The New York Times-20080124-Paying for College- -Letter-
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Paying for College; [Letter]
To the Editor:
Re Ivy-League Letdown (Op-Ed, Jan. 22):
Roger Lehecka and Andrew Delbanco are right to be concerned about the choices that colleges and universities need to make if they have only modest resources to apply to financial aid, but they are wrong to disparage institutions that are using their endowments to make college affordable to students at all income levels.
Seven years ago, Princeton adopted policies similar to the ones that Harvard and Yale recently announced, replacing loans with grants and reducing the contributions expected of students and their families. These policies benefit students from the lowest income levels as well as from middle and upper-middle income families.
Since Princeton adopted these policies, the percentage of its entering class on financial aid has increased to 54 percent from 38 percent, and the percentage of students from low-income backgrounds has increased to 15 percent from 8 percent. This year more than 11 percent of the students in our entering class are the first members of their families to attend college.
Princeton has also invested in programs that prepare more lower-income students for college and encourage them to attend. Other colleges and universities, both public and private, have also recently expanded their aid programs for low as well as middle-income students.
Ensuring that students from all income levels have access to the full range of colleges and universities should be a matter of high national priority. As Mr. Lehecka and Mr. Delbanco correctly point out, this will require a sustained public investment in addition to the investments that individual institutions can make, and increasingly are making.
Shirley M. Tilghman President, Princeton University
Princeton, N.J., Jan. 22, 2008
