Apr 1, 2009
"They shine a little brighter."
Paying in Full as the Ticket Into Colleges: In the face of the recession, colleges admit more wealthy students.
This year, many of these colleges say they are more inclined to accept students who do not apply for aid, or whom they judge to be less needy based on other factors, like ZIP code or parents’ background.
“We’re only human,” said Steven Syverson, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. “They shine a little brighter.”
This impacts international students even more dramatically than American students, since international aid is one of the first things cut — but also, at the top end of the scale, because more international students are being admitted if they can pay full tuition, in order to subsidize the educations of less-wealthy American-born students.
Colleges say they are not backing away from their desire to serve less affluent students; if anything, they say, taking more students who can afford to pay full price or close to it allows them to better afford those who cannot. But they say the inevitable result is that needier students will be shifted down to the less expensive and less prestigious institutions.
“There’s going to be a cascading of talented lower-income kids down the social hierarchy of American higher education, and some cascading up of affluent kids,” said Morton Owen Schapiro, the president of Williams College and an economist who studies higher education.
And colleges acknowledge that giving more seats to higher-paying students often means trading off their goals to be more socioeconomically diverse.
