YCC report recommends more aid reform
Yale students are by and large pleased with Yale’s sweeping financial aid reforms, but more work remains to be done, the Yale College Council wrote in a report released this week.
The ongoing financial crisis has created a continued need for financial aid reform at Yale, the report, which the YCC is circulating among administrators, states. The council suggests a range of policy changes, including a new way of calculating aid packages that would reduce the weight given to home equity, an increase in the annual travel award and reduction of the self-help contribution required of...
Consider the following please:
Various ways that Yale's (and other schools') financial aid policies still bite:
1. There is no disclosure before admission that the "income protection allowance" (or similar term) is only about 125% above the poverty level. This means that Yale and other schools expect a family to live on 125% above the poverty level. No school is obligated to assume you live lavishly, but if in awarding aid they expect the family to live at 125% of the poverty level, the schools should make that known. They don't. This could obviously be important to the family's decision about where their child attends college, especially if there are younger children who will now not have the same opportunities as the older Yale undergrad because they can't afford to send Kid #1 to Yale, AND give Kids#2-4 the same opportunities Kid #1 had.
2. More fundamentally, the schools in setting the "what we think you need to live on" allowance, should peg it to something reasonable, say 125% of median income, rather than 125% of poverty level. The schools may say they are required to do otherwise by the feds. That is baloney. It may be true with federally awarded money, but it is not true regarding the school's own money.
4. The schools punish parents for making any retirement contributions. Say you earn $90K for the year, and make a reasonable 10% retirment contribution (as any economist would say is what should be done, right President Levin?). Yale treats the family as having $90K in money avialable to fund the Yalie's education, when $9K was set aside in a retirement account that can't be tapped without paying a punitive penalty to the IRS. No school should be required to factor lavish retirement account contributions out of the analysis, but 10-15% is hardly unreasonable. What is unreasonable is for Yale and other schools to treat the family as having all the retirement contribution available for the student's education for the year when in fact none of it is. No family should be put in the position of "Do I fund my retirment or my child's education?"
5. Final pencil whipping the schools engage in: Every family gets assessed an "Expected Family Contribution." Assume you have two kids in college at the same time(say at different schools). You would expect that each school would get half of the ECF figure. That is not how it works--each takes 60% of the EFC, so the family pays 120% of the EFC. Thus for example if a family has one child in college and it has an EFC of $10K, it pays $10K. Assume that Family #2 also calculates out at a $10K EFC, but it has two kids in college. That family pays $6K to each school--so it pays 20% more than its "Expected" Family Contribution.
Please bring these points up with Mr. Stolarrzi, and ask the YDN to write an article about what he tells you.
Yale and a lot of other top schools have to their credit done a lot to improve financial aid, but all of them still pencil whip families with "gotchas" like these, and they don't disclose they are doing so. That is probably the reason they refuse to let you see how they calculated the EFC, and just tell you what the number is, and if you are lucky, they will tell you how they got there, but they won't put it in writing.
Please consider these reforms. Most are simple fairness and disclosure.
"Tao said the survey revealed that while Yale’s overall aid packages were in many cases sufficient, the crisis was affecting students in smaller ways. For example, students are finding themselves squeezed when it comes to finding money for travel to and from their homes and for daily expenses, areas the YCC hopes Yale can address through a reallocation of funds. "
There is a minority of students here that could never afford things here at Yale...They should work like people with the highest financial aid do. It's not the University's responsibility to pay for personal expenses of its students.
More. More! We want moooore! Yeah, I'm sure if I dug into the details the current aid package would look more like a marketing gimmick than a real help to the middle class as per #2. But I'll pretend things are all right for now cause in case you ingrates haven't noticed, Yale gave you a big improvement in aid just a year ago and now we're in a big recession. You should probably follow my lead.
“I don’t know where you could reallocate from,” said Tao, “But I see potential places where you could reallocate to.”
Good start. You're halfway there.