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MAMLET: Stanford doesn’t
lose students to other top-notch schools over
differences in financial aid packages.
Rod Searcey |
When Harvard University
announced in February that parents making less than
$40,000 annually would no longer be asked to pay anything
for their children’s education, Stanford’s
dean of admissions and financial aid applauded—and
continued to feel good about Stanford’s policies.
“Harvard, with that announcement, is going to
do a lot of good for a lot of people,” Robin Mamlet
says. “But it would be a mistake to think that
we haven’t been quietly doing a lot of good for
these families for decades.”
“We have always had a significant number of students
here with parents giving zero,” she adds. Stanford
does not use a specific income cut-off level, like $40,000,
for students to qualify for its most generous financial
aid packages. “There are some students from families
with a slightly higher income who qualify, and some
students from families with lower incomes who don’t
qualify because they have more assets,” Mamlet
says.
For most low-income students, “our financial
aid package is still more favorable than Harvard’s
new package,” she says. According to a Harvard
news release announcing the initiative, students are
expected to contribute $3,500 in self-help, which Harvard
defines as a combination of loans, academic-year work
and outside scholarships. Stanford expects a contribution
of $2,250 in loans and school-year work from its lowest-income
students (the self-help requirement for others is $6,000).
Harvard also expects a summer earnings contribution
of $1,850, whereas Stanford expects $1,500.
Because of Stanford’s policy of need-blind admission—admitting
qualified students without regard to their ability to
pay—the admissions staff makes its decisions,
and then passes the list of “admits” to
the financial aid staff, who “come up with a package
that covers the distance between a family’s ability
to pay and what Stanford costs,” Mamlet says.
More than 70 percent of undergraduates currently receive
some kind of financial assistance at Stanford, with
46 percent receiving need-based scholarship help. The
total amount of financial aid for 2002-03, the latest
available figure, was almost $107 million. “Our
lowest-income students in the Class of 2003 left with
an average debt burden of $6,590,” Mamlet says.
Mamlet is not worried that students from low-income
families will choose Harvard over Stanford based on
its new financial aid initiative. “Studies show
that when we lose students to Harvard, Yale, MIT or
Princeton, it’s for other reasons—it has
nothing to do with financial aid,” she says. “We
do lose students to a number of institutions that are
not considered Stanford peers due to merit scholarships.
“What you find, time and time again, when you
return to what Stanford is doing, is that our program
is exceptional,” she adds. “Do we need continued
reliance on alumni giving in order to maintain that
and enhance it? Absolutely. But we can feel really good
about what we’re doing.”
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