Sophomore Ian Duncan-Brown earlier this semester sat down with an Office of Financial Aid worker for what he later said was a "three-minute meeting" about his family's financial situation.
The employee suggested Duncan-Brown look into spending his junior year at another institution -- something he knew he did not want to do. She was unable to provide any other help without the proper paper work, though.
"[She] said she couldn't do anything without looking at my family's newest earnings," Duncan-Brown told the Daily.
Even so, she was not "very enthusiastic" about the prospect of him receiving more aid, he said. "She said realistically, she didn't think they'd be able to do a lot," he said.
The gloomy economic climate that has characterized most of this academic year has compounded a host of other financial problems facing families of Tufts students. In addition to dealing with business troubles, decreasing returns on investments and in some cases, unemployment, families have often struggled to find funding for college.
The problem has only been augmented by the fact that tuition prices continue to climb, putting a strain on middle-class families that do not qualify for much, if any, financial aid.
While some Tufts students are weathering the financial storm without substantial difficulty, financing education has become a serious concern for others, despite concerted university efforts to keep all current undergraduates enrolled.
Duncan-Brown's father is a real estate broker -- a particularly precarious job in the current economic climate -- and his family has debated throughout the school year about whether he would be able to return to Tufts next year.
The final verdict was for Duncan-Brown to leave for a year with the hopes of returning to the Hill to complete his college education.
"My parents can't afford the fees at this point," Duncan-Brown said. "I decided to take a year off and let them recoup."
In anticipation of the impact the current recession will have on families like Duncan-Brown's, next fiscal year's undergraduate financial aid budget at Tufts increased by 12 percent, or $5,675,282, according to Director of Public Relations Kim Thurler.
The jump is intended to meet an anticipated increased need of current students, who university officials have labeled their top priority.
"If we admit you, we guarantee to meet your full financial aid for all four years," University President Lawrence Bacow told the Daily at a meeting earlier this month. "And if it changes, the aid package changes."
But even a 12 percent increase in the money allotted for aid might not be enough to cover all students.
"I think there are families that will have to stretch further than they have in the past," Director of Financial Aid Patricia Reilly said. "I don't think that that budget is going to be enough to make it easy for everyone to be here ... Some families may not qualify for need-based financial aid but may feel that this is the time to take some time off because of what's going on there."
And while families struggle with their own personal finances, their ability to pay may be influenced by another factor: Tuition and fees are set to rise 3.5 percent next year.
"Tuition is definitely a major problem," said Christopher Penn, a spokesperson for the Student Loan Network, which runs the "Financial Aid Podcast." "You haven't really seen colleges cutting back tuition. Colleges are loath to cut back on a lot of things because they're still competing with each other."
Tufts administrators say that raising tuition is a necessity. And in an effort to make the university as affordable as possible, the increase for the next academic year was the smallest percentage increase in 45 years.
"It's clear they are trying to do the right thing by increasing the amount [for financial aid] more than the fee increases," said Tally Hart, the former director of student financial aid at Ohio State University.
Penn sees the economic situation putting a strain on lower-middle-class families. "[They] aren't able to cut a tuition check, and they're not poor enough to get full need," he said.
But Bacow has maintained that Tufts' commitment to meet the financial aid of current students has allowed undergraduates to stay enrolled.
"To our knowledge, no undergraduate has had to withdraw from Tufts due to financial distress," he said in a March 11 e-mail to the Tufts community.
Still, Bacow acknowledged yesterday that there was no way to be absolutely sure.
"I have always qualified my statements with 'to the best of our knowledge' because we cannot be certain about students who have withdrawn (or plan to withdraw) who have not indicated to us why they are doing so," Bacow told the Daily in an e-mail yesterday.
While the vast majority of Tufts students plan on continuing their education without interruption, Duncan-Brown is not alone. Another student who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the subject had to leave Tufts last year because he was unsure if he would be able to afford to continue to pay tuition.
He did not, however, inform the administration that he was leaving because of financial problems.
The student said that his major problem stemmed from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which essentially said his family should be able to pay full tuition.
With three younger brothers, two of whom were enrolled in private high school, the student said it was not feasible for his parents to spend a quarter of their gross income on tuition and fees for Tufts. During his freshman and sophomore years, he said, his parents paid about half of his tuition and he took out loans to pay the other half.
By last year, "I'd accumulated $50,000 in loans," he said. "I started looking around at other schools in the area."
The student, however, does not blame Tufts for making it hard for his family to pay, saying that factors beyond the university's control place limits on its ability to help. Much like in Duncan-Brown's case, the Office of Financial Aid was at the mercy of the paperwork.
"[The Office of Financial Aid] basically deflects all of your concerns to the structure of the FAFSA and how that all works," he said. "They basically had their hands tied."
The student ended up spending this academic year -- his junior -- at Assumption College, in Worcester, where he was able to get a "really good deal," he said. He hopes to come back to Tufts next year to graduate.
The move from a costly private school to a less expensive one is becoming more common.
Students are increasingly leaving private colleges and universities for public ones, according to Penn.
"Everyone across the board has been affected," he said. "In terms of financial aid, we have seen a double in traffic and people grabbing our e-books."
Colleges and universities across the country have been trying to find ways to respond to the recession. Many schools are admitting more students who can pay more in order to accommodate those who cannot.
This trend manifested itself when Tufts suspended its unofficial need-blind admissions procedures at the tail end of this spring's admissions process. The university also admitted more international students, who as a demographic do not qualify for as much financial aid.
It is not yet clear how the financial aid budget will affect the demographics of the incoming class. Although Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Lee Coffin noted no major changes in the racial or socioeconomic diversity of the admitted students, the makeup of next year's class is largely dependent on the financial aid packages that are offered.
Financial aid applications increased 13 percent for the Class of 2013, potentially making the packages even more important to the class' demographic composition. Incoming freshmen will not benefit from the increase in the financial aid budget, though, which only affects current students.
"When class comes in, there will be a few less socioeconomic disadvantages -- a few didn't make it this year," Coffin told the Daily earlier this month when admissions decisions were released.
But Bacow emphasized that suspending need-blind admissions was necessary to fund financial aid for current students.
"We've got kids who never qualified for financial aid -- didn't need it before -- whose family circumstances have changed completely," he told the Daily earlier this month. "We have an obligation to those students before we have an obligation to admit somebody else."
