In 2007 and 2008, Tufts admissions' process went need-blind. Large gifts were rolling in, including a significant donation from eBay founder and billionaire Pierre Omidyar (LA '88). The financial aid budget was doing well, such that Tufts had enough money to admit all students regardless of their financial need - and it did so for two years.
So what happened? The recession hit. Subsequently, need-blind admissions, which were implemented in practice by the university but not by any official policy from the Board of Trustees, were reversed.
"Everyone stopped and said, this changes the calculus," Lee Coffin, dean of undergraduate admissions for the School of Arts and Sciences, said.
According to Coffin, although former University President Lawrence Bacow made financial aid a priority during his term, the recession had sobering effects on his plans.
"[He] said, 'I think it's critically important that we focus on our current students first and any new need they might have before we make any indications to the next class,'" Coffin said. "It was either we move towards need-blind and let some of our current students withdraw because we didn't have resources to give to them, or we serve them first and hold back on need-blind in the freshman admission process until those resources were regenerated."
Provost and Senior Vice President David Harris, however, noted that the economic downturn has not resulted in more students applying for need-based aid but instead has caused the same students' average needs to grow.
"What that's telling you is that being need-blind takes more money than it previously would have," he said. "When we say we're not need-blind, that doesn't mean we're less committed, it just means the goal posts got moved further down the road."
As students' needs have grown, so has the average size of Tufts' need-based grants in an attempt to keep up. The packages granted to the Class of 2014 were on average $28,404, the class of 2015 received $29,995, the class of 2016 received $31,940 and the class of 2017 received $36,241 in grants. Each year has reset the record high for the university, according to Coffin.
"What makes me sober is when I look at the additional money, it didn't move the needle on the percentage of the class receiving aid," Coffin said.
He also noted that about 52 to 54 percent of accepted students have received aid for the past few years, although about two thirds of Tufts applicants have applied for it.
In an article published in the Boston Globe on Aug. 25, Coffin explained that financial aid is only considered at the end of the admissions process: each applicant is reviewed first based on merit, then their total financial need is calculated. The admissions office then calculates how many students would accept Tufts' offer and its cost. If that number exceeds the financial aid budget, some promising students are eliminated.
Harris said some need is not met since the need formulas can be so restrictive.
"You'll find a school saying, we cover 100 percent of the need. Then you'll find people saying, 'I can't make it work,'" Harris said. "It's really in these formulas about need that we have to follow."
Students that fall in between those who qualify for and receive a lot of aid and those who are wealthy enough not to need aid at all are often excluded in the financial aid processes. These students will likely graduate with between $23,000 and $24,000 in debt.
The federal methodology to determine the aid a student can receive considers factors including parent income, parent assets, number in family, number in college, number of working parents and age of the older parent. These are reported in the Federal financial aid application. The Tufts formula, which is used with the federal formula, also includes home equity.
According to Coffin, one reason why families may not be able to afford rising college costs, even with larger amounts of university grants, is federal aid's failure to rise in tandem with need. He noted that there was a point during the 1970s when a Federal Pell Grant could cover a significant portion of college costs, which is no longer the case, and colleges are expected to try and fill the gap.
"Our cost of tuition has gone up slower than our amount of financial aid," Harris said. "So that's not the story, that college is more expensive because [we're] holding back money. It's federal and state support that's rolled back."
The university, Coffin pointed out, cannot focus solely on financial aid in planning the budget.
"If you think about our infrastructure, our campus, it's beautiful but you have to do building maintenance and technology costs, and those costs get incorporated into the budget," Coffin said.
This, according to Harris, is the main reason why Tufts cannot go need-blind and why tuition continues to rise.
"We do not think it is plausible that we will have the resources to put Lee's calculus consistently in the black and have a university that is of the quality that we want to admit these kids into," Harris said. "It has to be sustainable."
To deal with these economic limitations, Tufts has made efforts to expand the types of socioeconomic backgrounds represented on campus. While two years ago students with total incomes under $40,000 received financial aid packages made exclusively of grants rather than loans, these packages have been extended to include those incomes under $60,000, according to Coffin.
"We tied it to socioeconomic access," he said. "The philosophy was, use [these packages] to guarantee access for those who are most economically at risk."
According to Coffin, in 2007, many universities began to move toward replacing more and more of their loans with grants, increasing the income requirement even up to $100,000.
"In peer groups, I'd go to meetings and everyone would be huddling, saying, 'I know this isn't sustainable but we had to do it,'" he said. "To Tufts' credit, we were very sober during that frenzy and said, 'We could do it, [but] we don't think its sustainable or good policy,' so we held steady [at $40,000]."
Now, the economic realities have forced many universities to backtrack on their aid. Wesleyan University ended its need-blind policies this admissions cycle and Cornell University reversed its policy of providing grants to students with incomes of $60,000 to $75,000 this past summer, according to the Globe.
Coffin maintained that long-sighted pragmatism in both realms of grants and need-blind policies have helped both Tufts' image and its financial situation.
University President Anthony Monaco may not be able to prioritize financial aid in the same way as Bacow, but he has not forgotten it. The university has embarked on a two-year financial aid initiative, which aims to bring in $25 million. In the start of its second fiscal year that began this July, it has already gathered $17.5 million, well above half of the target.
"Tony is saying, 'We can't wait for the next [capital] campaign, we have to do something now,'" Harris said. "We'll be in a full-blown, university-wide campaign before long, and I don't think it's too much of a scoop to [say] that financial aid is going to be a significant part of it."
This financial aid initiative is distinct from a capital campaign, which must be laid out in the Strategic Plan and approved by the Board of Trustees. It raises money for the university's endowment more generally, and is occurring at an appropriate time between capital campaigns, following the $1.2 billion Beyond Boundaries campaign's termination in 2011.
This financial aid initiative, however, is unique, according to Christine Sanni, executive director of advanced communications and donor relations at the University Advancement office. The university is now offering to match new endowed gifts of $100,000 as an incentive for new donors.
"The matching initiative has worked amazingly well," she said. "It's been a wide variety of people, including some new donors who have made smaller gifts before. They felt that the university cared about financial aid, so they wanted to help."
Sanni explained that an endowed gift, as opposed to an annual gift, goes into a fund that generates interest in the endowment that is intended for a specific purpose - financial aid, for example. Since the beginning of the initiative, 42 new endowed scholarships have been created, along with 174 new gifts to existing funds as of this week.
Jeannie Diefenderfer (E '84), member of the Board of Trustees for the School of Engineering, is a returning donor. She said that she created her endowed scholarship in 2008 and decided to add to it because of the significant difference she saw the matching program could make.
"Tufts is my most important philanthropic priority and, consequently, it is the largest gift I give within my means," she told the Daily in an e-mail.
Diefenderfer cited her own experiences as a student on financial aid at Tufts as a strong factor in her decision to donate.
"My four years at Tufts as an undergraduate were one of the best experiences of my life," she said. "My scholarship is a small way for me to give back so that others like me can benefit from a Tufts experience, both in its education quality and the opportunity it creates for a student to have a transformational experience."
