Prioritizing the Accessibility of a Wash U Education
A WU/FUSED EDITORIAL
In August 2013, the White House announced a plan for a new college rating system based on accessibility, affordability, and graduation(?) outcomes. The rankings, which would serve as a basis for federal allocations of student aid, would use metrics such as tuition affordability, percent of students receiving Pell grants, loan debt, graduation rate, and graduate earnings to assess educational “value.” Students would be drawn to “better value” schools because those institutions would have the most financial aid to dispense, whereas schools serving low income students poorly would find themselves losing federal financial support.
So how would Wash U fare in these new rankings?
Wash U does very well in terms of graduation rate and graduate earnings, and while tuition—at just over $44,000 a year—is high, the average burden of students taking out loans remains below the national average of $26,000 due to robust scholarship resources per student. The area in which Wash U performs most poorly is access: only 7% of Wash U students are Pell grant recipients (a measure of low-income background). So while Wash U supports its students well, this supportive education is available to only a select group of students—the vast majority of whom come from high-income backgrounds.
These conclusions are fairly obvious. It makes little sense to compare the cost and accessibility of Washington University to public universities or private institutions geared specifically towards low-income students. However, even within a select cohort of elite institutions—“The Top 25 Universities,” according to US News and World Report—Wash U performs poorly in terms of access. Dead last, in fact. Wash U supports less than a third of the percentage of Pell grant recipients as Columbia University, and just over half the percentage of the second-to-last ranked institution, California Institute of Technology.
To adopt the language of the new White House proposal, Wash U achieves affordability and outcomes at the expense of accessibility. But must increasing access necessarily undermine educational excellence and scholarship support per student?
Scholarship resources are determined not only by endowment size but by the priorities of endowment allocation. Many of the schools ranked ahead of Wash U in US News and World Report’s Pell grant ranking have similar—even smaller—endowments than Wash U, and nonetheless support greater numbers of low-income students. While Wash U’s endowment may be less flexible than older institutions, and Wash U’s character as a top research institution may skew priorities away from undergraduate socioeconomic diversity, there is a need to seriously discuss the relationship between spending and fundraising priorities on the accessibility of a Wash U education. The Wash U Leading Together campaign has set a $330 million fundraising goal for merit and need-based scholarship aid. This is great. But within the context of a $2.2 billion campaign, it’s worth asking: could we make scholarship aid— and in that accessibility—a higher priority?
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Washington University United for Undergraduate Socioeconomic Diversity (WU/FUSED) seeks to promote awareness of the implications of need-aware admissions and other barriers to socioeconomic diversity on campus and to prompt serious discussions between students and administrators about potential for increasing scholarship resources to support more students from low income backgrounds.