Aiding Students, Buying Students: Financial Aid in America

2. Aid in History: Who Got It, What Shaped It

28   2 Aid in History: Who Got It, What Shaped It The Reach of Student Aid The history of the reach of student aid involves two sets of questions. First, how big was grant aid in different periods, compared with student expenses and college budgets (most aid before the 1940s was college aid), and what proportions of students got it? Secondly, who got the aid, and how adequately? We will focus here on grant aid and socioeconomic groups. Answers to these questions can only be tentative because the data are spotty. There are no long-term studies tracing the amounts of aid given by a college—let alone whole groups of colleges—in relation to college budgets, total student costs, or family incomes.1 Different studies and data, mostly for particular dates or limited periods, give different criteria against which to measure grant aid—full tuition, for example, or total college spending. Published trend data on grant aid in relation to student budgets do not begin till the end of the 1920s. In 1929–30, grant aid per student in all colleges was a tiny 2.5 percent of total charges and living costs. In the 1930s Depression, charges fell and grant aid rose, but in 1939–40 it was still only 3.6 percent of charges and costs. The big change came with the GI Bill. In 1949–50 student grants were over half (55 percent) of all charges and living costs. As the wartime veterans’ benefits tailed off, the percentage fell to 14 percent in 1959–60 (still much more than in the 1920s and 1930s). It then grew again, as new federal programs, including Social Security, took effect.2 Aid in History  29 It is tempting to conclude that student grant aid was of no account till after World War II. This would be wrong. Until the 1940s, admittedly , low tuition at some colleges and off-campus jobs found by students themselves were probably more important than grants and loans in widening college access. But the data reported above for the 1920s and 1930s masked big differences between colleges. At the end of the 1920s, many gave no scholarships at all, but that was far from true everywhere. A survey of thirty-five Methodist colleges in 1930–31 (including Albion, DePauw , Dickinson, and Ohio Wesleyan) found that eight had no endowed scholarships, but the median college in the group gave grant aid to just over a quarter of its students. The grants averaged 40 percent of tuition, though much less of total costs.3 Among colleges founded before the late nineteenth century, at least some shared a common sequence. At early stages in their history, they gave extensive grant aid to maintain or expand enrollments. As they found larger and richer clienteles and put more money into faculty and plant, their aid spending declined but rose again at various points in the twentieth century under new pressures to widen access and catch talent. At Harvard in the early 1700s, following a buildup of endowed scholAid as Percentage of Expenses Graph and percentages derived from data in Carnegie Commission, Higher Education: Who Pays? Who Benefits? Who Should Pay? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), page 32. Percentages based on all students, whether or not they received aid. Graph lines do not show fluctuations between tenyear points. 1. Full tuition and fees, plus living and incidental costs. Figure 1. Grant Aid as a Percentage of Total Charges and Living CostsPer Student, 1929–19701 30   part i The American Way of Student Aid arships, between a quarter and a third of students received grant aid covering about half of their expenses, if they were frugal; there was also aid from jobs and loans. At Amherst, 39 percent of its first thirteen hundred students between 1821 and 1845 were ministerial charity students who got free tuition amounting to about a quarter of basic expenses. At New York University (founded 1831), nearly half of students were aided in the midnineteenth century, some getting free tuition. None of these aid levels was sustained.4 In the twentieth century, an unusual report by Swarthmore’s president David Fraser showed a dramatic fall and then rise in scholarship spending there. In 1903 Swarthmore (founded 1865) returned 25 percent of its charges back to students as scholarships. The president of the time, Joseph Swain, had just started an admissions drive that would double Swarthmore’s...