Skidmore admissions officers and faculty pick winners of a grant for talented science and math students.
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Financial Uncertainty
In most years, the system would leave Skidmore and colleges like it with a pretty good idea of what to expect come May 1, when deposits are due. This time, though, money troubles are continually changing the outlook. In previous cycles, Shorb estimates, he could base 95% of the aid awards on the prior year's tax returns. But this time Shorb is also trying to project many applicant families' income for 2009, which, given the volatility of the economy, is anyone's guess. He's leaving his calendar open every day in April to deal with further appeals from students whose family finances are casualties of the recession. "In other years, there have been changes in circumstances," Shorb says. "But not to this magnitude." (See the worst business deals of 2008.)
Skidmore has boosted its financial-aid budget 8% this year by trimming travel, faculty raises, renovation plans and commencement festivities. While the cost of attending the college rose $2,000 this year, the average aid award increased $2,300. In addition to $7,000 worth of federal and state grants, work-study earnings and federal loans, the average financial-aid applicant will pocket $28,000 in Skidmore grants. Skidmore, like many of its peer schools, also allocates funding for superstars with financial need, a practice known as "preferential packaging." The most desirable students--the ones who blew the lid off the SAT, for instance, or those who will be the first in their family to go to college--get a nice surprise in their aid awards: fewer loans, more grants. "Just like an airplane," explains Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO). "No two people going from point A to point B paid the same price for the ticket."
But what happens if in the end, a college can't book a full flight? Glotzbach says the possibility is remote, but Michael Casey, Skidmore's vice president for advancement, estimates that because 80% of the school's funding comes from tuition, any single student's absence could punch a $25,000 to $30,000 hole in the operating budget. And it's possible that the sophomore, junior and senior classes could shrink as well. Shorb has already received about 60 new financial-assistance requests from currently enrolled students, five times as many as in a typical year.
Such financial uncertainty is stoking fears of backsliding to an era when private colleges were the ivy-covered province of the privileged. Skidmore assistant director of admissions Marisa Ferrara fielded her first ever requests this year from parents rescinding financial-aid applications at the eleventh hour for fear that they would harm their children's chances of getting in. "They're feeling this guilt," Ferrara recalls of a phone call with one such parent. "You could almost hear it in this mother's voice, saying, 'I'll do anything. I don't want my kid not to get in because of needing financial aid.'" As it turned out, the student had already been denied admission, and the family's finances had nothing to do with it.
On the discussion forum College Confidential.com a February thread debating whether applying for aid will hurt a student's chances of getting admitted has been viewed nearly 25,000 times. At Skidmore, one figure suggests the answer is yes: students of color, who disproportionately applied for financial aid, made up a higher percentage of this year's applicant pool than last year's. But reflecting "the demands of financial aid," says Bates, they make up only 24% of the admitted pool this year, in contrast to 28% last year. "You've always been in an advantaged position to be rich and smart," says Morton Schapiro, a higher-education economist and the president of Williams College, which does not consider financial need in admissions. "Now you're at an even greater advantage." If so, then you can chalk up one more casualty of the financial crisis: diversity on campus.