http://www.newsweek.com/id/151735-
Rivalries
http://www.newsweek.com/id/151734
- Financial Aid
Contact:
Jan Angilella FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
at
212-445-5638 Sunday, August 10, 2008
EXCERPT:
NEWSWEEK-KAPLAN 'HOW TO GET INTO COLLEGE GUIDE'
NEWSWEEK'S
25 HOT RIVALRIES: INTENSE COMPETITION BETWEEN SCHOOLS STILL IMPORTANT IN
COLLEGE ADMISSIONS
----
HARVARD'S
NEW FINANCIAL AID POLICIES LED OTHER SCHOOLS TO DO THE SAME; OFFERING MORE AID
TO MORE MIDDLE- AND UPPER-MIDDLE INCOME FAMILIES
New
York-Ask colleges about their celebrated feuds with other colleges and they
brush them off as irrelevant in an age of national unity, writes Contributing
Editor Jay Mathews in the current issue of Newsweek. "Sir, we do not consider ourselves rivals with our sister
academies except on the fields of friendly strifes," says West Point
spokesman Francis J. DeMaro Jr. Annapolis spokeswoman Deborah Goode has the
same earnest message: "We support each other and our nation on the front lines
of the global War on Terror."
In
academia, such seeming hatreds are no longer fashionable. But intense
competition between high-quality institutions-what most people would call
rivalry-still has importance in college admissions, Mathews writes in an
excerpt of the Newsweek-Kaplan "How to Get Into College Guide," which
appears in the August 18-25 double issue (on newsstands Monday, August 11).
These rivals (OK, pick a friendlier word: counterparts?) are continually trying
to differentiate themselves for applicants who wonder which of similar, elite
schools might be best.
We
picked 11 pairs and one trio of colleges whose strengths are so great and
resemblances so compelling that careful comparison is necessary to sort out
which work best for which applicants. It's also a bit of a guilty pleasure to
marvel at how deeply embedded the rivalries are, Mathews reports. In every
case, "no matter what the schools' press releases say, students, faculty
and alumni feel as if they're in competition with one another. Like most
successful institutions, that turns out to be one of their strengths." The
top 12 rivalries at U.S. colleges:
Old
Ivies: Harvard vs. Yale Science
Magnets: Caltech vs. MIT
Bay
Area Giants: UC Berkeley vs. Stanford Big Hoosiers: Indiana vs. Purdue
American
Warriors: Annapolis vs. West Point Midwest Stars: Michigan vs. Ohio State
For
Women Only: Smith vs. Wellesley Historically
Black: Howard vs. Morehouse
Social
Activists: Guilford vs. Oberlin and
Spelman
Catholic
Powers: Boston College vs. Notre Dame Cinematic
Enclaves: NYU Tisch vs. USC
Consortium
Jewels: Amherst vs. Pomona Film
School
Also in
the excerpt, Miami Bureau Chief Arian Campo-Flores reports that Harvard's major
restructuring of its financial aid, aimed at easing the strain on middle-and
upper-middle-income families, overwhelmed by the spiraling cost of higher
education, that led other Ivies and well-endowed schools to publicize their own
aid overhauls aimed at the same target.
Harvard's
initiative had three parts, Campo-Flores reports. The first, dubbed the
"zero to 10 percent standard," decreed that families making between
$120,000 and $180,000 annually would now be expected to pay no more than 10
percent of their income. For those earning less than $120,000, the percentage
would steadily decline until reaching zero for incomes of $60,000 and below.
That means a family making $120,000 would be expected to contribute about
$12,000, compared with $19,000 before. The second component: all loans would be
replaced by outright grants (a policy that Princeton was first to enact, in
2001). And finally, in most cases Harvard would no longer consider home equity
in determining a family's ability to pay.
"It
was really clear we were just not getting the very good middle-income students
to even think about Harvard" because it was perceived as too expensive,
says William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid. "They were
almost automatically going straight to the great flagship public
universities." Moreover, Harvard's leadership fretted about what
Fitzsimmons calls the "upstairs-downstairs syndrome"-that the student
body was polarizing into rich and poor, with little in between. "We had a
great fear we were becoming unaffordable and inaccessible."
While
some education experts find much to praise in the financial-aid revolution, the
reaction from leaders at less-wealthy institutions, however, hasn't been nearly
as upbeat, Campo-Flores reports. "Some of their grumbling surely stems
from Ivy envy. But they make a substantive point: that Harvard has placed them
in an untenable position-unable to match the Ivies' munificence, yet facing
families who've heard the news and now want to haggle. "We got calls from
students right away saying, 'Harvard did this. Are you going to match them?'
" says John Burdick, dean of admissions and financial aid at the
University of Rochester in New York. "My concern is the larger signal to
the marketplace about what education should cost."
# # #
(Read
excerpt at www.Newsweek.com)
