Aiding Students, Buying Students: Financial Aid in America

9. Containing the Market

164   9 Containing the Market Professional Angst The departures from need-based aid met in the last chapter have been uncomfortable for financial aid officers and other college administrators. My interviews with them in the 1990s produced remarks about “unease” and “soul-searching,” being “torn” by new policies, and wondering if “I am compromising my values.” The disquiet appeared most strongly in discussions of “ethics” at professional meetings. In 1997 the College Board organized a whole conference on “Ethics in Enrollment Management and Financial Aid,” though the main result was simply a call for more discussion and open disclosure of practices.1 The anxiety stems from the historic tension between market and social mission in college admissions and student aid. That tension was sharpened by the development of a modern financial aid profession, dedicated to allocating aid on the basis of need but increasingly dominated by the demands of sophisticated enrollment management. College financial officers belong to a national association that states that their first responsibility is to the needy student, but they are paid—and hired and fired—by college managers who require them to think first and foremost of the college and its standing vis-à-vis market rivals.2 The two viewpoints, of course, are not necessarily opposed, as we have seen historically. Taking good care of students is in any college’s interests , and enrollment managers know it. But when veteran financial aid officers say, as they sometimes do, “I’m a Neanderthal” (or a “dinosaur”), they are saying, in a discreetly self-deprecating way, that their heart belongs to an earlier age when financial aid was more simply centered on Containing the Market  165 need. Nor is this just nostalgia. Some enrollment managers as well as financial aid officers have admitted to me that they would prefer not to give merits or do academically based preferential packaging if they could count on other colleges not to do so either. But usually, of course, they cannot. Ambivalence, then, is not confined to financial aid officers. Indeed, admissions officers have their own set of conflicts over the way colleges sell themselves.3 In some institutions, too, admissions officers have been more enthusiastic about reaching out to disadvantaged groups than the financial aid office, which has to be concerned about balancing the aid budget. And at some colleges, the strongest voice for basing aid on academic record rather than financial need comes from faculty. For many college officials involved in financial aid and admissions, there are ways of talking and thinking about it that massage ambivalence and make it easier to live with policies that favor the nonpoor. 1. Technical euphemism. “We brought down the discount rate” (grantaid per enrolled student as a percentage of full tuition) sounds better than “we cut financial aid” or “we enrolled fewer high-need students.” “We must look for more students with financial strength” sounds better than “we’ve got to get more rich kids.” 2. “Others are worse.” At colleges that give, say, small merit awards, administrators will sometimes point to other colleges that give bigger merits (“they just buy students”), or don’t meet all need, or, worse still, are guilty of both. 3. Specters of social division. Over the past three decades private-college officials have echoed the fear of Harvard’s president Eliot in 1904 that high tuition and expanded aid would lose the middle classes and polarize the college between two blocs—the rich who could afford high fees and the poor who would get the aid. The conclusion sometimes drawn today is that the middle classes rather than the poor need extra assistance to stem their flight to state universities where full tuition is lower. This flight in fact has not taken place at highly selective colleges (at least not before the recent recession), and low-income students do not form a large bloc at most private colleges.4 A bigger but less-publicized problem at hightuition colleges is the strain of being one of an impecunious few living among a prosperous majority. 4. “They come anyway.” Selective-college administrators often say they get high yield (high rate of acceptance of admission and financial aid of- 166   part II The Way of Elite Colleges fers) from low-income applicants. They sometimes add that even when the financial aid packages include heavy loans, the grants for high-need students are so big that they satisfy the...