On Tuesday, Sept. 8, President Bergeron announced the largest gift in Connecticut College’s history: $20 million from Robert Hale ‘88, a trustee of the College, and his wife, Karen. “The gift will be fulfilled over a period of 10 years,” Cameron Jones, Director of Major Gifts, explained in an e-mail. The exact size of each installment is currently under discussion. $10 million will go towards financial aid. Of that, $9 million will establish a Hale Scholars Program, the specifics of which have not yet been determined. The remaining $1 million will be placed in the Connecticut College Fund. (The Connecticut College Fund includes the total amount of money received in annual gifts during the fiscal year, which begins July 1 and ends June 30.)
To learn more about how this particular chunk of the gift will be used and what it might accomplish, I sat down with Sean Martin, Director of Financial Aid Services, who explained Connecticut College’s existing financial aid policy. “We have only need-based aid. … We look at a family’s income, assets and determine their ability to pay. … If we cost sixty thousand dollars and we think you can pay ten, we subtract your ten from the sixty and that means you have fifty thousand dollars worth of need. We meet 100% of [each student’s] need.” He compared Conn’s policy “to other institutions that don’t meet full need.” They might “give you twenty thousand dollars. That means your contribution is ten plus” whatever amount “they’re not giving you.” He said that Conn has “[met] full need … for many years” and is “committed to doing so for many years to come.”
This policy of meeting full need, of course, depends on how Financial Aid Services calculates need. I asked Martin, who worked at Wesleyan before coming here to Conn, how our financial aid compares to our peers, NESCAC and otherwise. He said, “That’s a little bit of a loaded question in that we meet full need.” What “full need” means depends on “our definition of need,” which a prospective student would then compare to other schools’ definitions. A student’s package depends on how “we choose to meet that need:” whether more through grants or more through loans and work-study. Martin determines need by viewing each “file and student and family individually” to find “the story behind the numbers, not just the numbers,” he said. “We look at components of things like home equity or contribution from income or assets for [individuals] perhaps a bit differently from our peers in ways that I believe are fairly generous,” he said. He declined to list “things that we do so much better than our peers,” because, he said, “[it is] not that simple. It’s not as simple as ‘Oh, well, we look at X completely differently than everybody else.’”
Regardless, what the financial aid office can and does consider “need” is necessarily limited by the school’s financial situation. “We don’t have the luxury and the resources to be everything that I think we would all hope we could be. But that being said, I think we’re very much in line with our peers and, in some ways that are not insignificant, I think we’re much more generous than they are. There are some areas that perhaps we’re not, but that’s the trade-off in … maintaining a financial aid budget within reason,” Martin said.
That budget has grown over the last several years as the demand for financial aid has increased. In fiscal year 2004, it was around 17% of the College’s total expenditure ($13.8 million of $80.1 million). By fiscal year 2015, it had risen to about 24% ($30.9 million our of $128.3 million). Through what Martin called “asset reallocation,” the Hales’ $10 million “eases the pressure on the financial aid budget.” The gift will “help supplement and … strengthen our ability to … [continue meeting full need] as an institution” despite an increasing demand for financial aid. There are currently no stipulations governing continued receipt of the $10 million. As such, the financial aid office is able to continue doing what it does, but with what is in effect a larger budget.
I wondered whether the gift, as a “budget-relieving mechanism,” would change who gets access to a Conn education, whether it would increase, for example, socioeconomic or geographic diversity. Reiterating Conn’s “commitment” to need-based aid, Martin said, “To a degree, I think we’re always looking to refine our needs analysis to be as generous as we can as an institution. Something like this gift only helps us to continue to do that.” Nonetheless, having received a large gift like this, we must evaluate the sustainability of Conn’s financial aid practices, as he said. Mr. Martin attests to the College’s current goals of increasing types of diversity, full participation, and inclusive excellence by providing “economic access by meeting a family’s full need.” Despite the steep price tag, Martin hopes that “[the financial aid office’s] interactions with students and families can help to provide greater access.” He emphasized that the office is “committed to the diversity that we’ve … achieved through this need-based aid that we currently have: socioeconomically, racially, ethnically, across the board.” Despite the inevitable budgetary limits, he said, “having an institutional commitment to meeting full need …helps in achieving some of those diversity goals. [It is] one less obstacle for a family that views an institution that costs as much as we do as an obstacle.”
Clearly, the Hales’ gift will at least indirectly increase prospective and admitted students’ potential access to Conn, and will ease the burden of our 52% of matriculated students who currently receive financial aid. Given the current lack of stipulations on how the money should be used, I hope that Financial Aid Services staff will actively use this gift, and the office’s resulting increased robustness, to reassess how they calculate need. Meeting full need is essential to creating a more economically and socially diverse student body. This would improve the experience of even those students who do not receive aid. If, instead, privileged people conventionally defined (white, wealthy, and able, with college-educated parents, among other characteristics) are the only people who make it onto this campus as students to begin with, we all suffer. (The question of who arrives on campus as staff and faculty is beyond the scope of this article; each deserves at least an article to itself.) Given that all of these decisions ultimately depend on how much money Conn has, I am keen to see if and how the Hales’ donation to financial aid changes the campus climate. •
