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.”
