The cost to attend colleges and universities across the United States has risen steadily while household incomes have remained largely stagnant. This economic reality has special ramifications for one facet of Â鶹´«Ã½ College’s commitment to social responsibility: providing financial support to meet the full demonstrated financial need for all enrolled students.
As operational costs have increased at Â鶹´«Ã½, so too have investments in financial support to help cover those costs. Periodically, it is crucial to comprehensively assess our financial support to determine if it is adequate to make Â鶹´«Ã½ accessible to all admitted students and to sustain students’ success once enrolled. Equally important, we must do so in the context of balancing revenues and expenses in the short term while preserving institutional financial viability and sustainability for the long run.
For these reasons, Board of Trustees chair Patricia Jipp Finkelman ’80 and President Raynard S. Kington agreed it was time to create the Task Force on Student Financial Support and Success to assess these issues. Led by board member and alumna Angela Onwuachi-Willig ’94, a noted scholar and current dean of Boston University School of Law, the task force will consider Â鶹´«Ã½â€™s financial support from both institutional and student perspectives. Trustees David Maxwell ’66 and Tobi Klein Marcus ’87 will serve on the task force. Topics that the task force may address include:
- The role and effectiveness of institutional grants in meeting student financial need.
- Factors used to determine parental contributions toward costs of attendance.
- The financial role of students’ summer and academic-year work.
- Student loans and student indebtedness, and their impact on postgraduate plans.
- Special circumstances unaccounted for in the financial aid assessment and award process (e.g., job loss, substantial medical expenses, erratic parental income, etc.) that can create hardship for enrolled students.
- Institutional response to exceptional needs such as food insecurity, unfunded expenses for books and supplies, and travel to/from home.
- Availability of food and housing for students remaining on campus during break periods.
- The balance between institutional financial aid commitments and the role of student revenue in the funding of College operations.
- The significance of merit aid in the student recruitment, enrollment, and operational funding processes.
The task force is expected to present an initial report to the Board of Trustees at its October 2019 meeting and to complete its work by February 2020.
The task force’s work will be supported by an advisory committee including students, faculty, staff, and alumni. The role of the advisory committee is to suggest resources and topics for the task force members to consider such as speakers and consultants, written reports and articles, best practices among peers nationally, and comparative and historical institutional data.