Jesuit College To End Discrimination, By Discriminating

Colleges offer financial aid to gain diversity in student body

By Kaitlynn Riely
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- For parents of college-age children, the start of a new school year may mean an empty wallet along with an empty nest.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the median tuition at a four-year school was $7,490 for the 2006-07 school year. The figure includes private and state-run schools, some of which charge in-state students very low tuition.

The median tuition at private schools was $15,900, with the more expensive colleges costing more than $30,000 a year.

The numbers do not include room and board and other fees that can carry high price tags, such as textbook purchases and travel expenses.

The high cost of college has made it difficult for lower-income students to afford it. Most schools have some form of financial aid, and the government provides grants to needy students and will pay the interest on a student loan and defer payments for those who qualify financially.

But some Catholic schools are taking extra measures to help students better afford college tuition.

Dominican-run Providence College in Rhode Island, in an effort to attract minority and first-generation college students and to put less emphasis on test scores, has made submission of scores from SAT and ACT -- traditional college entrance exams -- optional.

Providence's incoming freshman class is the first that did not have to submit scores. Christopher Lydon, the school's associate vice president for admission and enrollment planning, said the reason behind it was to put into action the school's philosophy that grades and extracurricular activities matter more than test scores.

He said Providence also wanted to return to its original mission of making college a viable option for a new generation of immigrants. Lower-income students often cannot afford the hours of SAT-prep classes that their peers can take to get higher scores.

In the first year that Providence dropped the SAT requirement, applications swelled by about 1,000, Lydon told Catholic News Service in a telephone interview.

Within the pool of about 9,000 applicants for a class of 960 students, Lydon said there was greater cultural, ethnic and socioeconomic diversity than in years past. In the class of 2011, there was about a 36 percent increase in the number of students of African-American, Asian, Hispanic and American Indian heritage compared to the class of 2010.

Lydon said there was also an increase in the number of students enrolled whose parents had not gone to college, and a 70 percent increase in the number of students who were eligible for federal Pell grants given to low-income students.

This program is still in the test stages to see whether Providence can reliably select high school seniors -- without using SAT scores -- who will perform well the next four years, but Lydon said he was happy with the results of the first year. He emphasized that Providence was not watering down standards with this approach to admissions. Rather, he said, they had a higher percentage of students in the top 10 percent of their high school class this year than in previous years.

However, Lydon said, if a school's goal is to make college more accessible, it can't stop at admissions. To retain students, Lydon said, Providence has shifted money away from merit scholarships to need-based scholarships. About 65 percent of students at the school receive some sort of aid.

Similarly, the University of San Francisco is leading a group of Jesuit-run colleges with the same goal -- to increase the numbers of underrepresented students in their student bodies. The university is one of 16 Jesuit colleges across the country working together to discover the best ways to recruit and retain low-income, first-generation and ethnic minority students.

The Jesuit Network for Equitable Excellence in Higher Education, started in the fall of 2006 and financed by a grant from the Lumina Foundation for Education, has spent its first year discussing ways each school attracts and retains students in these groups.

Preston Walton, the project coordinator for the network, said making education available for students who normally would not consider it or could not afford it is part of the Jesuit mission. Providing more financial aid is one way the schools are working to make college an option for every student.

St. Mary's College of California, a school run by the Christian Brothers in Moraga, also puts a strong emphasis on financial aid. Michael Beseda, the vice provost for enrollment, said the school strives to have 25 percent of entering students eligible for Pell grants.

It's important that the school has students from all income levels and all backgrounds, Beseda told CNS.

"There's all kinds of research that shows that there are huge educational benefits to having a diverse student population," he said. "Students learn from one another."

And the promise of more available financial aid means the number of applicants to the college is up, he said, which gives admissions officers a bigger pool to choose from.

Approximately 70 percent of St. Mary's undergraduates receive some form of financial aid, he said.

Financial aid is not going just to students from low-income families, but also to middle-income families who find it difficult to pay the high costs of a college education.

"We try to make an education available to all those students," Beseda said.


Original article (here)