<p>I am very pleased to announce that Bowdoin will eliminate loans for all new and current students receiving financial aid, replacing those loans with grants beginning with the 2008-09 academic year. This applies to all future aid awards at Bowdoin.</p>
<pre><code>This action, approved today by the Board of Trustees, is intended to greatly enhance our ability to attract and retain students of great promise, regardless of their economic circumstances. It reduces significantly the barriers to a Bowdoin education for students from low- and many middle-income families, while also permitting our graduates to pursue career paths and graduate education based on their talents, interests, and promise in a particular field, not on their capacity to repay student loans.
With this decision, Bowdoin is one of only two colleges with endowments of less than $1 billion to eliminate loans for both first-year and current students1. We are the first "need-blind" college with an endowment of less than $1 billion to do so, and are also the first college in Maine to eliminate loans for all students. We join a very select group of elite colleges and universities - including Princeton, Davidson, Amherst, Williams, Harvard, Pomona, Swarthmore, and Yale - instituting a "no-loan" policy for all students on aid. And Bowdoin's policy is among the more ambitious announced thus far, given the size of our endowment, the percentage of students at Bowdoin who receive aid, the size of the aid package provided, and Bowdoin's commitment to meet the full demonstrated need of its students for all four years.
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Colby College President William D. Adams announced Saturday that, beginning next fall, Colby will eliminate loans from all financial aid packages, replacing the loans with grants that do not have to be repaid. The new policy, approved by Colbys board of trustees January 19 in Boston, represents a commitment of more than $1 million and signals a move among top-tier liberal arts colleges to address issues of access and affordability through new aid policies.</p>
<p>Colby is taking a leadership role in the shift, joining fewer than a dozen private institutions in the United States committing institutional funds to make their programs affordable to the broadest range of qualified students regardless of ability to pay.
<p>Not a lot. They have very small numbers of Pell Grant and other low-income students. The biggest recipients of the no-loan policy are students in the top quintile in income, who end up paying most of COA, so it is relatively inexpensive compared with seeking out and accepting more low-income students.</p>
<p>It is "a good thing"; just not a "big" good thing. (It also eliminates students' loans, not parents' loans - for most students in the top quintile, it is parents who bear the majority of the loan burden.)</p>
<p>Props to Bowdoin and Colby indeed.
I always thought that colleges that told you to borrow from someone to pay them and called that "meeting need" were scum.
I used to worry that that was too strong a term. It isn't.</p>