Tufts' Office of Admissions is already operating under a need-blind admissions policy, but a lack of residual funds is preventing the department from finalizing the policy, according to administration officials.
Achieving permanent need-blind practices is the primary goal of Tufts' ongoing, $1.2-billion capital campaign, Beyond Boundaries. As prominent universities such as Harvard and Yale continue to implement these policies, Tufts has been striving to catch up.
The admissions office first implemented the policy of admitting the most qualified students regardless of their financial needs last school year, when selecting the Class of 2011. So far, applicants for the Class of 2012 have been dealt with in the same way.
But the funds that made this achievement possible are not yet sustainable, so the university cannot guarantee that the policy will be permanent.
Tufts for some time has been need-sensitive in admissions, which means that the admissions office considers an applicant's ability to pay in relatively few cases. Usually, these cases involve deciding whether or not to place a student on the waitlist.
Last year, an increase in various types of funds allowed the admissions office to accept students with no consideration of their ability to pay.
The university's undergraduate schools' annual operating budgets provided the vast majority of funding for the approximately $42 million of financial aid given to this school year's undergraduates. In addition, a good deal of money from interest generated by endowed funds went to funding financial aid, and a significant amount of non-endowment-related donations also went towards financial aid.
Dean of Admissions Lee Coffin said that growth in endowment funds through Beyond Boundaries and the annual interest that those funds generate are the most important factors in making admissions need-blind.
"Last year, gifts to the capital campaign added substantial new resources to the financial aid endowment, and those resources accommodated need-blind admissions practices for the Class of 2011," he said in an e-mail.
Coffin said that while the admissions office expects the entire Class of 2012 to be admitted on a need-blind basis, the university has not yet been able to project when a sustainable need-blind policy will be implemented.
He said that Tufts will become need-blind when Beyond Boundaries succeeds in raising $200 million in financial-aid funds. At the end of last year, $65 million had been compiled for these funds.
"It is possible that the university will formally implement a need-blind policy before the campaign ends" in 2011, Coffin said. "The determining factor is fundraising."
The Class of 2011 received over $13 million in financial aid last year, a $3-million increase from the Class of 2010, Coffin said.
In addition, the percentage of freshmen who were awarded any financial aid from the school increased this year to 39, a five-percent spike. Coffin predicts that 42 percent of students will receive financial aid after a need-blind policy is officially announced.
While interest from endowment investments is the main source of funding that will lead to a change in policy, donors can contribute to the cause on a smaller scale as well.
But such contributions are not sustainable and can only be used in the fiscal year in which they were raised, according to Christine Sanni, Tufts' director of advancement communications and donor relations.
"While we're aiming for a certain amount of endowment, every year there's money raised for term scholarships," she said. "Sometimes there's a donor that doesn't have those resources [to contribute to the endowment, which has a donation minimum], but they still want to support a student. There are people that do that every year."
Sanni said that money donated for purposes other than financial aid can also help increase the financial-aid budget indirectly by freeing up resources in the university's operating budget.
One institution comparable to Tufts that recently declared an official need-blind policy is Vassar College, a liberal arts school located in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Vassar announced its policy last June. It had previously been effectively need-blind for a time prior to the 1996-1997 school year, at which point the rising costs of tuition led it to backtrack to a policy of need-sensitivity.
According to Vassar's Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid David Borus, the school was able to make the switch back to need-blind admissions last year because of greater funding from the operating budget in the short-term, and an understanding that more endowed funds would be raised in the long-term.
"In order to be need-blind, we decided that we simply have to have the flexibility in our budgeting process to allow an annual fluctuation in the spending on aid," he told the Daily.
Schools cannot predict how many applicants that request financial aid will end up enrolling, he added. Therefore, the amount of funds provided by the school's operating budget must be flexible enough to accommodate changes.
How much the recent announcement of a need-blind policy will attract students from lower-income families to Vassar remains to be seen.
Vassar's financial aid budget is smaller than Tufts' by about $16 million, and the college has only about 2,400 undergraduate students; Tufts has nearly 5,000. Accordingly, Tufts must collect more extensive resources to support a sustainable switch, Coffin said.
"The $13 [m]illion we awarded to the Class of '11 gives us a concrete sum to model the impact of need blind practices," Coffin said. "If we repeat that figure this year for the Class of '12, we will have a better sense of what Tufts ultimately needs to make need blind admissions a sustainable policy."
