The Campaign
Priorities: Financial Aid
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Priority Update
To hold our financial aid programs at current levels, we must raise a minimum of $75 million in new endowment and an additional $1.5 million in expendable income by June 30, 2009.
Introduction
Bowdoin is committed to enrolling the most talented and promising students, regardless of their ability to pay for a Bowdoin education. The College’s first scholarships were provided in 1814 by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, when a year at Bowdoin cost less than twenty-five dollars. The goal then—as it is today—was to ensure access to Bowdoin for all students of great promise.
Student financial aid is an investment, not charity. It is a deliberate commitment of institutional resources to bring to the College students of abundant talent and energy – young men and women who will constitute the next generation of principled leadership for Bowdoin, the state of Maine, the United States and, increasingly, the world.
Financial aid is also the means by which Bowdoin helps to ensure the high quality of its student body. Bowdoin seeks annually to be need-blind in admissions, meaning that the admissions decision process is “blind” to the financial circumstances of an individual applicant. The College also guarantees to meet the full calculated need of each student who qualifies for aid for all four years. This dual commitment—need-blind admissions and full-need financial aid—has produced first-year classes composed of young women and men from all financial circumstances, who have the intellect, energy, and character to take full advantage of the educational opportunities at the College. Very few colleges—approximately two dozen of the 3,700 colleges and universities in the U.S.—have the will and the resources to keep financial considerations out of the admissions process. However, all that do have superior academic reputations and many are Bowdoin’s direct competitors.
Bowdoin’s Financial Aid Program
“The most rewarding aspect of giving to financial aid is receiving letters each year from the recipients telling me who they are and what they are doing and sometimes — and most importantly — their aspirations and dreams. The diversity and richness of this group is astounding, and Bowdoin would be a lot poorer place without them. That is my reward.”
Barry N. Wish ’63
Over the years, as (1) the College has reached out to a broader spectrum of students, (2) the College’s cost of offering educational and student programs has increased and (3) the economy has become more uncertain and difficult for many in America, the cost of funding our aid programs has grown significantly. In 2006-07, Bowdoin distributed more than $17.4 million in need-based financial aid, an average of over $23,400 per aided student. In 1996-97, 37% of the student body received financial aid; today that percentage is approaching 42%. Nearly a quarter of our financial aid recipients are from families with a median family income of less than $40,000 a year. It is also important to note that even as the College has remained open to students from all economic circumstances, most of the College’s 750 aid recipients are middle-class students, many of whom are Bowdoin’s top scholars and leaders. In addition, the College has maintained its historic financial commitment to students from Maine, investing nearly 18% of its annual scholarship budget in students from surrounding counties and towns, when the percentage of the students from Maine is around 13%.
Approximately half of our $17.4 million aid budget is underwritten by the income from $207 million in endowed scholarship funds, many of them established by alumni who were themselves recipients of financial aid at Bowdoin. These endowments are incredibly valuable to the College, but the need to secure the other half of the aid budget from unrestricted sources in the College’s annual operating budget is a source of real financial pressure.
While fundraising for financial aid has been successful, endowment for financial aid has not kept pace with student enrollment and need. Income from financial aid endowments provided 75% of the aid budget in 1990-91; ten years later that figure had dropped to 51%.
If we fail to raise additional financial aid endowment, without any change in our financial aid policies and without any increase in the percentage or number of students on aid, income from financial aid endowments will cover a shrinking percentage of our aid obligation simply due to annual tuition and fees increases. This will put pressure on unrestricted sources of income. Moreover, we will still be providing smaller grants and requiring higher family contributions than some of our peers, making Bowdoin less competitive for the students we want. In order to stay at the levels of aid we provide today, over the long term it is vital for us to raise additional financial aid endowment.
Strategic Use of Financial Aid
In the past decade, many colleges and universities have adopted new strategies in awarding their financial aid dollars. Some of these strategies have resulted in the reduction or elimination of loans, increased use of merit awards, or alterations in the calculations used to determine need—all intended to lure the best students. Among Bowdoin’s closest competitor group of schools (those that still calculate aid based only on need) institutional decisions about the different amounts of grant, loan, and student job that make up a particular student’s aid offer can influence enrollment decisions and result in real-dollar differences between aid packages of $20,000 at two different schools. In the current admissions literature and vernacular, this is called “preferential packaging.” Colleges with larger endowments tend to provide larger average grants and require students to borrow less. Bowdoin and other schools with smaller endowments ask parents and students to bear more of the cost. Bowdoin is fifth among 22 competitor colleges in the amount of selfhelp required ( job and loan), second in percentage of cost required from parents, and—not surprisingly given our smaller endowment—sixteenth in average grant. There is intense competition between Bowdoin and other schools when financial aid packages are equal for a student accepted at several colleges; if the annual difference in cost-of-attendance to a family becomes thousands of dollars less elsewhere, Bowdoin will have a very difficult time enrolling its share of top scholars.
Distinction, Diversity, and Demographics
If Bowdoin is to preserve access to the College’s educational opportunities for the very best students and compete for those students with wealthier institutions, the College will need to raise significant additional financial aid dollars. It will need to do so if Bowdoin is to continue its commitment to socioeconomic, geographic and ethnic diversity, especially for students from Maine.
Moving forward, Bowdoin aspires to be among the small number of schools with 100% of the financial aid budget provided by income from financial aid endowment. Our current levels of enrollment and aid would require us to raise endowment for financial aid at a rate that is two or three times greater than what we were doing at the start of The Bowdoin Campaign. This is a more aggressive goal requiring the involvement and dedication of the entire Bowdoin family, and the development of thorough long-term strategies for fundraising success.
In the short term, to hold our programs at current levels, we must raise a minimum of $75 million in new endowment and an additional $1.5 million in expendable income by June 30, 2009.
Falling short of these immediate and long-range initiatives risks the intrusion of financial considerations into the admissions process and threatens Bowdoin’s ability to keep its doors open to the best students from across the nation and around the world. The quality of the academic experience for all students depends on our ability to meet the financial needs of deserving students. There is no more compelling need, no more important priority for the future of the College as it moves ahead in this new century.