The current economic crisis has hit home for many college students on financial aid. But Tufts remains committed to meeting the needs of all students currently receiving aid.
In an e-mail to the Tufts community earlier this month, University President Lawrence Bacow promised "to meet the full financial need of every undergraduate we admit."
"Our highest priority is to meet our financial aid obligations to our students," Bacow told the Daily last week. "We will do everything to try and protect that."
At Tufts, the undergraduate schools' annual operating budgets provide the vast majority of funding for financial aid. For the last two years, the university has been admitting students on an unofficial need-blind basis, in which admissions officers evaluate applicants without considering their ability to pay.
Tufts will not be able to determine until March, when the Office of Admiss-ions finalizes the Class of 2013's makeup, whether the economic climate will prevent the continuation of this practice, according to Director of Financial Aid Patricia Reilly.
She said financial aid officers know that the economic downturn is having "some impact" on Tufts families' assets, citing decreasing home values and savings. But there have been fewer effects on families' incomes. Both assets and income become factors in the financial aid process.
"In general, this kind of downturn means individual families need extra help," Reilly said. "What we need to be prepared for is most likely there are going to be families who hadn't expected to need financial aid or hadn't expected to need substantially more, and because of the financial markets things change."
She stressed that the economy's effects on Tufts students have been relatively minor so far.
"We haven't seen yet a big surge in families reporting that they're unemployed, or that their assets are gone or that they can't borrow," Reilly said, noting that there was only a two-percent increase in the number of applicants who applied for aid this year. "In fact, this fall, the number of people who paid their bills on time is higher than it's ever been."
But officials must wait to see if rising unemployment will translate to increased demand for aid next fall. Meanwhile, decreased confidence in the credit markets has not significantly impacted Tufts students who receive loans, Reilly said.
The university has one of the lowest rates in the country of students defaulting on their federal loans, making it easy "to find lenders who were happy to do business with us," Reilly added.
Around the country, though, many college students are having a tougher time securing private and federal loans since the crisis.
As of last week, 137 lenders had stopped making federal student loans and 36 had stopped issuing private ones, Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org, said. This means "that students will have to hunt around a little bit more to find a lender," he said. The Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority, the state's largest student-loan provider, stopped offering private loans in July; it has begun offering some of them again.
Kantrowitz finds that economic worries have affected financial aid in three areas: availability, cost and eligibility.
Increased credit-score minimums for private loans will impact low- and moderate-income students, first-generation college students and minority students the most, he explained.
Kantrowitz said that subsidized and unsubsidized federal Stafford loans will not be impacted by the crisis because their issuance does not depend on a borrower's credit history.
Federally guaranteed parent loans, PLUS loans, to a "small percentage of borrowers" could be affected, Kantrowitz said. Users are not allowed to have an "adverse credit history," which includes, among other things, having had a foreclosure in the last five years.
"The major impact has to do with the length of the education program," he said. "Students at four-year schools are going to be more profitable than students at two-year schools, and that's why we've seen discrimination against some students at two-year institutions."
But in many cases, this is not an issue for students at community colleges, who often do not need to enter the private market, since safer federal and state loans cover their lower costs of education.
At Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, officials have seen a recent increase in enrollment from students seeking a cheaper college path, said Melissa Holster, the school's financial aid director.
"We have a lot more students applying to aid and a lot more students opting to come to community college," she said, "because they don't want to spend the [extra] money."
