Critiquing Financial Aid
A private-college president and parent offers his thoughts on the 'antidemocratic merit scam'
Robert Weisbuch is entering only his sophomore year as president of Drew University, a small, private liberal arts college in Madison, N.J. But the former English professor has already made big waves. In a column published this spring in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he railed against what he calls "the antidemocratic 'merit' scam." Weisbuch said his eyes were really opened to the problems of the financial aid system when his daughter applied to college last fall. He sat down with Senior Writer Kim Clark to share his view from both sides of the financial aid application.
If I had asked you two years ago about financial aid, what would you have said?
I would have said it is a complete and total mystery to me.
You've been a college president for a year, and you've just had to pay your second tuition bill. How do you feel about financial aid now?
These are highly complicated issues, and there's a danger in being simplistic. But we are putting more and more money, proportionately, into scholarships for students who are very bright but don't need the money to go to college, and less for the students who really can't go to college unless they get support. And to me, this is unsustainable, with terrible consequences for the country.
You called merit aid a "scam."
The idea that we give some students money because they deserve it, and others because they need it, is a nasty notion, one that I would like to try to stay away from. Every one of the students that we give scholarships to deserves it on the basis of merit.
Lots of people criticize merit aid, but schools and governments keep handing it out.
Yes. And I don't want to be false about our own situation here. When we see a terrific academic record, we are more prone to provide financial aid than when the record is good but not great, and that's regardless of need.
I've heard from a lot of financial aid officers that they think today's parents are less willing to sacrifice to pay for education than previous generations were.
My dad, who was a jeweler, probably ended up with a Pontiac rather than a Cadillac so that I could go to college.... It has been shown in study after study that a strong education repays itself any number of times. If I, as a parent, take out a loan that enables my child to attend a school that she and I consider better for her, then I think that is the best investment I can make.
You've had your principles tested on a personal level.
My daughter was adamant about not applying for scholarships. "Dad," she said, "we can afford college; other people can't." "Sarah," I said, "you can't afford college." She's an ethical kid, and she was thinking that, really, she didn't need money as badly as many people she knew. I think she also overrated my income. I was the head of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation at the time, so I was making a good income, but you know, nobody's got such a good income that the cost of college is no concern.
So, you couldn't write a check for $45,000.
I could have, but then we wouldn't have had anywhere to live. A fine research university in another part of the country, which I'd prefer not to name publicly, gave my daughter a full scholarship, a total tuition waiver, worth $25,000 a year. And she got into Wesleyan [from which Weisbuch graduated in 1968] without any money at all. We're having to stretch to put Sarah and then her brother, Mike, next year, through college. But if I stretch, I can do it.
This story appears in the September 18, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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