Dartmouth raises financial aid

Other top schools have raised their aid offers for middle-income families. The elite-college financial aid competition shows no sign of letting up. The latest entrant hoping to use generous aid packages to attract the best and brightest students is Dartmouth College, which joins peer institutions such as Princeton, Harvard, Stanford and Yale universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in augmenting its need-based financial aid awards. Dartmouth's new policy will replace loans with grants on a graduated scale for lower and middle-class students. Last week's announcement from the Hanover, NH, school comes one month after Harvard pledged an unprecedented 20 percent increase in its financial aid budget and seven months after Penn introduced its Trustees Scholars program. Under the terms of the Penn initiative, announced in late March, a limited number of outstanding students -- beginning with the freshmen in the Class of 2002 -- will have their entire demonstrated need met with grants and work-study funds instead of loans. Unlike the Trustees Scholars program, the initiatives announced by Princeton in January, Yale and Stanford in February, MIT in March and Harvard in September affect all financial aid students at those schools, not just a handful. Though Penn's $2.7 billion endowment is among the top 15 in the country, it only ranks 65th in dollars per student because of the University's large enrollment at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Officials have named undergraduate financial aid as the administration's top fundraising priority. Even with Dartmouth's pledge, Penn administrators are not worried about keeping pace with the dizzying array of competing initiatives in the higher education marketplace. University President Judith Rodin said she is not concerned about Penn falling behind in the competition over students, adding that Penn offers attractive financial aid packages. Associate Vice President for Finance Frank Claus -- who directly oversees the Office of Student Financial Services -- stressed that Penn is always evaluating its own resources and is committed to keeping pace with other schools. "We responded last time to Harvard and Yale with the Trustees Scholars," he said, adding that 91 such scholarships have been awarded this year. "We are studying what the others are doing, and we are seeing what we can do." Dartmouth Admissions Director Maria Laskaris explained her school's plan as a necessary reaction to market conditions that make it difficult for expensive institutions to maintain "socioeconomic diversity." "The overarching reason for all of this is a concern whether a Dartmouth education is truly accessible and affordable for students from different economic backgrounds," she said. Laskaris said a Dartmouth education costs about $31,000 a year, plus the cost of a mandatory computer. The new policy's focus is on student loans -- of which needy students regularly receive up to $3,525 a year from the federal government. Laskaris said that students' loan expectations will be reduced on a "graduated basis" determined by family income. Students whose families make under $30,000 a year will see their loans replaced by grants, while those with incomes up to $60,000 will see reductions of between $1,000 and $2,400 in the loan portions of their aid packages. The plan -- which will cost the school about $2 million more a year -- will also increase scholarships for international students, allow students to use the tax advantage of the Hope scholarship, a federal tax credit for higher education and permit students to apply 100 percent of outside scholarships toward their tuition without affecting their financial aid status.