College in Need Closes a Door to Needy Students (charges $50K/year)

New York Times ^ | June 9, 2009 | Jonathan D. Glater

[reaganaut1]

The admissions team at Reed College, known for its free-spirited students, learned in March that the prospective freshman class it had so carefully composed after weeks of reviewing essays, scores and recommendations was unworkable.

Money was the problem. Too many of the students needed financial aid, and the college did not have enough. So the director of financial aid gave the team another task: drop more than 100 needy students before sending out acceptances, and substitute those who could pay full freight.

The whole idea of excluding a student simply because of money clashed with the college’s ideals, Leslie Limper, the aid director, acknowledged. “None of us are very happy,” she said, adding that Reed did not strike anyone from its list last year and that never before had it needed to weed out so many worthy students. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m still doing this.”

That decision was one of several agonizing ones for this small private college, celebrated for its combination of academic rigor and a laid-back approach to education that once attracted Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, to study on its leafy campus minutes from downtown.

With their endowments ravaged by the financial markets and more students clamoring for assistance, private colleges like Reed are making numerous changes this year in staff, students, tuition and classes that they hope will tide them over without harming their reputations or their educational goals.

Reed and others have admitted more students to bolster revenue with larger classes. Many are cutting costs by freezing or reducing salaries, suspending hiring and postponing building maintenance and construction. And the cost of attendance is rising; in Reed’s case, by 3.8 percent, to nearly $50,000 a year for its 1,300 students.

[Toki]

The funny part is he became a Dem while I was at college (he was the only republican in our house before). I’m trying to do what he asks though I don’t always (we argue about me having a job in college, and he threatened to pull my funding if I didn’t vote for Obama [I did not, I ended up not getting my ballot in time though, and I wanted to vote for Palin too!]), though he’ll work my hide off when I go to work for him (my father is one thing, a hard worker, which I respect above all else about him). Thanks though

[HereInTheHeartland]

I know there are many good people at universities and that blanket statements such as I made are usually wrong to make.

I just get frustrated knowing of the huge amounts of waste at universities, and the dead weight that the tenure system produces.
They are places where viewpoints that are in opposition to core American values are the vast norm. And they see themselves as required to foist these views on impressionable young people.

[Nam Vet]

Communism, Atheism, Free Love

Unofficial motto of Reed College.

Nam Vet