COLUMN: Penn's ever=persistent financial aid problem

From Edward Sherwin's, "The Lower Frequencies," Fall '00 From Edward Sherwin's, "The Lower Frequencies," Fall '00The news passed last week with barely a whisper. Princeton University announced it was increasing the size of its undergraduate financial aid packages -- again. Yale, Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Dartmouth all followed up with plans of their own in rapid succession, each attempting to raise the bar a little bit higher for the competition. Noticeably absent from 1998's financial aid hit parade, however, was the University of Pennsylvania. Of course, Penn did in March 1998 create the Trustees Scholars program, which replaced burdensome student loans with free grant money -- but for a grand total of only 50 students on financial aid in each incoming class. It is in the context of Penn's inability to act on the same scale as its peers, however, that we see the growing divide between the ivory tower haves and have-nots. Penn's endowment, currently in the neighborhood of $3.3 billion, is among the dozen or so largest in the country. But given the University's large student body -- 10,000 graduate students included -- Penn ranks far below its peer institutions on a per capita basis. As a result, the University cannot afford to spend as much on financial aid as many of its peers. This has been the case for some time now -- Penn officials have plead poverty for years whenever someone raised the issue of increasing financial aid. And independent of the University's current building spree, Penn really cannot afford to throw around thousands of extra dollars per student. The Princetons and Harvards and Yales can afford to do so, and over the last two years, have. The implications of Penn's inability to keep pace with other schools over the last two years are indeed troubling. First, we can expect the percentage of students on financial aid to decrease -- much as it has over the last two years -- as deserving students follow the money elsewhere. The demographic trend will likely be away from the diversity that so many find appealing about Penn, and toward increasing homogeneity. The academic environment will suffer as talented students of modest means spurn Penn's offer of admission when confronted with better aid packages. Even Penn's athletic programs will be affected in the long run. In the scholarship-free Ivy League, the Quakers have recruited competitively with the Harvards and Princetons in part because of its academic trump card -- the Wharton School, in which a disproportionate share of Penn's top athletes are enrolled. But given the prospect of graduating without a cent of debt, the next great point guard or free safety may choose to don the Orange and Black instead of the Red and Blue. Wharton's cachet can only carry the University's recruitment efforts so far. Penn's financial prospects are not particularly bright. According to statistics from The Chronicle of Higher Education, the University's endowment has underperformed national averages in each of the last two fiscal years. But the University's financial constraints are such that even in the event of spectacular endowment growth, the financial aid situation will not be very different. Any calls for funding financial aid primarily through endowment income, as Princeton currently does, are therefore implausible. The Undergraduate Assembly put forward a proposal earlier this week to exempt a handful of students each year from the summer earnings requirement. Much like the Trustees Scholars program, this plan is not a cure-all. Its intent, and rightly so, is to allow students to pursue study, travel or low-paying internships over the summer -- not to make Penn that much more affordable. It is in these small, focused initiatives -- beneficial for the few, not the masses -- that Penn's future progress in the area of financial aid will be found. It is worth keeping this in mind as the UA presses ahead with its financial aid plan and other University bodies consider the role of financial aid in the area of minority recruitment and retention. The constraints on the University's finances will for now prevent Penn from competing with the big boys in offering the best financial aid packages.