The middle-class squeeze

    In a March 11 e-mail to the Tufts community, University President Lawrence Bacow wrote, "To our knowledge, no undergraduate has had to withdraw from Tufts due to financial distress."
    Anecdotal evidence and common sense suggests some students may be affected more than Bacow and the administration are aware. Amid a deepening recession and the rising cost of tuition, families everywhere are having more and more trouble keeping their students in college. Though Bacow and the Tufts administration can pledge to fill students' financial needs, this may prove to be a very difficult promise to keep. While their intentions are good, and they have taken several positive steps in order to maximize funding for students, such as the financial aid budget having been raised by 12 percent, there is no guarantee as to when the recession will end and no assurance Tufts will continually be able to meet enrolled students' needs.
    This issue is part of a larger problem, however, that is by no means limited to our own campus. Across the nation, universities with limited funds are struggling to maintain current levels of financial aid, and universities like Tufts that seek to practice need-blind admissions have an even more difficult task before them. By pledging to meet the need of any student who is accepted, these universities are forced to spend large amounts of their funds on students from lower-income backgrounds, while a significant number of middle-class students are being shortchanged the relatively small amount of funds they need to get by.
    This is a difficult conversation to have, partly because it threatens to upset the careful progress Tufts has made toward a need-blind admissions process — in itself a worthy goal. But Tufts needs to be focused on ensuring the financial stability of as many of its students as possible, and middle-class students need to be part of the equation.
    That is not to say that Tufts should prioritize students with fewer financial needs over students with more. Ideally, qualified students (and certainly current attendees) should not be hamstrung by circumstances that are almost entirely out of their control. Nevertheless, amid a deepening recession, Tufts needs to recognize the plight of its students and look for creative (and often unpopular) ways to manage their well-being along with that of the university as a whole. In an effort to remain competitive with other top-tier institutions of higher learning, Tufts must necessarily improve and expand — whether that means raising prices, cutting budgets or acknowledging the difficulty of an entirely need-blind admissions process.
    There are no simple solutions for these problems. Tufts finds itself in the unenviable position of having to make difficult choices between losing top students, losing its need-blind status and losing its competitive edge. None of these options is appealing, and any step forward requires significant sacrifice, but we at the Daily hope that the Tufts administration will recognize that there is something wrong. The road to recovery will not be easy — but the first step is admitting we have a problem.