacow explained his position on college affordability and financial aid in an e-mail to the Daily. "As a result of the proliferation of merit aid, financial aid to those in the top quartile of the income distribution has grown much faster than that awarded to those in the bottom quartile," Bacow said. "I have argued in a variety of forums that all financial aid should be need-based."
Both Bacow and Giannino-Racine believe that it is better to use limited financial-aid resources to provide low-income students with access to higher education than it is to recruit well-qualified students who have access to college regardless of monetary assistance.
"I do not see how society is better off diverting scarce financial-aid resources from students who need it, just to redistribute relatively wealthy students among the nation's college[s] and universities," Bacow said.
Giannino-Racine said that he turned to Tufts for the forum because "President Bacow and Tufts as an institution have been leaders" in supporting need-based financial aid. According to Giannino-Racine, Bacow has pledged that "Tufts will award this incoming class of students zero merit-based financial aid." Bacow has told the Daily that he does not plan on bringing merit-based aid to Tufts.
"Those are the types of practices that we want to reward, spotlight and share as best practices," Giannino-Racine said.
ACCESS established this series of public forums in order to address what Giannino-Racine calls the "growing challenge" of schools using financial-aid money to recruit higher-income families that come from higher-performing school districts.
"I think we definitely accomplished the goal of bringing this issue to the forefront and having ... provocative speakers talk on the issue," Giannino-Racine said.
"I think that each of the panelists left with the consensus that there's not one [specific] thing wrong with college affordability and college access, [but] that it's a myriad of issues," Giannino-Racine said. He added that the topic deserves more than a series of forums because the panelists and audience members had "a real appetite" to further explore the topic.
"I think all panelists supported the concept of need-based aid," Bacow said. "But we also acknowledged that there is political pressure to redistribute aid to the middle class and above. I think most of us agreed that this was bad public policy."
While this forum focused on de-emphasizing merit-based financial aid compared to need-based aid, Giannino-Racine said that merit-based aid is not necessarily a bad thing in itself.
Instead, he described an alternative use of merit-based aid that would be used to encourage those students already at a school to stay, using it as a retention tool rather than a device to attract prospective students.
Giannino-Racine said that for him, the forum confirmed that the issue of college accessibility really has the ability to grab the public's attention. "This is something that is valuable and that people are interested in," he said.
The other panelists who spoke with Bacow included a number of other individuals with a depth of knowledge and experience relating to financial aid. Among them were Jim Braude, a co-host of the shows "Newsnight" and "Wired" on the New England Cable News; Patricia Meservey, president of Salem State College; Paul Grogan, president and CEO of the Boston Foundation; Clantha McCurdy, vice chancellor of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education; J. Keith Motley, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts, Boston; and Deborah Hirsch, interim associate vice president at Mount Ida College in Newton.
ACCESS plans to continue addressing the issue of college affordability with its next forum, which will occur in the fall. The specific topic has not yet been selected.
"I'm just very heartened about this first step," Giannino-Racine said. "I think it was great for Tufts to share leadership with this issue by agreeing to co-sponsor it."
